With the 2024 Kentucky General Assembly now less than a month away, lawmakers are reacting to a new report from the progressive leaning League of Women Voters of Kentucky.

The report says fast tracking bills with little time for review or debate is happening now more than ever.

Now, a leading state senator is calling on legislators to change the way they operate.

I've gotten a lot of emails and some phone calls from the public that say, hey, we agree with the League of Women Voters.

We don't have enough time to digest all the changes, to really speak to the changes, to even know what's in the bill.

And you have a lot of people, believe it or not, who do follow this legislation.

You know, they they care about it.

It's important to them.

It impacts their lives and their livelihood and their voice is the one that needs to be heard more than anyone else.

At no time should a bill be brought to the floor on the same day that that committee action is taken, at least again, a gap of 24 hours, probably more should take place before the bill comes to the floor for a final vote.

Having a committee action and then turning around an hour or two later and then voting on that floor.

Bill really gags the public.

I mean, the public has no voice.

And in the building that legislation No, no opportunity to contact our legislators to say, here's how we feel about this legislation.

The legislators don't have time really to to digest and consider all the changes that have been made.

And that's really bad for the public.

That is not democracy at its best.

This should not be an issue where we're one party bill tries to one up the other.

You know, I think these kinds of suggestions and proposals by the league women vote are reasonable and again, at all times all those.

We want the public involved as much as possible because we're voting on en matters and policies that impact the public.

We're coming up on a 60 day session.

This is a long session.

We're going to see each other every day for 60 days.

We we know what bills are out there.

Pretty much, you know, by the 10th, 20th day.

There is never a need to rush a bill and no legislation should be justified on the fact that it needs to be raised.

There's plenty of time to make changes on the bill, if it's that important, that important.

We've got enough time to make changes.

Put it out there.

Have the public consider it because we want public input and the public demands input and listen to the public and then vote.

Republican State Senator Damien Thayer of Georgetown.

The Senate majority floor leader says there is no need to change how the General Assembly handles legislation.

He told WVXU Public Radio.

All bills in the General Assembly are legally passed under the State Constitution and Masons Manual of Legislative Procedure and Robert's Rules of Order.

And he said the Senate operates in a transparent manner.

They are, says the General Assembly will continue to operate in a way that makes good laws, and he doesn't see any massive changes coming for relatively new lawmakers to Republicans and to Democrats.

Also reacted to the League of Women Voters report last night on Kentucky tonight.

So I will say coming from local government, it blew my mind when I got to Frankfort that we don't have some sort of online database where people can see committee subs, where they can see offered amendments, where a lot of times we're still dealing with hard copies getting handed out.

Someone check your email.

It's there.

And when I think about transparency, that really bothers me.

I think the public should be able to see what we're doing and see what we're voting on and understand the impact of the decisions that we're making on the floor.

Every day we work for them with their tax dollars on the issues they care about.

And I know a lot of other states, including some Republican led legislatures, have taken big moves towards transparency around creating these kinds of electronic systems where the public can really see what the bills are, see what the amendments are.

I think that's a very basic first step to take to let the public understand exactly what it is we're voting on.

I think it's also important that we make sure the public has a meaningful chance to tell us what they think about it after that, to have hearings to make sure that we're having the process be sort of slow enough and meaningful enough that we really do hear from the public about the things we're doing.

And so I think there are things big and small we could do to make the public feel as though their voice matters because it should.

Represent them dates.

Were you ever frustrated by the fast in nature of how bills and amendments were considered?

Did you feel like you had ample time to review and to understand what you were voting on, particularly in those last hundred days of the session?

So I think that's really a two part question for me, and I've learned that more since we've been in the interim.

So during the interim, we spent a lot of time fleshing out issues.

We sit in our committee meetings and we're able to see what happens before we go into session.

I didn't have the benefit of that the last time, so I don't know what went on during the interim and what was discussed.

So as much as I might have felt that that was very fast paced, I don't know what was discussed during the interim.

I feel much more prepared now to go into this session with what I know has been discussed in the different committee meetings.

So yeah, I think there's a frustration with the process.

I come from obviously a legal background and we follow rules and things are filed ahead of time and you're used to seeing those and there's no surprises when you litigate.

There's not supposed to be.

So, yeah, you know, so I think surprised at that.

But I'm hoping I feel much more prepared going in this time, knowing what we've talked about during the interim.

Okay.

So how do you feel about it as an almost by itself?

I actually completely agree.

I think not having the interim really when you walk into it, it is very fast.

And I completely share Senator Chambers, and we've talked a lot about being local government representatives for as long as we both were.

And then coming to this, you know, Lexington highly values transparency, almost to a fault, nothing is done.

It you know, everything's done well in advance in public.

And that was very much like, holy cow, this is not that.

And it is fast.

And we don't have the benefit of full year legislation.

So you do have a limited time.

So you are quickly move quickly and it can be a challenge, I think, just to figure out if it's on your email or not or what's going on.

But I definitely share that perspective that I feel much better going into it this year than I did last year.

And I think we can make some better compromises to provide some stuff online easier and faster.

So you're not feeling like there's something being said that you can't find quickly.

Yeah, Representative, All sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But you used to hear a lot in Frankfurt.

It sure is.

And I think there's two things I want to say here.

One, the legislature could just slow down and adhere to their own rules and stop suspending the rules and go to the three days imposed to have it in committee and then passing go in the other chamber.

And sometimes we keep waiving our own rules not to not even follow our rules we've set up for ourselves.

That would be a good first step.

But number two, the interim does give us a time to work on the budget and work on these bills, but it doesn't give the public time for input when the legislation is dropped.

There were several bills last session that were amended last second, called in for a special meeting and on the House floor and 30 minutes passed and then over into the same Senate chamber and passed that night.

So while we might have personally an opportunity to better understand and work on some of those pieces of legislation during the interim, the public does not.

And our job is to slow down and listen to the public and get their input.

And if we would do that, we would probably find many things in bills when we should have not had an and or an or as an example, in some particular bills.

So we need to slow down and let the public have an actual meaningful opportunity to provide us feedback on these critical piece of legislation that affects people's lives.

If we need to do this, there's no reason we should rush and get these things through in a few hours.

Slow down.

The process would be better.

So we touched on many interesting issues last night on Kentucky tonight, and you can see the full hour long conversation online on demand at Katie Dorgan.

Why tonight?

Now should Kentucky have a full time legislature?

You'll hear some of the pros and cons of that tomorrow on Kentucky Edition.