As the League of Women Voters of Kentucky was finalizing its recent report on legislative transparency, How Can They Do That?, the nonpartisan group said they became aware of an additional barrier to citizen participation in the legislative process.
House Bill (HB) 10, passed in the regular 2022 session, eliminated the sharing of pre-filed bills on the Legislative Research Commission’s (LRC) website. The effect is that citizens cannot preview pending legislation, which inhibits their ability to prepare for and participate in the upcoming legislative session. Although the LRC posts filed bills as the session begins, citizens no longer have time to consider or participate in the deliberations during the months before the session starts.
HB 10 passed with little fanfare or dissent, based in part on testimony from the bill’s primary sponsor, House Speaker David Osborne. Specifically, Speaker Osborne told the House Standing Committee on Government (3 March, 2022) that “… the co-chairs of LRC could direct the LRC to develop a working bill section of our website… alerting the public that these are working drafts. These are not final products in any way, shape, or form. I think it will make for a better legislative process in the long run.”
During a later meeting of the Senate Standing Committee hearing on State & Local Government (16 March 2022), when asked why HB 10 did not state that a webpage for draft bills would be created, the Speaker promised that, “As soon as this is passed, we will direct the LRC Director to develop the process.” To date, however, the LRC website has no section nor any links or direction to a site that posts draft bills. Our inquiries about where we might find draft bills have yielded several explanations, including that:
- Individual legislators can release their working drafts publicly, but only on their own social media accounts and not through the LRC website.
- Interested parties may find pending legislation by combing through agendas and minutes on the individual websites of the many Interim Joint Committees.
These options do not offer citizens the promised, one-click, working bill section of the LRC webpage as offered by the bill’s sponsor. These options also require citizens to conduct hours of research delving into multiple individual legislators’ social media and three or four layers of the LRC site.
This is a problem because the sheer volume of bills introduced each session means that, with no way to preview legislation before the session begins, organizations like the League will be challenged to prepare for and inform their members and citizens in a timely manner. For example, the LRC website indicates that in the 2022 Regular Session, legislators put in 2400 requests to prepare bills or resolution drafts. Once the session started, the total filed in 2022 included 1165 bills and 475 resolutions.
The Kentucky League of Women Voters said they will call on the General Assembly to address the League’s three questions:
- When will a new section of the LRC website with working draft bills be online, and how will citizens know when it is available?
- If draft bills are not available online before the next legislative session, when and how will citizens have an effective one-stop opportunity to access pending, draft forms of bills?
- What does the legislature plan to do to increase transparency and include its constituents in the law-making process?
The League emphasizes the democracy principle that the people should have a voice in decisions that affect them. Recently, the Kentucky General Assembly has used multiple tactics to make lawmaking more expedient, but in doing so, makes the process less transparent and shrinks citizens’ opportunities to participate in the important statutory work that affects their lives.
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