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A recent op-ed by Sen. Mitch McConnell featured in the Floyd County Times:

Wherever I go in Kentucky, I see President Obama’s policies have raised energy rates, decreased domestic energy production, and cost jobs. A barrage of regulations from the EPA is strangling one of our state’s most important industries — the coal industry — and Kentucky miners and the thousands whose jobs rely on mining are feeling it.

 

After more than four years, it is clear this administration has declared a war on coal.

 

Kentucky’s coal industry employs over 14,000 people directly. For every miner employed, three more Kentuckians hold jobs indirectly dependent on coal. But in 2012, total coal production in Kentucky declined by over 16 percent, and direct employment from coal fell by over 22 percent.

 

Eastern Kentucky has suffered the most. Coal production in the region is down by nearly 28 percent, the lowest level since Lyndon Johnson was president. As a result, 4,000 miners in eastern Kentucky have lost their jobs — a drop of nearly 30 percent.

 

I think it’s clear what this administration’s true goal is. It’s not to see the coal industry actually comply with so many unreasonable regulations and red tape. It’s to see the coal industry driven out of business altogether.

 

This EPA has turned the coal permitting process into an illegitimate, back-door means to shut down coal mines permanently by sitting on permits indefinitely and removing any certainty from the regulatory process. Playing this game of “run out the clock” has put many Kentucky mining operations into limbo and cost Kentucky thousands of jobs and over $123 million in coal severance money.

 

The EPA is changing the rules in the middle of the game. And they’ve done it all without a single vote in Congress. Their actions are outside the scope of its authority, outside the scope of the law, and represent a fundamental departure from the permitting process as originally envisioned by Congress. So if this administration won’t rein the EPA in, Congress will.

 

That’s why I recently introduced in the U.S. Senate the Coal Jobs Protection Act. Cosponsored with my good friend Senator Rand Paul, it will be our best weapon of defense to protect the thousands of jobs targeted by this administration and its war on coal.

 

The Coal Jobs Protection Act would end this abuse of the process by the EPA by requiring them to approve or veto 402 permit applications within 270 days of application. If the EPA doesn’t act by that time, the permit would be automatically approved.

 

The Coal Jobs Protection Act would give the EPA 90 days after they receive a 404 permit application to begin the approval process for that application. It also gives the president a year to conduct an environmental assessment. Failure to act within that time frame for approval of a 404 permit would mean the application is approved, the permit is issued, and the permit can never be subject to judicial review.

 

Despite a recent federal appeals court decision, EPA should not have the authority to retroactively deny permits that have already been approved. The Coal Jobs Protection Act is even more essential in light of that destructive ruling.

 

The Coal Jobs Protection Act would also implement much-needed reform to help farmers, home builders, realtors, transportation-industry workers, municipalities, and manufacturers who are already at risk from the EPA’s wish to impose a back-door national energy tax by regulating carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants under the Clean Air Act. Such a move would hurt our economy and endanger millions of jobs across the country.

 

A broad coalition of job-creating industries throughout Kentucky are standing with me to support this legislation, including the National Mining Association, the Kentucky Coal Association, the Kentucky Farm Bureau Federation, the Kentucky Corn Growers Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Kentucky Home Builders Association, and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, plus local chambers stretching from Pikeville to Paducah.

 

I visited with many miners and Kentuckians whose jobs depend on the energy sector in eastern Kentucky, including stops in Pikeville and Hazard, to speak with Kentuckians about this bill and let them know I’m on their side in this fight against the administration. For years, people across the Commonwealth have told me of the damage done by this administration’s policies.

 

Under this president, unemployment is still high and economic growth is still shaky. The last thing we need is the EPA’s endless maze of rules and regulations hampering job creation even further.

 

I would have hoped this administration could see that on its own. But since they can’t, it will be up to Kentucky to show them.

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Key hemp proponents and legislative leaders headed to Washington D.C. this week to make the case for legalizing industrial hemp. Agriculture Commissioner James Comer, Kentucky Sen. Paul Hornback and hemp commission member Jonathan Miller have joined forces in a bipartisan effort to meet with White House officials, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy and Environmental Protection Agency and congressional leaders in the House and Senate.

The trio plans to discuss the details of Kentucky’s recently passed SB 50 and how it positions Kentucky to be the perfect test case for growing hemp. SB 50 created the regulatory framework for the production of industrial hemp in the Commonwealth, but the state must first receive a waiver from current federal law (which bans the production of hemp) or a new law must be passed.

Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Rand Paul have introduced a bill that would distinguish hemp from marijuana, thus making it legal to farm anywhere in the country. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also has signed on to sponsor the bill and Reps. John Yarmuth and Bret Guthrie have also voiced their strong support for the legislation.

But Comer’s and his allies say their top priority is making sure Kentucky is first in the race to produce industrial hemp.

“If we want to have the crop in the ground by next year, we need to have a clear indication that they will allow this to happen by late fall. No farmer will plant without a contract to sell, and the producers need to be established here by next spring,” Comer said.

Stay tuned for updates as Kentucky’s leaders press this issue in Washington D.C. or click here to fill out a petition encouraging your federal elected officials to legalize industrial hemp.

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The 2013 Kentucky General Assembly passed monumental reforms to Kentucky’s public employee pension system. Bond rating agencies have already taken notice and indicated SB 2 has put the Commonwealth’s economic health in a more favorable position and put our troubled pension system on the path to recovery. With any important reform, difficult decisions must be made and some groups have expressed concerns about the immediate costs. Quasi-government agencies – groups who are supported by the government, but privately managed – are particularly concerned about the immediate impact the changes to the pension system will have on their bottom line. It’s true SB 2 will require public agencies to increase their contribution to the pension system from 2015-2018, which will require tough budgeting decisions. But it’s also true that by 2019, those organizations will be contributing less than they would under the current system (or if no reforms had been made.) In fact, by 2032 the current pension system would have required employers to contribute more than 64% compared to only 40% under the SB 2 revisions. In terms of our pension system, we as a state have been living beyond our means. It’s time to tighten the belt in order to restore financial security in the Commonwealth. The long-term savings of these reforms could mean more than $10 billion over 20 years for taxpayers – that’s a benefit that far outweighs the cost.

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Below is a guest blog by Robyn Oatley recently featured in Education Week. Oatley works as a consultant with the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and leads ReadyKentucky, a project designed to inform citizens about the Common Core Standards.

Where are the Internet-fueled push to oppose the Common Core Standards and claims of conspiracy coming from? Well, it does not help that the Republican National Committee has issued a draft of a statement calling the standards a “nationwide straitjacket on academic freedom and achievement.” How many members of the RNC are trained educators? How many have even read the standards? Better yet, how many of them know what a standard is? Would they be opposed to this expectation for every 12^th grader: “By the end of grade 12, read and comprehend literature [informational texts, history/social studies texts, science/technical texts].”

Kentucky has been implementing the new standards since February 2010, following a legislative mandate in 2009 requiring more rigorous standards to get more students college and career ready. As a veteran educator, I was hired to lead ReadyKY, a Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence initiative, and began a public engagement campaign to inform citizens and stakeholders about the standards and what they mean for our children’s futures. We had many partners, including the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, and the Kentucky Department of Education, to get the word out.

The ‘word’ in 2010 was what a standard is and isn’t. A standard is just a sentence that states what a child should know and be able to do at the end of the year. In some grade levels there may be 10 math standards; in some grade levels 20 standards. For example: in kindergarten, students are expected to be able to count to 100 and do basic addition and subtraction. Can your 5-year-old already do that? Then your school is responsible for moving your child’s learning to meet the next level of standards.

Standards are not curriculum. The standards do not dictate how teachers teach those standards, what materials they must use or anything else about the local classroom. That is up to the experts who teach your children every day. States joined this movement voluntarily and could add to the standards, if they had something specific their state valued.

Most of the spokespeople who claim there is a conspiracy behind the standards want us to think the federal government is mandating a public education curriculum. The truth is that the federal government has done nothing, except offer temporary financial incentives for states to work together on standards they could share; there was no mandate to adopt the Common Core standards – states had a choice. And this was after 2009, when 48 governors decided that it was crazy for every state to reinvent the wheel when developing expectations for student performance levels by the end of each school year.

Fourth grade in Kentucky ought to have some similarity to expectations in any other state. Louisville, KY, a community with more than 100,000 students, loses approximately 400 kids to transiency every day – that’s the size of a small school! If those families move to any one of the 45 states with similar standards, those students will have the same academic expectations. Think about military families who are in Fort Campbell today and San Diego on Friday. Because the Department of Defense is using the Common Core standards, these military students stand a chance of some consistency in their academic careers.

Most of the initiatives opposing Common Core are not even based on the content of the standards. They have made up fearful statements like “the classics have been thrown out of the curriculum.” All anyone has to do is go to corestandards.org and pull up Appendix A of the English Language Arts standards where The Grapes of Wrath is used as a ‘model’ for teachers to teach the classics in high school English classes. There are many examples, largely considered classics, for educators to use in their classrooms to encourage the reading of more complex texts.

Kentucky has come a long way in education reform, but we have a lot farther to go. We have gained national competitiveness but our graduates are not all internationally competitive. Still 40% of our high school graduates have to take at least one remedial class in college. That is unacceptable. The standards, more highly effective teaching and monitoring of student learning are lifting us to higher levels of performance by our graduates. We are going the right direction for now. This is the next logical step for many states to increase their student achievement, one of many tools necessary for growth.

Reflections to consider:

· Standards are the cornerstone, but we know we have to build a house around it: it’ll take professional development and teacher reflection,locally built curriculum and cycles and cycles of designing-trying-refining-trying again on instruction. This is the work of true implementation.

· Kentucky is a state of local control. We are local citizens who believe the standards are right for students. We believe it because we read them. They’re strong and clear and better than what had before. No one coerced us. No one bribed us. We read, reflected and committed.

· We are local citizens who remember the invitations to contribute to the standards and who have heard directly from Kentucky teacher panels that their thoughts were embodied in the final document.

· Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is a publicly available document. In reading, the key issue is that science reading has to be embedded in science study and history reading in history study, and literary texts will be only a small portion of that work in those subject areas. Literary texts will remain a huge portion of the English Language Arts curriculum. In fact, if science and history take up a greater share of the reading and writing skills that belong in their disciplines, ELA can put more time and energy into literature and literary non-fiction, not less.

· The Prichard Committee is proud to work with and hear the voices of hundreds of teachers, across multiple disciplines, who tell us their students are working at new and higher levels using CCSS-aligned tools. CCSS didn’t make that happen, but it made the tools possible. Again, CCSS is a cornerstone, and we’re busy building the house around it. So it’s working, with no guarantees but with plenty of reason for hope and growing confidence.

A recent national survey of public school teachers in states across the country found:

• 73 percent of teachers surveyed have a favorable view of Common Core State Standards.
• 74 percent of teachers surveyed support their state’s decision to adopt Common Core State Standards.
• 77 percent of teachers surveyed say their state is already teaching to Common Core standards.

Listen to the educators; this is the next logical step for our kids. There is power in consistency of expectations between states. There is power in the international competitiveness of our graduates when they meet high standards and apply for jobs in the global workforce.

Don’t politicize our kids’ futures by turning a strong collaboration between states working together into a polarized political debate.

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Gov. Beshear signed two of the Chamber’s top priorities into law today. Senate Bill 13 is designed to bring Kentucky’s alcohol laws closer to that of 2013 standards and SB 2 along with House Bill 440 will save Kentucky’s ailing public employee pension system.

In a bill signing ceremony today, Gov. Beshear noted the monumental nature in which a compromise was reached to reform the pension system.

“The recent legislative session offered a renewed spirit of cooperation and thoughtful discourse. That new atmosphere allowed us to reach a bipartisan agreement to solve the most pressing financial problem facing our state — our monstrous unfunded pension liability and the financial instability of our pension fund,” said Beshear.

The Chamber applauds the governor and legislators for their collaboration and dedication to passing these business-friendly laws.

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Senate Bill 50 (Hornback), which creates a structure for the regulation and production of industrial hemp, if and when the federal government allows it to be grown, passed the House Agriculture and Small Business Committee on Tuesday morning. Rep. Tommy Turner, of Somerset was the only no vote in committee.   Before hearing SB 50, Chairman McKee addressed the Committee and stated that despite reports regarding the hearing on the bill last week, he did not abruptly end the meeting, nor was it his intent to block a vote on this important issue.

After the vote, Cynthiana farmer, Brian Furnish, a member of the Hemp Commission, spoke to the committee to encourage their support of allowing a hearing of SB 50 on the House floor.  With only six legislative days left in the 2013 session, a vote on the House floor is the last step for the bill before heading to the Governor’s desk for signature into law. This is looking unlikely to happen as House Speaker Greg Stumbo said that since SB 50 would create new fees to pay for the regulation and testing of industrial hemp, it was a revenue bill that needed to originate in the House. Because of this, he said it would not get a vote on the House floor.

Legislation has been introduced in Congress by Rep. Thomas Massie, Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Mitch McConnell. The Chamber supports Senate Bill 50 to position Kentucky as a leader in the production and commercialization of industrial hemp.

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