A priority bill that’s moving through the legislature talks about hundreds of millions of dollars, but it doesn’t actually do or spend anything — at least, not yet.
The bill moved relatively swiftly and largely unchanged through both chambers of the General Assembly. It easily passed through the Senate Wednesday with little discussion.
Here’s the catch: at the moment, it can’t actually be implemented.
“We could appropriate and lock funds off for particular purposes, but that would be no practical wisdom or no practical use for us,” said sponsor Rep. Jason Petrie, a Republican from Elkton.
House Bill 900 states that it is the “intent” of the General Assembly to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on things like water infrastructure, economic development and local investments, but it doesn’t actually appropriate any funds. Petrie, who chairs the House appropriations committee, said that more details can’t be fleshed out until the Senate weighs in.
Well, the Senate weighed in last Wednesday by passing an equally empty version, this time with an extra $10 million vaguely appropriated.
Lawmakers say they’ll decide what to specifically put in it later — in private, likely through a free conference committee.
It’s an unusual example of a “shell bill.” Shell bills are legislation that’s really meant as a placeholder for future language. It’s a workaround that allows lawmakers to introduce new bill language toward the end of the legislative session, long after the deadline for filing new bills has passed and often with limited opportunity for the public to engage with it. Lawmakers filing the bills say they’re necessary to maintain flexibility late in the session.
A Kentucky Public Radio analysis identified nearly 150 shell bills filed this year in the House and Senate. They’re mostly bills that add gender neutral language, or change the spelling of Web site to website or some other insignificantly technical correction. Of the more than 1,270 bills circulating through the House and Senate this year, roughly 11% are shell bills.
The League of Women Voters of Kentucky argues these shell bills, along with other fast-tracking methods, upset principles of transparency and limit public participation. According to the non-profit civic engagement group, the use of these placeholder bills has been on the rise in the Kentucky General Assembly since 2014.
The number of shell bills filed this year holds roughly in line with the number filed last year, although House members filed less this time around, according to League of Women Voters data. The use of placeholders has exploded since the 2014 session — that year, lawmakers filed a combined 24 shell bills.
Janie Lindle, who researches shell bills as part of her work on the league’s Transparency Committee, told KPR shell bills bypass the normal legislative process and make it harder for citizens to follow bills as they progress.
“The point is, you don't know what you're supposed to be following, and you also don't know if one of these things is going to show up, and as a substitution for a bill that maybe struggled a bit in committee,” Lindle said.
Republican leaders say the shell bills are necessary to maintain flexibility late in session. Sen. Max Wise, the Republican floor leader from Campbellsville, said that placeholder bills allow lawmakers to make important changes late in the session, after the deadline to file bills has passed.
House Speaker David Osborne, a Republican from Prospect, said that lawmakers have “got to have something,” and it’s not necessarily controversial topics.
“There's one in just about every topic, for every committee. And that is just for safe harbor for anything that may come up at the last second,” Osborne said.
House Democrats, who frequently express frustration with the legislative process, said they were especially frustrated by HB 900, asking how they can be expected to pass a bill without the details of how hundreds of millions of dollars should be spent.
“When we're spending important money, we're thinking about how we're spending it and we're making a clear plan. That clear plan is completely absent from this one-page document. How can I say yes to a one-page document that allocates $800 million?” said Democratic Rep. Lindsey Burke of Lexington. “How can anyone say yes to that?”
When asked if the public would get to see HB 900 and the plans for those millions of dollars before the final days of the session, Sen. Chris McDaniel of Ryland Heights, chair of the Senate appropriations committee, said he hopes so. Leadership in both chambers said the bill needed to pass both chambers with little to no detail before a full draft could be put together, although that is not how the budgeting process has worked in the past.
“I would hope that there may be something next week. I can't guarantee that. You know, members are still making asks,” McDaniel said.
‘Just in case.’
Osborne, the Republican House speaker, pointed to the overruling of a 2018 bill to explain why lawmakers have increasingly turned to shell bills. At the time, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a massive teacher pension bill that had been slotted in place of a 11-page sewer related bill.
The Kentucky Supreme Court eventually overturned that bill, finding it had violated the state constitution’s requirement that a bill be read three times over three different days. The legislature tried to claim that previous readings when it was still a sewer bill counted, but the justices disagreed.
Osborne said, when asked about the prevalence of shell bills, that the courts forced their hands. Using placeholder bills, lawmakers can file a flood of bills touching on any number of topics and give them readings. Thus, if alternate language is slotted in, the topic still matches.
“They vastly narrowed our scope as to what we can do with changing bills, which had not been a practice since the beginning of the legislative process. They changed that practice of what we were allowed to do late in the session,” Osborne said. “We have to have more available vehicles, just in case something comes up.”
Lindle also noted the so-called “sewer bill,” but said it was a case that highlights the importance of following constitutional rules governing transparency.
In recent sessions, lawmakers have passed major legislation slotted in place of very short, largely inconsequential bills. Last year, Senate Bill 25 started out as five pages about “land use.” It ended as a 77-page bill that created the Medicaid Oversight and Advisory Board, changed and expanded the workings of the state auditor’s office, and more.
House Bill 775, which initially started out as a four-page bill about “development areas,” later became legislation that would make it easier for the state to hit annual budget triggers for cuts to the individual income tax rate. In its final form, the bill was 147 pages.
Transparency concerns
Lindle said when she first started looking into shell bills in 2024, she wondered on some level if the placeholders were worth worrying about. A very small percentage of the bills end up getting passed usually.
“At some level, they're not worth worrying about,” Lindle said. “But at another level, you don't know which one of them is going to explode.”
The average citizen has enough difficulty following the usual legislative process, Lindle said, but the wave of shell bills makes following that process even more difficult.
“What am I supposed to be paying attention to? How do I get in touch with my representative?” Lindle said.
The league also follows a number of methods by which lawmakers fast-track bills. Lindle noted that often shell bills are the beneficiaries of such maneuvers. Under the Kentucky Constitution, each bill is required to receive three readings on the chamber floor before lawmakers can vote on it.
Leadership has made a habit of giving bills readings before a committee approves it — in the case of shell bills especially, substituted language is often inserted in place of the original bill in committees. That means that new substituted language is able to hop over those required readings and can be voted on within hours of being made public.
Some of the shell bills filed this session have already gotten multiple readings on the floor, setting them to move rapidly through the process should they be stuffed with new language later.
