Kentucky Chamber President and CEO Dave Adkisson recently appeared on Louisville Fox station WDRB to outline the business community’s “wish list” for the 2016 legislative session.
In terms of the two biggest priorities of the Kentucky Chamber, Adkisson pointed to fixing the state’s public pension systems and beginning to shore up the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System (KTRS) as well as making sure legislators craft a responsible two-year budget that deals with pensions and funds necessary government functions like education and economic development.
Adkisson also listed other priorities including legislation to:
- Enact public-private partnership (P3) legislation. P3 would encourage businesses to partner with government on major projects,
- Allow charter schools,
- Invest in higher education by rewarding colleges and universities for the graduates they produce,
- Enact a right to work law,
- Pass a consistent, state-wide smoke-free law because Kentucky ranks 50th for cancer deaths,
- Allow local voters to decide whether to pay for key projects with a local option sales tax,
- Repeal the prevailing wage law that increases public construction costs,
- Pass measures to improve Kentucky’s legal climate,
- Modernize our justice code to be “smarter on crime”,
- Pass a commonsense law to give ex-felons a second chance after staying clean for five years.