American Forum Op-Ed

KENTUCKY FORUM

By Linda Stettenbenz

Many Kentuckians, like myself, are struggling to find adequate employment, and are going back to school at public universities to try and improve our financial outlook. With tuition at our publicly funded universities rising on average 10 percent per year, we sink into personal debt just trying to find ways to stay afloat and move ahead. While we do our best to move ourselves and our families forward, the Kentucky legislature continues to move us further behind.

People like me pay a bigger portion of our income to state and local taxes than do Kentucky’s wealthiest. Still, every year we are told there is no way to properly fund the services we need the most. And once again, the legislature’s unwillingness to adopt needed reforms further sends Kentucky into decline.

As citizens, we must see through the smoke and mirrors of perpetually inadequate funding for critical services, and support fair and adequate reforms that will move us forward.

We need to demand no-nonsense reforms that will invest in our children, our workforce and the programs that keep our communities safe and healthy. One of the most commonsense, painless, and fair remedies is to change Kentucky’s regressive tax structure.

Right now, people who make $40,000 per year pay a much greater share of income in state and local taxes -- almost double -- than those who make $350,000 per year. If the richest 6 percent chipped in an average of $20 more per month, along with paying currently non-existent sales taxes on things like charter plane rentals and golf course fees, it would fully fund an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for 300,000 working families, and create a stable and fair system of revenue.

How can we expect adults and families to prosper if they are only trained for low-paying and declining jobs? According to a recently released Mountain Association for Community Economic Development report, “Kentucky ranks 41st among the states in share of adults with a high school education or GED, and 46th in share of adults with an associate’s degree or higher....80 percent of the job needs in Kentucky in 2016 will require at least two years of training past high school.” Yet, we lag far behind other states in funding adult education and providing proper resources for working families to move ahead.

Most state legislatures recognize the need to keep the recession from pulling us further back. Thirty-three other states passed reforms to raise public dollars since the recession began. But in Kentucky, where we have among the highest unemployment and lowest paying jobs, our legislators are sacrificing us and our children to keep their most influential supporters happy.

They toss a few crumbs to schools in agreeable legislators’ districts; they pretend to balance the budget with tricks like moving the date on state workers’ paychecks; and they continue to ask the most from those who are struggling. When the Poison Control Hotline told legislators it needed funding to maintain its services, it was told to “be creative.” Funding for Kentucky’s mental health clinics has flat-lined for 14 years, even as inflation and need rises. We again face cuts to K-12 education, GED completion programs and higher education. This is not sound leadership, and it won’t move us forward.

Tax policy and budgets can seem intimidating or confusing to the average citizen. We may think we are powerless to change it due to money and old power networks that are so influential in Kentucky politics. But this is exactly what we must do. We are experts. We are people who have friends, sons, and daughters who are struggling to find decent employment or pay tuition at public universities. We value K-12 education, mental health clinics, the poison control hotline, and programs that provide for public health and safety. And we know it’s not right to ask the most from those who can afford it the least. Legislators need our leadership. It’s time for real reforms to move Kentucky forward.
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Stettenbenz lives in Jefferson County and is looking for adequate employment.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the Kentucky Forum. 4/10

KENTUCKY FORUM

By Doug Doerrfeld

Kentucky officials are betting our future on an unproven technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon sequestration. It’s a misguided gamble that takes us down an expensive path when there are clearly better options.

No doubt there is a problem. Kentucky coal burning power plants produce about 100 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. And though there are modest efforts to reduce this amount, Kentucky’s electricity use is expected to grow which adds to the problem unless we turn down a different path.

Politicians and utilities are betting on geological sequestration – using porous rock, and a lot of it, deep under our land as the place to dispose of this waste. But after years of experiments, we still have no proof that carbon capture and sequestration will work on the scale necessary, and at a cost that’s affordable. It’s the wrong solution.

The sheer volume of carbon dioxide that we produce in Kentucky requires a scale that goes way beyond any feasible options. To dispose of this much waste would result in the creation of the largest toxic waste distribution and disposal system ever conceived. It will take, literally, the whole state to provide storage capacity that even then might not be enough, and then only for a limited number of years. But state officials have crafted a program that, either through outright seizure or condemnation, gives the coal industry access to almost all deep rock strata under the state.

The speculation until recently was that it would take a 359-square-mile area to store carbon waste from a 500-mega-watt (MW) power plant. But that formula was shattered with research from a recent peer-reviewed article in the Journal of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Professors Michael and Christine Ehlig-Economides concluded that geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide is “a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of carbon dioxide emissions.”

“Published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing carbon dioxide in a closed system," wrote Professors Ehlig-Economides. "Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical carbon dioxide to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1 percent of pore space. This will require from five to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, including federal government laboratories.” By their projections, a small 500 MW plant's underground carbon dioxide reservoir would need to be the size of the state of Vermont to work.

Kentucky has about 16,510 MW of coal-burning capacity and officials want to add more. That’s just one of the problems with the sequestering side of the plan.

Carbon capture technologies built into a new power plant would increase the fuel needs of such plants by 25-40 percent. In other words, it would take a third more coal to produce the same amount of electricity. The overall energy costs of new coal-burning plants equipped with CCS will jump 30-90 percent. Applying CCS to existing plants or plants far from a storage location will be even more expensive, elevating costs by 50-300 percent.

A 2008 federal Government Accountability Office report concluded that the sheer energy cost of CCS outweighs any potential benefit. Rodney Andrews, executive director at University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research, predicts CCS electricity cost increases of 60-200 percent.

The only way utilities will find CCS to be affordable is to get taxpayers, and eventually their customers, to foot the bill. The Kentucky General Assembly has been more than willing to go along with this scheme, introducing several proposals to provide subsidies for sequestration experiments – and exempting corporations from any permanent liability for their wastes.

We need to stop our obsession with coal and move toward energy efficient power such as solar, wind, biomass and the wide variety of available and developing non-fossil fuel energy options. This is where our future economy needs to be headed.

But in Kentucky, some officials don’t see beyond coal.

“For many of us who realize only too plainly the very real dangers and difficulties associated with sequestration, over-inflated claims for CCS have become the last refuge of the energy scoundrel. There is no need to research this subject any longer,” the Ehlig-Economides concluded. “Let's try something else."

I agree. It’s past time to get started.
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Doerrfeld is a member of the Executive Committee of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the Kentucky Forum. 4/10

KENTUCKY FORUM

By Teri Blanton

Quietly, behind the scenes, state and industry officials are planning the largest toxic waste disposal system in Kentucky’s history. The system would deal with 100 million tons of hazardous materials every year.

Where is this system going to be located? Under our land.

No, I’m not kidding.

Right now, we’re putting this waste into our atmosphere and into our lungs. Coal burning power plants operating in Kentucky spew out nearly 100 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution every year, along with a long list of other toxic gases. Most people recognize excessive amounts of carbon and other pollutants in our atmosphere as a serious health and economic problem. Inevitably, and probably soon, federal law and international treaties are going to require that we greatly reduce the amount of our carbon pollution.

Utilities see it coming, and feel some urgency about it. Two problems, though: it conflicts with Kentucky’s mine and burn as much coal as possible for as long as possible obsession, and it is prohibitively expensive.

The first problem is being dealt with as follows: we’ll make modest gestures toward energy efficiency and renewables, the approaches that would actually reduce our pollution. But at the same time, we’ll disparage those solutions as inadequate so that we can keep our obsession with mining and burning the coal that fuels our campaign coffers.

And we’ll even use the emphasis on developing alternative sources of energy to coal’s advantage by declaring that, in Kentucky, synthetic liquids and gas derived from coal qualify as “alternative” fuels.

In terms of cost, investors aren’t willing to risk their capital when there is no possibility of eventual payback, and when the public health liability will never go away.

But that doesn’t deter some Kentucky officials. Taxpayers can help foot the bill, and we can exempt corporations from long-term liability for the pollution they leave permanently with us. And then they’ll require utility customers to pay the cost when we are too far down that path to turn back.

This scenario has been unfolding in the Kentucky General Assembly. The House has been the starting point for proposals that offer hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for companies to convert coal to some other burnable form. Peabody Energy – when legislation was being considered during a 2007 special session called just for them – made it clear that they would do no such business in Kentucky if taxpayers did not help foot the bill.

In the current session, we see a series of proposals in the House Natural Resources Committee designed to create the legal and financing structures to cement the state’s continued unhealthy dependence on coal. The most egregious proposes to greatly expand the powers of state officials to seize private property for the benefit of private companies needing a place to store their carbon waste. The proposal would give the state ownership of all the deep rock strata under our land, 5,500 feet and deeper.

On top of that, after a 10-year closure period, the companies that put their waste under our land are free of any permanent liability. They’ll be long gone, but the waste will be ours to keep forever.

All of this is for a technology that hasn’t been proven feasible on a 100-million-tons-a-year scale, or anything close to it.

Another proposal gives private companies the power to use eminent domain to grab the land they need to build and operate pipelines to move around their carbon dioxide, from power plants to disposal sites. As if letting these handful of companies take our land weren’t enough, House members also agreed to have taxpayers help the companies pay for their pipelines.

It’s rather amazing that this massive toxic waste disposal system, that does nothing to address excessive carbon production, is being developed with little public knowledge or discussion. There is little apparent awareness in the General Assembly itself of what is going on.

We know that we will be burning coal to make electricity for some years to come. The Kentucky General Assembly is taking this to an extreme by supporting programs that will obligate us to mine and burn as much coal as possible at whatever the cost. If giving our land, our health and our tax dollars are what legislators believe they owe to the coal industry, then the cost is too high.
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Blanton is a fellow with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the Kentucky Forum. 3/10

KENTUCKY FORUM

By Homer S. White

State Senator Damon Thayer is preventing a proposed amendment to the Kentucky constitution that would restore voting rights to former felons from moving forward. Furthermore, nine of the 12 members of Thayer’s State and Local Government Committee say that they intend to support the measure, but Thayer still refuses to let it be heard. Surely this is an important proposal that merits full consideration (the proposal passed the House last month with strong bipartisan support).

Nearly 129,000 former felons in Kentucky, who have served their prison time, probation and parole, have not been able to navigate the existing pardoning process which requires an individual pardon from the governor. Tens of thousands more Kentuckians will be in the same situation in coming years. Conversations with former felons indicate that most have not heard about the pardon process and don't know how to initiate it. Even officials in the Kentucky justice system and the state's county clerk offices often don't know how to help people through the process.

We have to bear in mind that persons recently released from prison are at a particularly vulnerable point in their lives. If we want them to re-engage in society in a positive way, we should provide them with every possible encouragement to do so, and work to remove hurdles that stand in their way.

The current pardon process is entirely dependent upon the sitting governor. It's less complicated under Gov. Beshear, but was quite difficult under Gov. Fletcher. A civil right as fundamental as the right to vote should not be subject to the whim or favor of any one individual.

Thayer alludes to the fact that the current proposal, as currently written, does not automatically restore rights to those who have committed murder or sexual abuse. He speculates that this may create “two classes” of felons – those who regain their rights when they have completed their sentences and those who must still rely “on the favor of the governor.”

This is a point worthy of consideration.

I would prefer to restore rights without exception. After all, the most dangerous voters are those who use their rights to advance their own interests at the expense of the common good.

For example, lobbyists for business interests routinely support laws that give their business a special and unfair advantage, often at taxpayer expense. Yet, we would never think of denying such persons the vote. The right to vote is just that sacred.

A former murderer, on the other hand, never has an opportunity to vote for politicians who pledge to "make murder easier," so his vote is far less likely to damage the common good. Accordingly, there is even less reason to deny this person the right to participate in our democracy.

Nevertheless, the current proposal, as it stands, has widespread support, and it would at least restore rights to nearly all former felons. It’s a fair compromise.

The proposal is more than just a technical device to make the restoration process cheaper and more reliable than tens of thousands of individual pardons, though it will certainly accomplish this aim.

Restoring the vote will also restore the dignity of the human person. Picture a young woman who gets mixed up in drugs and goes to prison. Many of us know such a person -- she may be a childhood friend, someone we went to school with, a relative, even our child. By allowing her the right to vote after she serves her time sends a message to this young woman that she has dignity, that we need and value her positive involvement in society, that we want her to rebuild her life, and that when she does so we are delighted to welcome her back.

Former felons have served their debt to society. Kentucky must allow democracy, dignity, and reason to have a chance.
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White is a professor of mathematics at Georgetown College.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the Kentucky Forum. 3/10

KENTUCKY FORUM

By Michael Aldridge, Craig Cammack, Chris Hartman, Travis Myles and George W. Stinson

January of 1966, with Gov. Edward T. Breathitt's signing of a law Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the strongest and most comprehensive civil rights bill passed by a southern state,” the Commonwealth of Kentucky became the first state in the south to adopt a Civil Rights Act with enforceable repercussions for acts of discrimination. Two years later, Kentucky was again first in the south, this time in the passage of a statewide fair housing law, which cemented our commonwealth's legacy as the nation's southern civil rights leader.

At its core, the purpose of the Civil Rights Act is to guarantee equality for everyone. It ensures all Kentuckians have the same opportunities to earn a living, be safe in their communities, serve their country, and care for the ones they love. When there has been a history of a particular group's lack of access to these fundamentals of the American dream, the just and appropriate response has been to add that group to existing antidiscrimination laws.

Today our state has the opportunity to once again stand as the pioneer of fairness and equality among its southern peers, and we challenge each and every Kentuckian to add their voice to the call for comprehensive civil rights in the commonwealth.

On Jan. 5, a proposal for a statewide fairness law was introduced to amend our state's Civil Rights Act to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected classifications. This would prohibit discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Kentuckians in employment, housing and public accommodations. Even today, any person suspected of being gay or transgender outside Lexington, Louisville or Covington may be legally fired from their job, denied housing, or withheld access to any public accommodation — such as a bus ride or service in a restaurant.

Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia currently enforce such fairness protections, and of the 29 states that do not, more than 70 of their cities and counties extend protections to their gay and transgender citizens. Approximately 25 percent of our state's population resides in the three communities with existing fairness laws, and Census data indicates that large numbers of individuals also commute into these communities during the workweek. Consequently, approximately 30 percent of Kentuckians are protected from this type of discrimination, yet this simple equality proposal has never even come to a committee vote.

This year marks more than a decade since Lexington and Louisville passed their fairness ordinances — the same year a Decision Research Poll documented 73 percent of Kentuckians supported statewide fairness protections. This law is long overdue in our commonwealth, and if we do not act quickly, we will surely lose our place in history as the nation's southern leader of equality.

On June 2, 2008, Gov. Steve Beshear adopted an executive order stating a broad and inclusive policy of nondiscrimination in state government employment. Governor Beshear recognizes the time has come for Kentucky to join the 21 other states that have already enacted laws protecting gay and transgender people, and we must too.

Just as Kentucky led the south in 1966 by becoming the first southern state to pass a civil rights law applicable to employment and places of public accommodation, and led the region in 1968 by becoming the first southern state to pass protections in housing, we must now boldly, resolutely take up the challenge to lead the south into a new era of equality for everyone. We must affirm our commonwealth's legacy by becoming the first southern state to stand united for fairness.

If you cherish Kentucky's rich history as the southern civil rights leader, then look not only to our past, but also to our fair and equal future.
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Aldridge is executive director of ACLU-KY. Cammack is chairman of Lexington Fairness. Hartman is director of the Fairness Campaign Louisville. Myles is chairperson of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance. Stinson is chairperson of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. They are all members of the Kentucky Statewide Fairness Coalition. The Statewide Fairness Day and rally in the Capitol Rotunda is being held in Frankfort on Wednesday, Feb. 24.
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Copyright (C) 2010 by the Kentucky Forum. 2/10

By K.A. Owens

By Dana Beasley Brown

As a mother, I’m fed up with the questionable choices made by the leaders who are entrusted to serve and protect their citizens. As a resident of Kentucky, I need to know that our leadership is willing to invest in the life that my son will have here. I need to know that when he’s old enough to go to school, he’ll have every opportunity to learn and succeed as well as his friends in Maryland and his cousins in California.

And I need to know that the air he breathes and the water he drinks is just as safe here as it is anyplace else and that he will experience a community in which people are treated fairly and justly.

Three little pieces of news led me to believe that perhaps a change had come to the Commonwealth and that we were on our way to a Kentucky I could be proud of. First, our elected officials started echoing Rep. Jim Wayne’s call for a comprehensive tax overhaul. Second, some House Republicans proposed a plan to expand the sales tax to a few of our untaxed services. Third, after years of watching our children’s class sizes swell, our teachers' pay fail to keep up, our justice system and health services leave more and more people behind, and our colleges become unaffordable, even Senate President David Williams admitted that we need new revenue.

These three little pieces have allowed me to think that a positive change would come to our state. Like many Kentuckians, I was hopeful about the likelihood of real reforms.

Unfortunately, however, the closed doors that hid away the negotiations among House, Senate, and executive leadership also prevented them from hearing the call for change coming from across the state. So instead, we get a plan to raise the cigarette tax by 30 cents, a retail sales tax on alcohol, and deep budget cuts.

That’s the plan that’s supposed to save the day?

The legislature has a short memory. As easy as it is to blame the severity of Kentucky’s budget needs on the economic crisis, it isn’t accurate to do so. We had known about the revenue shortfall last year, but the legislature didn’t do anything about it except to make another round of budget cuts, some deeper than the three rounds of cuts before that.

And although Gov. Beshear acted surprised to learn of that shortfall, the legislators knew better. The legislature-commissioned Fox Report confirmed back in 2001 that Kentucky’s tax system was out of date and could not sustain a basic level of services. Years of bad choices have left us with chronically underfunded programs, unaffordable higher education, abandoned school programs, and unenforced environmental laws.

The legislature, once again, has made a big mistake. We now have a tax structure that asks the lowest income-earners to contribute about 10 percent of their income to state and local taxes, and asks the wealthiest to contribute not even 6 percent.

It's the low- and middle-income earners -- not our state's wealthiest, with incomes above $300,000--who are being hurt the most by our economic recession. Balancing our budget on their backs has never been fair, and now it seems especially unwise. Why aren't we moving toward solutions that make our tax structure more balanced and, therefore, more sound?

Instead of adding some patchwork taxes that, in their weakness, will do very little for the public good, our elected officials could have moved us closer to a tax structure that reflects our values of fairness and cooperation.

Where’s the real revenue reform that the Commonwealth so badly needs? Our taxes fit into the old trend. They are relics of a time when people bought into the falsity of small government connoting efficient government. Continuing to move in this direction will dig us deeper into the situation we are in right now, suffering from unemployment, extractive industries, and facilitating policies that don’t work.

We all want our state to be efficient. But we won’t make it efficient by continuing the practices that make it ineffective. Our state government can only be efficient if it is able to do the work that we have charged it to do—help us protect and educate ourselves so that we can all realize our potential to succeed. Efficiency takes some investment. Our leaders can choose to support these investments, or they can choose--as they have--to only do what makes our budget legal.

I want our leaders to make better choices. I want them to invest in a better Kentucky.
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Beasley Brown lives in Bowling Green with her husband and 1-year old son. She is member of the Economic Justice Committee of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth.
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Copyright (C) 2009 by the Kentucky Forum. 2/09

By Doug Doerrfeld

Sweden recently set on a path to become the world’s first “oil-free economy” within 15 years by replacing all fossil fuels with renewables. As a result, entrepreneurs rushed to develop new ways of generating energy from the wind, sun and tides, from wood chips, agricultural waste, and garbage. Economic growth rates climbed. We learned that when nations "decarbonizes," their economies reap immediate rewards.

In recent weeks we’ve heard significant announcements in solar breakthroughs, from gigantic generating plants to new ways to store solar energy. We are on the threshold of the day when nearly every Kentucky home and business could be generating electricity and hot water.

With technology changing so fast, with renewable energy poised to deliver significant levels of power on a cost-competitive basis, Gov. Steve Beshear was right to ask the Energy Cabinet to develop a new comprehensive energy plan. Though Kentucky’s current plan is just a few years old, it relies heavily on coal and does more to reinforce old power (both energy production and the politically entrenched) than to transform our economy.

A good plan will not only cleanly generate the energy needed to meet the needs of Kentuckians, it will also improve our quality of life. "With good policies and strong investments that prepare people who most need work for the work that most needs to be done, green jobs can fight poverty and global warming pollution at the same time," a University of Massachusetts report pointed out.

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth offers three standards by which we will judge a new energy plan.

First, it must do no more harm and work to stop the harm now being done. The same week Gov. Beshear asked for a new energy plan the city of Louisville issued several air quality alerts. These air-borne toxins hurt people and put some in the hospital. Rural areas are also hardly immune to these dangers. Mammoth Cave is the fifth most polluted national park, largely because of coal power plants in western Kentucky.

On the other end of the coal cycle, more mining with the continued lack of effective enforcement of mining laws means unabated destruction of mountains, forests and streams. More coal might feed the frenzy for short-term energy, but do so at the cost of our ecological health and economic well-being. The state ignores its own Division of Water reports about the degradation of water quality resulting from radical strip mining and continues allowing the intentional destruction of streams -- another example that the “energy at any cost” mentality still rules in the state capitol.

Second, any plan must make sure affordable energy remains accessible to all Kentuckians. Kentucky’s past and present dependence on coal for electricity in a carbon constrained future looms as a menacing financial and environmental liability. New coal plants are expensive and will continue the upward spiral of electricity rates. Experimental coal sequestration technology, decades away, could increase the cost of electricity another 50 to 80 percent. Clearly, this path is making electricity less accessible to lower income families and creating a burden for small businesses.

Energy accessibility and security demand that we look toward sources that provide the greatest price and supply stability.

Third, we must take advantage of the growing green economy or we face being left behind. A recent Apollo Alliance report showed that investment in a clean and efficient economy would "lead to over 3 million new green-collar jobs, stimulate $1.4 trillion in new GDP, add billions in personal income and retail sales, produce $284 billion in net energy savings, all while generating sufficient returns to the U.S. treasury to pay for itself over 10 years." How much of this will Kentucky capture, or will it go to other states while we’re still mired in old dirty power?

The state currently offers only $76 million in incentives to Integrity Manufacturing for 1,000 new jobs building electric cars compared to $250 million to Peabody Energy to create 500 coal gasification jobs. This may be circumstantial, but it is a clear indication of how our priorities must change.

Visionary leadership will see this moment as an opportunity to move Kentucky into the future that we have the power to create. But it will require breaking away from the old mindsets, the old political alliances and fossil-fuel submission. We have no time to waste.
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Doerrfeld is the chairperson of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth.
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Copyright (C) 2008 by the Kentucky Forum. 10/08