001Earlier this week, the Green River Area Development District held its monthly board of directors meeting at the GRD office. This one, though, was a little bit more special than others. Legislators from across the Green River region were invited to attend and share their recap of the most recent legislative session held in Frankfurt. They were asked to speak on bills they sponsored, as well as issues or topics they feel were important to address. So my mission is to reduce health care costs and specifically the Medicaid program by 30% over the next 5 years. If we can do that, if we reduce the bureaucracy, if we reduce uh the number of people on the Medicaid program and get them back to gainful employment, improve their health population, we can do this. So to that end, I think
002the piece of legislation I'm proudest of this session was Senate Concurrent Resolution Nine, which calls for a different means delivering the Medicaid program. And then I had the infamous library bill which affected every county in the state of Kentucky. Simplified the process for making board appointments and take and took a lot of the acrimony and the argumentation that was going on especially here in Osensboro away. We don't need that and it it simplified that actually was a very nonpartisan uh bill and it was voted on by majority of both the Senate and the House in both parties. Our Medicaid has grown uh probably statewide. We're probably close to 40% of our population is on Medicaid. We even have counties in this state that 65% of their residents are on Medicaid. And that really is uh
003not something that's sustainable. And uh uh I I know that the senator has mentioned uh you know trying to reduce that and we're going to have to reduce those costs because we can't sustain it if they continue. One of the bills I did was House Bill 366. This bill dealt with um digital images of child pornography. Not a very comfortable topic to talk about, but it's something we need to take care of. And what my bill did was two things. one, it it tightened up the definition of digital images uh to include AI produced digital images because it's still child pornography. But the important thing it did was um it mandated that whatever the sentence that someone receives if they're convicted of of of this statute that they have to serve 85% of whatever that
004sentence is. It doesn't mandate sentences, but it does mandate if we're going to it's effectively a truth and sentencing uh part of the bill. Um if if the judge is going to give a sentence, we're going to make sure that who the the person that's uh found guilty is going to serve 85% of that sentence, whatever that might be. I'm going to talk generally and Representative Payne is going to talk about a few bills that we did pass in our committee. But uh you know overall we've had a good session probably the last six years in education in the state of Kentucky. We put in place policies that help student outcomes and that's what we should be doing and it's paying off. Uh, every state gives a test called the NATE test, which is a
005national test. And that's if you really want to pay attention in education to see how we're doing, look at those tests. We were third and fourth grade reading in the last uh assessment. So, what does that mean? We all know if we can teach them to read, we can teach them to do the other things. So, I think that's very important. >> Changing from a growth or from a change model to a growth model. So, our former accountability system looked at schools and said, "Well, how did this year's third grade class compare to next year's third grade class?" Well, that's like comparing apples to oranges, right? It's a totally different set of teachers. It's a totally different set of kids. Um, so now what we're doing is measuring growth of each individual child. So, how
006do they move from the third grade and their achievement in the third grade and now their achievement in the fourth grade and then from the fourth grade to the fifth grade. So really prioritizing the individual student and meeting their needs and making sure that our systems are designed to meet that which uh is extraordinarily important. >> One specific item I'll point out in the budget that especially proud of for the Davis County community. I want to thank Judge Castlin. he's been uh very diligent on working on a public works building for our community and he's he has stayed on top of that not only at the state level and the federal level to make sure that we move forward on um what provides for the most safest in our communities and things like that. So
007want to compliment you on on that project and thank you for that. I think we can say as far as the grad community did extremely well in the budget. You all had great advocates and also great projects. It's really nice and easy to support whenever we feel like we're doing our due diligence to support the taxpayers and also provide for our communities.