Good evening and welcome to Kentucky edition for this Monday, August 5th.

I'm Rene Marsh, all coming to you from downtown Louisville.

Thanks so very much for joining us.

We're here at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville for the 50th anniversary of the National Conference of State Legislatures, or in CECL for short.

For the last five decades, NCAA salons brought together legislators and their staff from around the country and abroad.

Even thousands of people are here roaming these halls over the coming days to learn about artificial intelligence, child care, housing, education and more.

Last night, I spoke with the public affairs director of NCC XL, Nick Bullock, who helps organize the summit, as well as some political leaders from Kentucky, Republican Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne, who discussed the economic impact of this conference and what they're hoping to take away from it.

For those of us who are still who are like viewers, like still, what is NCC?

Oh, my goodness.

Give us a little primer on explainer.

What is what is in CECL?

Not, you know, truthfully speaking in CECL is a professional organization for legislators and legislative staff.

We're bipartisan.

So are nonpartisan.

However you want to label it.

We represent the more than 7300 state legislators out there and the more than 37,000 legislative staff.

We're the only association that that does that.

Just like you're probably, again, a member of the Kentucky Kentucky Press Association, think of us in that sense where we are their professional organization.

If you are a legislator or a legislative staffer, we provide ample amounts of research, professional development.

And then, of course, what we're doing here at the legislative summit is just another great example of what the other member benefits that are provided there.

Yeah, well, first of all, we're so glad that Louisville was selected.

Absolutely right.

And it's very.

Competitive.

It's very competitive.

And the Senate president and the House speaker told us about that and the pitch that they made, of course, to make that happen.

But talk about overall the economic impact to this city because of the number of rooms and all of these things and maybe having to buy some clothes if the luggage didn't quite get here with.

The luggage is still a thing.

But I will say this about Louisville.

We were here back in 2010 and we really listen to what our members have to say when they're filling out that questionnaire of like, why, you know, did you enjoy the summit?

You know, what made you enjoy the summit?

And overwhelmingly, the attendees when we were here back in 2010 said we loved the environment.

We loved the food, we loved the people, we loved the policy.

Of course, that was being covered at the summit.

So we fast forward a couple of years now and Louisville was just a no brainer.

I mean, you have a beautiful facility here at the convention Center, a fantastic job, and really bringing this up to speed here because with the NCAA, because it is such a large meeting for this year, we have over 5300 attendees coming in from all across the country and not even just the country, but international as well.

So when you break it down, there's about 20 cities that could actually host an Excel legislative summit.

Now, this is all on top of we have we have over 10,000 hotel room nights that are booked in the Louisville area.

In fact, some of our spillover rooms right now are at the airport cause they're still people still trying to find a room.

And then on top of that, the economic impact of bringing in Cecil here, $4.8 million.

Your hopes for what you hope to learn from the conference.

I mean, we know that you just had the SLC conference last week along with ALEC.

What sets Inxile apart?

Well, I'm on it does two things.

It really focuses on legislative seminars that you can come in and pick up, say, what are they doing in Maryland or Maryland has $1,000,000,000 shortfall in their budget, so you might not want to do what Maryland's doing.

But you know, you also hear some good economic development stories.

We have different seminars all around here.

But the other function, because in CECL is purely on legislatures, is the staff.

They do a huge staff component.

So when you see us reading the rules, a lot of these have been developed by the 50 states over 50 years about how you proceed and how you have a default document Masons manual, which is not Robert's Rules of Order or anything else that was developed by the in CSAIL over years to say you develop your own rules with the default document being Masons manual.

So our staff trains and it's really important to have that interconnect between staff and legislators.

And in between the states, you know.

There's a lot of attention on artificial intelligence, and we've heard that from several that we've talked to cybersecurity, of course, education, the staple types issues.

But we know artificial intelligence.

Representative Josh Bray has been a part of this conversation.

I think he's probably part of one of those sessions on that.

He is.

And actually the the opening session tomorrow morning will be focused on a relative.

New developments of how we manage what we don't even know at this point in time.

But yes, we have a Robert now appointed a task force to work through the interim to deal with that being led by Josh Perry on our side.

And it is it's a huge issue, but it's a follow up on what Robert said.

You know, SLC and ALEC, they both have both great conferences.

They both bring a lot of distinct properties to them in CECL is different in the fact that it brings people from every political persuasion, from every corner of the country, and a lot of international leaders will be here.

I know that there's a delegation from Taiwan, there's one from Ireland, one from Canada.

So it really does bring perspectives that we don't get to see often and developing those relationships, developing those contacts.

It really is a huge benefit as we work through problems and that we deal with every day.

Yeah.