All four Republican candidates running for their Party’s nomination in this year’s Governor’s race appeared Saturday night at the 4th Congressional District GOP Lincoln Reagan Dinner at the Airport Marriott in Hebron.
The most recurring words throughout the four candidates’ speeches? Pensions and Texas. Each of those issues, they said, pose a major threat to Kentucky’s future prosperity.
“You got four real Kentuckians to choose from this year,” said Will T. Scott, the former Kentucky Supreme Court justice from Pikeville who stepped down in December to seek the state’s highest office. He and his running mate, Menifee County Sheriff Rodney Coffey, are touring the state as “The Justice & The Sheriff”. “The Republicans in Kentucky have been elected to a four-year term once every twenty-three years,” he said. “We get four years and they get twenty-four. How ’bout we take the next twenty years? We can do this. All we have to do is be smart.”
For a Republican to claim the governor’s seat in November, first one candidate must vanquish the other three in May’s primary, and then defeat Democrat Jack Conway, the two-term Attorney General from Louisville. All four appear to be poised to arm themselves with the message that the state’s pension system must undergo a major reform and that Kentucky’s business climate should more closely resemble that of Texas.
For that matter, other states that surround Kentucky and have Republican governors are also models for what the Bluegrass should aspire to, they said.
“In 2015, we are going to elect a conservative Republican to lead this state and not just for the next four years but for the next sixty years to get this state back on track,” said Louisville businessman Hal Heiner. He said his oldest daughter was instructed to go find a good job after college and she did – in Texas, where she still resides with her family. Indiana and Tennessee are also among the best business climates, Heiner said. “They’re surrounding us!”
“Companies love Kentucky,” Heiner continued. “They can’t stand Frankfort.” Pointing to his business experience, Heiner implied that his administration would resemble those of Mitch Daniels in Indiana or Michigan Governor Rick Snyder or Tennessee’s Bill Haslam, all elected following long careers in business. “They get more done in one (legislative) session in Tennessee than we get in twenty.”
Heiner, who is running with former Lexington City Councilwoman K.C. Crosbie, said that in Gov. Steve Beshear’s recent speech before the General Assembly ignored the “pension crisis” and job losses at coal mining sites and Toyota in Erlanger which will be packing up for Texas.
Matt Bevin, also from Louisville, stressed his business experience, too. He also emphasized pensions as a need for immediate attention. “If there is any one thing that ails us, it is the pension crisis in this state,” said Bevin, who lost to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in last year’s GOP primary. He said that are hundreds of pieces of legislation that float in Frankfort purporting to address pensions, but “how many seriously address the issue? Essentially, none.”
Bevin talked about his nine children as his motivation for seeking a brighter future for Kentucky. “In Northern Kentucky, that’s just getting warmed up,” he joked about his number of kids. “Nowhere else do I feel like such a slacker.” Like Heiner’s, Bevin’s children are home-schooled.Â
He is the right choice to handle the unfunded pension situation, which some accounts place second-worst in the country behind only Illinois, because he runs a firm that oversees $5 billion in pension assets, he said. “I will run this state with your money the way I run my home and my business,” said Bevin, whose running mate is Jenean Hampton of Bowling Green. “God bless Texas, but this should be the magnet in America. How is it that we’re not a magnet in the entire nation? Have you been to Texas in July or August?”
With the first two speakers highlighting their business experience and standing as “Frankfort outsiders”, Agriculture Commissioner James Comer counter-punched by emphasizing his own business experience, at both a bank and his large family farm. He has cut spending and staffing at his department in Frankfort and launched a full audit that landed his Republican predecessor in prison. “My business background plays well along with my service in Frankfort,” said Comer, who has also served as a state representative.Â
As governor, his focus would be on improving the business climate, changing the culture in Frankfort, and offering leadership at the executive level, he said. Comer also warned that surrounding states will siphon off jobs and development, because they have more aggressive governors who happen to be Republican. “In Kentucky, we don’t have the development that Tennessee has. Tennessee has that development because they have elected a governor that is a Republican,” Comer said. All the major cities in Kentucky, except Lexington, and including Covington, he said, border a state with a Republican governor.Â
Comer highlighted his work as agriculture commissioner, claiming that his department is the most transparent in Frankfort following the audit of Richie Farmer’s criminal tenure there. He has reduced the workforce and outsourced tasks to the private sector. “We want to do that across the board. State government can be more efficient,” he said. “The private sector can do it better than the public sector every time.” Comer claimed that Democrats are resistant to such change because it would reduce the number of state employees. “It’s not about the state employees, it’s about the taxpayers.”
Continuing, Comer said that Democrats have no plan to reduce poverty in a state where now 25% are enrolled in Medicaid. “People won’t get out of poverty untilw e change the business climate,” he said. His running mate, Kenton County State Senator Chris McDaniel (R-Taylor Mill) would serve as the state’s secretary of finance and would oversee the budget. “We’re going to invest our tax dollars where we will get the biggest return on our investment.”
Taking the stage last, Scott said that he and Coffey stepped down from their previous roles (as Supreme Court justice and head of the Kentucky Sheriffs Association, respectively) to run their campaign. “We wanted to solve the problems more than we wanted to keep what we had,” Scott said before turning to the pension problem. “We have $34 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. If we were a family with that kind of debt, you’d be putting us into involuntary bankruptcy. That’s how bad it is.”
He also called for a new minimum security prison that would house those convicted of drug-related crimes where a priority would be on rehabilitation and reintegration. “We’re gonna stop people from dying from heroin in Kentucky,” Scott said. “I don’t want another death on my hands.”
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Story & photos by Michael Monks, editor & publisher of The River City News