It's been a central Kentucky landmark for decades now.

The Kentucky Horse Park is getting some big new upgrades.

Yesterday, state Senator Stephen West and Senate Majority floor leader Damon Thayer visited the park for a ceremony and they brought along a check.

A big one for $39 million.

We were at a point this session where we had a very large budget reserve trust fund.

And this is one of the fun parts of the job.

We get to spend some of that because we don't want that budgeted reserve trust fund to get too large.

We were able to deliver $39 million to the horse park, which I believe is on top of 21 for a total of about $60 million over the past two budget cycles.

It's going to upgrade the restaurants.

It's going to upgrade the campground, which is the most popular public campground in Kentucky.

But it it's showing its age and the money will be invested to bring it up into the 21st century.

It was opened in the mid seventies.

So it's seeing some wear and tear of hundreds of thousands of people come through here every year.

And so these are necessary repairs.

And also the barns here are pretty old and in some cases falling down.

So new competition barns for the horses to stay in when they're here was probably the biggest need at the park.

The Museum of the Horse is going to get upgrades.

So really top to bottom facility wise here.

If you go through the two budget bills, House Bill one and House Bill six, you'll see that we actually were pretty ecumenical in spreading the money around every region of Kentucky and every cause that you can think of.

Every member of our caucus, actually every member of the Senate, Democrats and Republicans had input into the final document.

It's an economic driver for Bourbon County and all the counties, especially around Lexington.

You have people pay for feed, they pay for labor, they pay for hotel rooms.

But another thing it does is synergy.

There's a lot of synergy with the bourbon industry.

So people show up to the horse park and they're like, hey, let's let's go on the bourbon trail.

So it just it's a circle and it adds to the economic impact.

But very synergistic with all of the other tourist related activities.

And those tourist related dollars trickle back down into the community.

They help employ people.

They help people pay their pay their bills.

And so I think justifying this $39 million is one of the easiest things I've ever had to do.

The Kentucky Horse Park opened in 1978 after the state purchased the property five years earlier.