KFTC along with the Sierra Club, Public Justice and the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment asked the U.S. EPA today to rescind the state of Kentucky's authority to enforce the pollution discharge permitting program under the Clean Water Act.

The request was based on the state's widespread failure to protect the waters of the commonwealth, especially in coal mining areas.

“Citizens know when the companies violate the law here, but they’ve stopped reporting it because they know the agency won’t do anything to enforce the law,” said Rick Handshoe, a Floyd County resident and KFTC member. "It feels like the state has lost control of what happens here. It’s the coal companies that run the law of the land around here, not the Kentucky Division of Water (DOW)."

There is a growing preponderance of data that shows the poor quality of Kentucky's waterways:

• nearly 2,500 miles of streams already fail to meet water quality standards;
• coal mining is the identified or "suspected" pollution source for much of this;
• numerous additional miles of streams are being polluted as a result of DOW’s lax or sometimes non-existent water standards and pollution permit requirements;
• the DOW has regularly issued permits that fail to address key pollutants associated with coal mining and known to be harmful. such as toxic selenium and aluminum. In most cases DOW requires almost no water testing to actually determine whether or not the water is being contaminated.
• The cumulative pollution level in a stream is currently not considered when setting limits for specific mining operations. As a result the toxicity of downstream waters in recent testing was between 3 and 55 times higher than state standards.

“The problem is much more widespread and more serious than the state admits. We found high conductivity downstream from almost every mine site we tested," said Tim Guilfoile, deputy director of the Sierra Club's Water Sentinels program, which has done extensive water testing in Kentucky. High conductivity is an indicator of badly polluted water. Water with elevated conductivity may not support aquatic life.

The state also is giving inadequate emphasis to water quality programs, as evidenced by the chronic underfunding of the Division of Water. For example, only four permit writers develop and review more than 2,300 permits.

The petition asks the EPA to take over primary responsibility for enforcing the permitting program, known as the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The state currently has authority, granted to it by EPA, for enforcing this program – one of the key components of the federal Clean Water Act. But Kentucky’s water program has completely failed to prevent the widespread contamination of state waters by coal mining.

A copy of the petition is here.

House Bill 70 is the strongest vehicle we have in Kentucky right now to push to restore voting rights to most former felons in the state. But KFTC also has supported federal legislation since it was filed in August that would represent a big step forward.  The bill finally seems to be moving!

The U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties will hold a hearing on H.R. 3335, the Democracy Restoration Act of 2009, on Tuesday, March 16 at 2 p.m.

The Democracy Restoration Act of 2009 would restore federal voting rights to millions of Americans with past felony convictions. An estimated 5.3 million citizens cannot vote as a result of felony convictions, and nearly 4 million of these individuals are living and working in their communities. Under H.R. 3335, anyone who is not incarcerated would be eligible to vote in federal elections, even if barred from voting in state elections.

Hearing witnesses include:

    * Roger Clegg (President, General Counsel, Center for Equal Opportunity)

    * Andres Idarraga (an impacted person currently in his last year at Yale Law School).

    * Burt Neuborne (Legal Director, Brennan Center for Justice)

    * Ion Sancho (Supervisor of Elections, Leon County, Florida)

    * Hilary Shelton (Director, Washington office, NAACP)

    * Hans von Spakovsky (Attorney, former member, Federal Election Commission)

    * Carl Wicklund (Executive Director, American Probation and Parole Association)

You can visit the pages of members of the committee and email them or call their offices to ask them to support H.R.3335.  None of the committee members are from Kentucky, but if you know people in these districts it would be great if you asked them to call in.

KFTC will also be contacting our members in these districts today.

Thanks to our allies at The Sentencing Project who provided an email notice that this blog post was derived from.

Let the count begin.

More than 120 million U.S. census forms begin arriving Monday in mailboxes around the country, in the government's once-a-decade population count that will be used to divvy up congressional seats and more than $400 billion in federal aid. Fast-growing states in the South and the West could stand to lose the most because of lower-than-average mail participation rates in 2000 and higher shares of Hispanics and young adults, who are among the least likely to mail in their forms.

Did those $2.5 million Super Bowl ads work? Stay tuned.

"When you receive your 2010 census, please fill it out and mail it back," said Census Bureau director Robert Groves, who was set to kick off the national mail-in campaign Monday in Phoenix, Ariz., a state which could gain up to two U.S. House seats because of rapid immigrant growth in the last decade.

Groves is urging cities and states to promote the census and improve upon rates in 2000, when about 72 percent of U.S. households returned their forms. If everyone who receives a census form mails it back, the government would save an estimated $1.5 billion in follow-up visits...

For the complete AP story released today, click here.

Now that the House budget proposal has been out for a few days, we’re starting to see the extent to which the House contorted numbers and ideas to avoid having to support real reforms.

The budget does a couple of things that are not bad. It puts some much needed money into community health centers and services like Meals on Wheels, and starts to fund the Boni Bill, a bill that passed in 2007 to increase the protections of social service workers.  This funding is good and necessary.  But in addition to the cuts to higher ed, adult education, the school year and teacher pay, and services that we need, the budget does many things that show a lack of leadership by playing with our future instead of solving our problems of today.

The budget includes $74 million dollars that is the result of moving the one paycheck for state workers back one day, from June 30, 2012 to July 1, 2012.  This way, the $74 million dollars is technically part of the 2012-2014 budget cycle.  This little nugget was slipped in to the 238^th page of the House budget proposal.  It didn’t make any headlines, but was embedded in a Herald-Leader article about the House’s proposal to halve the salary of Economic Development Secretary Larry Hayes. 

It’s an important little nugget, though, because it shows the acrobatics that legislators were willing to perform to avoid taking up real solutions.  A budget that’s “balanced” because it pays state workers the day after the budget cycle?  It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it?

This shell game is also exactly the kind of game that jeopardizes Kentucky’s credit rating.  Kentucky is already on the watch list of some of these credit rating agencies, both because of our policy makers’ failure to pass sustainable revenue reforms, and because of our dependence on a manufacturing economy.  Moody’s is one such agency.  When their analysts look at Kentucky, they don’t see a credible borrower.  According to a memo from the Legislative Research Commission in September of  2009, Kentucky's leadership should be very concerned about what credit ranking agencies are seeing when they look at Kentucky. Here are the pieces of evidence they see:

Our lack of leadership predates the recession.  The LRC ehoes credit agencies' concern that Kentucky depends on one-shot, nonrecurring revenue sources to fund services and programs that we rely on every year.  Eventually, the smoke and mirrors aren’t going to be able to hide the ever-worsening real-world gap between the revenue the state brings in and the cost of the services that we need.

Kentucky is still bending over backwards to bring in manufacturing, which is not as good of an investment as it was fifty years ago, as we move toward a technology and knowledge-based economy.  This dependence, according to credit agencies, jeopardizes our standing as a worthwhile investment. 

Credit agencies and analysts maintain that states should evince some good faith effort toward keeping themselves financially secure.  Part of that effort is having a Rainy Day Fund, money reserved for emergencies.  Here, too, Kentucky falls short.  Leaders haven't adequately funded our Rainy Day Fund since 2001.  Our Rainy Day Fund is supposed to be between 3 and 5 percent of our General Fund revenue.  Kentucky’s is 0%.  We have no Rainy Day Fund.

These pieces of evidence aren’t good, and they've caused Kentucky's rating to slip from stable to negative. It's true that many states are in uncertain times.  But it's also true that thirty-three states have done something to raise the revenue they need to pull themselves through.  Oregon, for example, just passed a tax increase on income above $125,000. 

Kentucky, on the other hand, is going in the wrong direction.  The House budget would make Kentucky even more vulnerable.  If the debt in that budget passes—the debt that replaces the real revenue reforms that Kentucky needs—the credit rating agencies will also see these pieces of evidence:

• Kentucky will have taken on $2380 in debt for every man, woman, and child in our commonwealth, according to the Legislative Research Commission.
  
• According to the LRC, Kentucky’s debt as a percentage of our revenue will shoot up to 7.43%.  It’s supposed to stay below 6%.  When it gets too high, it sends another message to credit agencies that we’re not putting forth a “good faith effort” to generate revenue.
  

Why does this matter? 

Because when Kentucky doesn’t look credible to lenders, we pay higher interest rates. Those higher rates cost taxpayer dollars, dollars that most folks would rather see put toward smaller class sizes and clean water.  Kentucky's budget has had nine rounds of budget cuts since early 2008 for most public services, and these on top of chronic underfunding of these services and programs. 

We can't afford the borrowing in the House budget, but we can't afford the cuts, either.  Cutting school days from the calendar and adult education resources doesn't put Kentucky in a position to move forward. 

The House had a choice.  It could have chosen to invest in Kentucky's people by sending money back to the pockets of working families who are struggling with a state EITC, and by raising the revenue that we need.  Instead, it chose to play games with our future.

Take Action

• Write a letter to the editor supporting tax and revenue reforms that fix our broken system.  You'll find helpful tips and links to lots of local papers here, on an earlier blog entry. Writing these letters is valuable and easy!  Feel free to post your letter in the comments section so others can see your letter here.

• Call House and Senate Leadership, Senator Leeper, and your legislators and leave a message in support of a budget with fair and adequate reforms.

  Call the Legislative Message Line, 1-800-372-7181 (7am-11pm M-F of this week) and ask to leave a message for House and Senate Leadership and your own legislators (if you don't know their names, the operator can look them up for you). Leave a simple message like "This budget process is taking Kentucky in the wrong direction.  I support the fair and adequate tax reforms in HB 13 as solutions that will move Kentucky forward.”

• Contact Governor Beshear in support of a budget with fair and adequate reforms. Call him at (502) 564-2611, or email him through this link.  You can use the same message: "This budget process is taking Kentucky in the wrong direction.  I support the fair and adequate tax reforms in HB 13 as solutions that will move Kentucky forward.”

And feel free to share your thoughts about the House budget below!

The social networking site Facebook has been a key way to mobilize members and allies of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth for a few years now - for events, legislative call-in actions, etc.

But today may have been the first big (albeit fairly spontaneous) instance of lots of KFTC members and allies using Facebook to both organize and directly contact a legislator to demonstrate support for a bill. 

Senator Damon Thayer has been preventing HB 70, our bill to restore voting rights to former felons who have served their debt to society, from being voted on in his committee.  He also uses Facebook to organize his own supporters.

Today, over 80 KFTC members and allies contacted Thayer by leaving public messages on his Facebook page, all asking him to support and/or allow HB 70 to come to a vote in his committee. 

You can see the full list of comments and leave your own (polite but firm) encouragement to Thayer to allow his committee to vote on HB 70 at Damon Thayer's Facebook Page HERE.  Maybe we can top 100 comments.

This has also proven to be a great way to get people to write down how they feel about an issue so they can use that same content in a letter to the editor.  At least two of the people who have posted to Thayer's Facebook wall have already submitted the same letter to their local newspaper.

We even got a little local blog attention from the folks over at Barefoot and Progressive. 

Kudos for the idea of posting the requests on Thayer's wall. I hope it is wildly successful. And just as an aside, it is so encouraging to see all of the comments. Nothing against calling the message line, but this action gives you a real visual of solidarity on this issue." - Hillary Bullock, after she left a note on Thayer's wall.

We'll see how Senator Damon Thayer responds. 

And either way, we'll keep calling, writing, holding events, going door-to-door, and building leaders until we win this one.

There is still time for YOU to write a letter to the editor about voting rights or some other issue and to have it get out in time to make an impact in the General Assembly in Frankfort. 

Members of KFTC under the banner of The Kentucky Sustainable Energy Alliance (KySEA) have been enthusiastically supporting HB 408, legislation introduced by Rep. Harry Moberly (see blog post 2.9.10)

On the last day that new bills could be introduced Rep. Rocky Adkins filed  House Bill 3 as a "clean energy bill." Although HB 3 includes new supports for energy efficiency and renewable energy by setting mandatory standards, at heart it is more of an extension of HB 1, "The Peabody Bill".

House Bill 3 does this by creating a new category of energy called "low carbon" and extends previously created tax incentives under HB 1 to include low carbon energy. Though not labeled as such, low carbon energy could also include nuclear energy. 

These two bills represent two different visions for Kentucky's future.

In general, HB 3 focuses more on centralized power generation and increasing the efficiency of the generation and distribution infrastructure, with little support for the end user, especially low-income households.

HB 408, on the other hand, makes energy efficiency Kentucky’s top energy priority.  It assists the elderly and the poor.  It seeks to make efficiency and renewables available to all.  HB 408 is similar to legislation already enacted in Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina. And while both bills strive to create new jobs, HB 3 will likely concentrate those jobs.  HB 408 will make more jobs statewide.

 Both bills are currently in the House Natural Resources Committee, and while HB 408 has yet to be called up for discussion by Chairman Gooch, HB 3 is likely to be heard and passed on Thursday, March 11.

For more information on how the two bills compare, visit the KySEA website: http://www.kysea.org/blog/is-house-bill-3-the-best-it-can-be.

Call or write your Legislator and ask that Kentucky pass energy legislation that makes energy efficiency, including low-income Kentuckians, a priority and makes energy efficiency, renewable energy and the jobs they create available to all Kentuckians.

The House budget proposal is getting its hearing today, to be sent to the House floor for a vote later in the week.

Written versions of the proposal *still* haven't been released, but here's what it does, as far as we know:

• Cuts higher education 2.5% over the next two years.
  
• Cuts adult education. Non-traditional students have already taken hits with previous cuts to the community colleges, and cuts that limited GED testing sites and programs and access.
  
• Cuts two days from the school year for elementary kids, which also cuts pay for teachers and staff.
• Cuts the health plan for state workers.
• Cuts funding for contracts with private companies. (What does this mean? The example offered at one Frankfort hearing was the Poison Control Hotline.)
  
• Depends on $256 million in federal Medicaid funding that might or might not materialize.
• Includes about $371 in revenue from HB 530, which passed the House last week. HB 530 would cap some tax breaks that the legislature passed last summer, suspend tax breaks for businesses that aren't making a profit, and have businesses pay the sales taxes they owe sooner rather than later. There were no revenue reforms. And this bill is unlikely to pass the Senate intact.
  

So there is $627 million in assumed funding.  That means that there's almost $900 million in cuts.  And yet, somehow this proposed budget includes a $10 million increase in funding for the Boni Bill (a bill that passed in 2007 to protect social service workers, but has never been fully funded), a host of projects to "reward" some legislators who voted for HB 530, and money to chip away at the waiting lists for Meals on Wheels.

(Edit: Oh! So that's how they did it! They borrowed about $2.2 billion--quite a hefty debt. For more information, here's the Herald-Leader article, and here's the Courier-Journal article.)

But after chronic underfunding of health services, education, environmental protection, and public safety, the House doesn't have much to be proud of.  They had better choices that would have allowed stronger investments in Kentuckians, better opportunities, and a more balanced and fair tax structure.  More details are expected to be released this evening, and a written version is expected to finally be released later this week.

Meanwhile, a report was released that says that out of every 100 Kentucky 9th-graders, only 44 will start college the fall after they graduate, and only six of those will finish in four years.  If this is all by choice, fine and good. But with tuition rates rising an average of 10% a year for the last decade, we suspect it isn't by choice.

Rowan County members held a Bake Sale for the Budget on the campus of Morehead State University yesterday.

It was great!  We got about 80 people to sign on in support of adequate budgets and fair taxes, had lots of good conversations about the tax/budget/tuition relationship, and raised about $70 for the state budget that we'll deliver to the Governor's office.

Rowan County members' baking abilities are legendary, and they sure didn't disappoint yesterday! 

Five members baked up plates of brownies, buckeyes, blondies, cookies, and lemon bars.  Another group of six came out to talk with folks about the implications of letting our budget needs fester, and the real solutions in HB 13.

The President of MSU even stopped by to talk about the effects of the budget cuts on Morehead.

Thanks to everyone who pitched in!

The ring from a bell means so much during Week in Washington...it means that another legislator has stood up to big coal and decided to co-sponsor the Clean Water Protection Act

We just got another co-sponsor !  We are now up to 166!

Week in Washington Bell Ringing from Kentuckians For The Commonwealth on Vimeo.