I’m Senator Gex Williams.

My name is a little bit different.

It's spelled GEX, pronounced Jay Some of the district has lived with that name since the early 1800s, and some of it it's a new name.

They don't think it's an old Kentucky name, but the only place GEX is pronounced Jay is in Kentucky.

Everybody else says something else.

And the French don't even think it's a French name.

Okay?

And but my district is the 20th is a brand new 20th Senate district.

I like to say it goes from the Kentucky Capitol to the Cincinnati airport.

It doesn't quite get up to the Cincinnati airport, but it's Franklin, Owen, Carroll Gallatin, Southern Boone and Southwest Kenton In 1991, I got I won by 41 votes.

And actually, it's interesting because there are six Gex Williamses in the district who are Edwin Gex Williams I'm only related to two of them, and I'm pretty sure in that first race there were at least 41 people voting for the other Gex Williams.

Okay.

Now, this race I won by 5000, so I'm thinking maybe I won actually did win on my own.

But that was a time where Boone and Gallatin were one House seat.

I got redistricted out of that House seat and then won a special election in ‘93 for a Senate seat.

So that's where I moved over to the Senate.

And I was the 13th Republican out of 38, which was the most number of Republican senators ever in the state.

This time, I'm the 31st senator out of 38, which is the most number of Republican senators we ever had.

I started back doing software development way back in the day, back when we thought that a 52k modem was a really high speed modem.

As a matter of fact I started when a 96k modem was high speed.

So I got into datacom and I sold worked for a company called Software Clearing House.

We sold software over all over the world, went twice a year to Europe and sold that and some it was started out my software, but I looked at software in development.

But in the interim, I've still been in technology, but more delivering Internet to people a lot out in the rural areas that can’t I took it as a challenge.

They say we can't get high speed Internet and said, Well, let's see what we can do about it.

When they created this new district, people wanted somebody that could come back and get right into it.

It’s a very broad district, very diverse.

And I know I live in the rural part of northern Kentucky, just about Gowen County, but I had contacts down here.

I knew the state, so it was sort of a logical decision.

A lot of people kept calling me and say, should get back in, you should run.

And so I finally said, I'm leaning toward it.

And then everybody just assume I was in.

And so so I had a good time getting to know everybody in the district and the history.

And and so I think I even though a lot of things have changed, there's enough the same that I start sort of ahead of the curve.

I asked for Transportation Committee, okay, because my wife said, you go back, you got three priorities roads, roads and roads.

Okay.

So that's my priority.

Is it I told him if I don't get transportation, she might pull my ticket to serve.

Okay, so I need to be on transportation.

Get in the corridors.

I grew up in a civil engineering family.

I grew up at 14 walking the streets.

So transportation just comes naturally.

I'm really looking to dive in into that.

But that's a longer term thing and we're really doing some adjustments and that's really for the biennium on that.

The other thing that I was very involved with before and it always neat, you know, some things never change and that is education.

So I'm vice-chair of Education committe But my first bill is not about any of that.

The first bill is Senate Bill 13 and really has to do with local control over the certificate of need process or eliminating the certificate of need process.

We're one of we regulate more health services in Kentucky than all but four states.

This, the bill I'm coming out with will have an emergency clause on it.

It'll give the local governments the authority to eliminate or to suspend the certificate of need process, because if we get hit by another one of these variants coming along here, it may affect one county or another area of the state and they may need to do things to get around that killer C.O.N.

that has restricted services.

So I'm putting it back in the locals.

Let them decide on whether they have a need for additional doctors offices or services that we're right now that we we don't permit them to have because of certificate of need.

I'm an idealist.

I think we can make things better.

I believe in Kentucky.

I want to do my part in making it better, not just for us, but for the rest of U.S. and the world as well.