Winter weather road clean-up under scrutiny as legislators get first draft of a budget

We officially have our first version of a two-year budget in the Kentucky House of Representatives, but it is very much a draft version that will undergo many changes before it becomes law in April.

Still, it’s a place to start, and Representative Myron Dossett of Christian County says they’ll hear from representatives from all the Kentucky cabinets and numerous organizations, and those folks will have to make their case for why and what they need funding for to the House.

He says that does lengthen the process, but he says the time of ‘blinding signing checks’ is over—he says he and his colleagues are focused on making a responsible budget that sets up future generations for success.

It will be quite a while before that draft budget makes it to the Senate, as the House will debate and amend it a lot before then. In its current version, the budget does not look to fully fund Medicaid, which Senator Craig Richardson had predicted it wouldn’t. But he says to not panic, because this is far from a final version.

Closer to home, Richardson says he’s not happy with how the icy road conditions have been handled in the wake of Winter Storm Fern. He’s also not happy with the answers that were provided by the Chief Engineer for District 2 of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.

The senator says he intends to dig deeper into what when wrong with either storm preparation or storm clean up, saying that while he understands the icy conditions caused a tremendous problem, he feels it could have been better handled.

The icy weather did cause some hiccups for legislators this week, but they’re hoping to come back strong next week as they begin the budget fine-tuning process.