Homelessness also came up during last night's Kentucky.

Tonight, as we recap the legislative session with a panel of Kentucky lawmakers.

I asked why an anti-crime bill, including a provision about the homeless.

Crime is a huge, huge topic.

We have to do something to figure out what we need to do to get control of crime.

And so there was data that showed that the homeless are committing violent crime.

So the homelessness and that whole part of that is not necessarily attacking them for crime.

The homeless part of that is looking to say, how can we help you?

And now whether it's provide that shelter, provide the sources that you need, whether it's addiction, whether it's food, whatever it is.

But the part of that part is that homelessness was basically in front of stores, in front of people's livelihood.

And so what we were trying to say is, look, I know there's an issue.

We all know there's an issue.

Let's find a way to kind of keep them out of the streets in some other places of shelter, whatever that looks like.

And that's something that we've got to take a hard look at.

But that was the intent, in my opinion, of what House Bill five was about.

Democrats have been critical of the homeless provision in the bill, as well as the cost and the burden the new bill puts on police.

That lacking stakeholder input and data driven sources.

It's really concerning for what the future of Kentucky looks like, especially when we now have limits on how much funding for things like our corrections unit that the governor's office can expend when we're out of session.

And I'm really worried without them an update it corrections impact statement that we really don't know the level of burden and sticky situations that this is going to put our law enforcement officers into and more overburdened corrections system than what we currently have today.

We also talked about the state budget and what lawmakers did and what they didn't do.

Before the session, our rainy day fund was a historic high.

This budget document actually doesn't take a lot of that money out of that rainy day fund, out of that budget surplus.

And so what concerns me is I think we can all agree that we have big problems in the Commonwealth, that families are facing rising costs, that health care is too expensive, that child care is hard to find.

And so we have real problems.

And we could have put that money to work for Kentuckians.

I'm concerned that we didn't, and I'm concerned about the way we then have to pay for that decision down the road.

The fact that we didn't invest in some of those problems.

Now, how much more expensive are they going to be when we try to solve them next budget cycle?

What we have to be careful of is we don't need to create systemic problems in the budget which is which.

You know, today we're still living with some of the problems created by past generations of Legislative Assembly's most glaring example will be the pension crisis.

I mean, we have a $60 billion monkey on our back that we've been slowly paying down over the years because of poor decisions that created systemic damage to the to the state budget that we that take up a huge amount of money for the.

Lack of funding by the General Assembly.

Of the executive.

System.

And, you know, so, you know, we have to be careful.

I agree that we need to try to make sure that working families get all the support they need.

I've been consistently in favor of that during my service in the General Assembly.

At the same time, we have to do it in such a way that is responsible, that doesn't overburden working Kentuckians and Kentucky taxpayers with systemic costs that continue to increase every year.

We covered other topics last night medical marijuana, the mom, the bust, mental matter, maternal health bill, and whether a state government should be able to reverse local government decisions.

You can see it all online on demand at K.T.

dot org slash k y tonight.