The economy, education, housing, healthcare and AI were all topics of conversation Wednesday evening at a special NKY Chamber of Commerce event in Devou Park.
The event saw an extended Q&A with Kentucky House Speaker David Osborne and Kentucky Senate President Rob Stivers, both Republicans, about key issues and how they planned to advocate for the interests of businesses in the upcoming legislative session.
The talks occurred in the shadow of the midterm elections, which saw both chambers of Congress in Washington, D.C., flip in favor of the Democrats. Yet, the Kentucky General Assembly has maintained a Republican majority, and, as a result, “philosophically, I don’t see that our goals and directions will really change a whole lot,” said Stivers,
Stivers has served as the Kentucky Senate president since 2013, making him the longest-serving president in the Kentucky Senate’s history. His largely rural district covers Clay, Jackson, Knox, McCreary, Owsley and Whitley counties. Osborne has served as House speaker since 2018. His district covers a portion of Oldham County, although he’s originally from Jefferson County.
One thing the two legislators emphasized was that Kentucky was open for business, a message the NKY Chamber attendees found reassuring.
“We need to be gearing up planes at CVG right now and flying banners over the top of Texas (which flipped to Democrats in the election) saying ‘Kentucky is open for business,'” Osborne said.
The NKY Chamber’s Vice President of Government Relations and Business Advocacy Tami Wilson chaired the Q&A, pitching questions about everything from economic development to housing to healthcare to AI. Many of the questions were posed with a view to building the region and the state’s economy and expanding its workforce.
“There’s a lot of facets that are surrounding workforce,” said Wilson, “infrastructure, which will include housing, economic development, as well as healthcare. Those are probably our top four larger priorities.”
“There’s certain things that we know that are conducive to creating a better business environment,” said Stivers. “One is housing. Two is daycare.”
Osborne teased that there would be some legislation related to housing coming down the pike next year, although he predicted it may create tension with some other advocacy groups like the Kentucky League of Cities.
“I do think that we remain committed to passing strong housing legislation,” Osborne said.
“We want to create incentives to work and get rid of disincentives and impediments,” Stivers said.
Next, the conversation turned to transportation and the state’s road fund, which is largely paid for with gas taxes. Osborne argued that losses in the fund due to the increased popularity of electric and hybrid cars, as well as this year’s temporary suspension of the gas tax, were both issues that had to be backfilled in the fund.
Both were critical of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s backlog of contracts.
“We need to look at something to not necessarily leave it with the district engineers and the consultants in the district, but think about another method of getting road projects through design, engineering, right of way, utilities purchase and then to the construction stage,” said Stivers, pitching solutions like local consortia or development districts “to take some of that responsibility away from the transportation cabinet.”
“You’re going to see those construction costs catch up with what the gas prices are,” said Osborne. “So, you’re going to see an inverse relationship that is going to cause even a bigger disparity in how we index our road funds.”
As it related to education, Osborne and Stivers argued for expanded trades education and refocusing universities on employment.
Osborne said NKU recently reached a decision with the legislature’s Postsecondary Education Working Group on Performance Funding, convened last year to evaluate how secondary education was funded. However, he was not privy to the details of the agreement.
“It’s going to have to be the universities that are going to have to look at what we really need and understand what needs to come out of them,” Stivers said, “not for recruitment, retention and graduation (but the) number one thing: employment.”
The legislators admitted that healthcare was more complicated and that there was likely no one-size-fits-all solution to healthcare issues in different communities. Osborne, however, pointed to a recently convened Medicaid Oversight Advisory Board in the General Assembly, which issues recommendations on the costs and delivery of Kentucky’s Medicaid program.
“I think we build it back better, faster, stronger because it will become more and more important as we continue to deal with what is surely to be dramatically changing influences from Washington that we don’t have any ability to control,” Osborne said.
Finally, the legislators turned to the topic of AI. Both believed that use regulations on the technology needed to come from the federal government; having 50 different policies for each state was untenable, they argued. The chamber shares this view.
“We’ve got to have a federal solution to this,” Osborne said.
Stivers has come out as a “proponent,” he said, of AI due to the potential economic growth it could stimulate but believed that policies on “hyperscalers or data centers, I think that’s up to the state to define.”
Osborne and Stivers did not take questions from audience members at the event.
