Norma Hatfield has been raising two of her grandchildren for about a decade and is the president of the Kinship Families Coalition of Kentucky. She testified this week before an interim legislative committee in favor of a regulation to increase the day rate for therapeutic foster care homes, but she also pointed to a bill, passed in 2024, that the cabinet has yet to implement.
The bipartisan Senate Bill 151 was designed to help grandparents and relatives like her who choose to care for children instead of sending them to foster homes.
“[Senate Bill 151] helps give caregivers more time when they're looking at placement options for these vulnerable kids, too,” Hatfield said. “I've been waiting over a year now for somebody to follow the law and to do something, and family after family after family has been waiting.”
Right now, caregivers say they are given 10 days to apply for aid when they first accept a child. That’s even though last year the Kentucky General Assembly unanimously passed SB 151, which gives relatives 120 days to apply for foster care benefits after the child is placed with a relative or fictive kin caregiver.
Republican Sen. Julie Raque Adams from Louisville sponsored the bill. Democratic Governor Andy Beshear signed it into law.
Lawmakers questioned a representative for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services on Tuesday as they sought approval for a $10 million rate increase for therapeutic foster care. The increase itself wasn’t controversial, but Republican Sen. Julie Raque Adams from Louisville questioned where the money came from.
“I think that these rate increases are absolutely 100% appropriate,” Adams said. “I think we should do this. But it doesn't go without understanding that Senate Bill 151 is still not implemented.”
Apparent miscommunication and disagreement over the cost of the bill led Gov. Andy Beshear to inform the legislature just days before the end of the session that he would not implement SB 151 — and a host of other bills — unless lawmakers provided explicit funds to make it happen. Last year, Beshear said his administration would be unable to implement 20 bills and two resolutions, and this year he identified an additional 11 bills.
Adams said at the Tuesday hearing the rate increase shows the administration is capable of finding the funding for initiatives it wants to implement and shouldn’t refuse to find the funds for bills like hers, which are required by law.
“This is a joke, that the cabinet has full discretion to implement what they want to implement, as evidenced by what we're what we have before us today,” Adams said. “The governor is not a dictator. He's not a king. He has to follow the law, and in this instance, he is not following the law.”
Crystal Staley, a spokesperson for Beshear, said the state budget had a line item allowing for per diem rate increases, but no such budget line contains funding for relative caregivers.
“Senator Raque Adams and Senator West voted for the budget and should be aware,” Staley said. “It is simple: The state cannot implement programs and policies if we don’t have the funding needed to do so — and the Kentucky Supreme Court agrees.”
The two-year budget passed last year specifically provided $13 million in state and federal funds for per diem rate increases for foster care families, but did not explicitly mention therapeutic foster care. A spokesperson for the Senate majority leadership said they don’t believe those funds are being used for the increase though, pointing out that the $13 million came out of a mixture of restricted and federal funds. The cabinet said the regulation would make use of general funds, federal dollars and Medicaid-specific restricted funds, which the spokesperson argued refers to different pots of money.
As lawmakers and the governor’s office ascribe blame, kinship caregivers remain unable to access the support that they are entitled to under state law.
‘It's just important to keep pushing’
Adams said she is still willing to work with the administration to make her bill a reality because it’s vital to ensuring kids who are victims of abuse and neglect are placed in the best possible home. She said many families have taken on a relative or a child they know without question, only to find themselves in need of additional financial assistance.
“They do it because they love them, and that family deserves to have that consideration,” Adams said. “They are doing the state a service by taking in that child, and now it's our responsibility to make sure that that child stays in that protected environment and so it's just important to keep pushing for this.”
Melanie Taylor, the cabinet’s director for the Division of Protection and Permanency, presented the proposed rate increase to the committee Tuesday. She said she did not believe the increase was required by statute and was unable to say where the cabinet found the money to make it happen.
“I don't know those decisions were made at a different level from me,” Taylor said in response to Adams’s questioning. “All I know is that I was given the information that the projected cost was around $10 million for the biennium and that it was available.”
Republican Sen. Stephen West from Paris, who chairs the committee, said he doesn’t believe the funds for the increase were explicitly provided in the budget and believes it shows “the hypocrisy of the governor.”
“What we're proving today is that the money actually is there to properly fund [SB] 151 and so this body is very — at least the majority part of this committee — is very, very frustrated with the governor for not funding and implementing 151,” West said, asking Taylor to bring the message back to the cabinet.
Adams said she is especially frustrated by the lack of regulations created by the cabinet to implement her bill. She said she tried to build flexibility into SB 151 to allow them to manage costs as needed. In his letter to lawmakers, Beshear said he expected it to cost the state $20 million over two years because of the extra people who would now be eligible for foster care benefits.
“They had some concerns on cost, and so we worked with them over on the House side to come up with what we thought was a really solid plan, which was, you have total regulatory control so that we can figure out how to manage the cost as we go forward,” Adams said.
Beshear once again sent a letter to lawmakers this year, informing them he would be unable to implement nearly a dozen 2025 bills without clear appropriations. It included some of the most controversial bills this year, including major changes to Medicaid, pollution regulations and worker safety rules.
“The estimated costs of these policies and programs were known and communicated, and there is still time in this legislative session to add appropriations in the last two legislative days to rectify the omissions,” Beshear wrote in the March letter.
In response, Republican legislative leaders said they would remove the governor’s discretionary spending powers if he continues to refuse to implement bills they think he has enough cash to put in place.
Senate President Robert Stivers from Manchester said the legislature holds the power of the purse and the power to set policy, and Beshear should focus solely on executing those faithfully. Stivers gave him an ultimatum: make the budget work as is or see discretionary funding disappear in the next budget cycle.
“He won't hire anybody, he won't travel. He won't do anything unless he gets authority from the legislature,” Stivers said in March. “Because everybody knows, by the Constitution, the power of the purse is ours.”
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
