2025 Regular Session - Day 16 - HB 566, Rep. Matthew Koch

thank thank you Mr Speaker we please have the clerk report house committee sub one clerk please report house committee substitute one to House Bill 566 gentleman from bourbon move adoption motion is for the adoption of house committee substitute one is there any discussion of the committee substitute seeing none those in favor signify voting I I those oppose nay ask committee substitute one is adopted gentleman from bourbon thank you Mr Speaker everyone that was all the members that were here last year we remember Senate Bill 299 when we created the horse racing and Gaming Corporation that was easy this year we had to do the implementation and figure out how all that was going to work that was definitely a much taller task to help understand this bill I know it's rather lanky I've broke it down to three different groups and let's start with the elephant in the room first which is charitable gaming I think it's fair to say that they had a lot of anxiety uh with the changes that were coming but we heard them we listened to them let me tell you what we put in place for them first thing we did is we the fee structure uh they had a system in place every October that was looked at um and then that could actually fluctuate and go up we chose the lower rate of 0.53 they asked us to lock that in statute and that's what we're doing here we increased uh representation on the board they wanted to have three members on the board we thought that was very much needed so we're making that effective right now they will get a third representative on the board for that every piece of technology that uh charitable gaming has on July 1st 2025 that will be locked into place they had a fear that something could possibly taken away from them so we put that in statute here to make sure that they stay um same on that also there are some questions with common school districts and charitable gaming so what we've done is we've created a charitable gaming license at the district level so any club any booster underneath that that wants to have a charitable game and raise money for their Club they can simply have the district can have the can apply for the charitable gaming license and then like an umbrella everybody else underneath it reports to them and they file their quarterly reports everything that's always been in statute for that on to the corporation itself we've created a corporation now we had to figure out how to make them self-funded uh that was not an easy task but we could not have uh any general fund dollars going in there so it needed to be all industry dollars so we've got the charitable gaming the 0.53 that's locked in statute now it'll be 10% coming from all the other funds that are within there so starting with sports wagering um and then all the funds I think they're listed on page 3 but you got your Kentucky therapy Development Fund your Kentucky breeders incentive fund your standard grid fund and so forth um we staggered the board not only so we added a member with charitable gaming we also added a member for quarter horse racing it's on there we've staggered the board you never want to lose all your board at one time so they'll have an initial um initial terms of two and three years and then after that there'll be four-year terms staggered so you only do half the board at a time we had a problem with uncashed vouchers at each track um so it's your HHR facilities you have un you had uncashed vouchers out there this was a pool of money not allowed it not allowed it to go anywhere the very first thing we did is 10% of that will be going to problem gaming something that I continue to support anytime you have a vice you need to make sure you have something there to help with that Vice 65% will go to Backside improvements and 25% will go to the administration and regulation of live racing uh want to talk about pop certification and the invest investigative division of that if you'll see in there for horse racing there was some peace officer language that was struck also with charitable gaming we put in May instead of Shia the idea behind this is we're going to allow the charitable gaming um not all Char sorry we're going to allow the entire Corporation to have an investigative division that can cover all sectors so that'll streamline make that a much more efficient uh process they will all be cross-trained and then the corporation can decide who needs to be pop certified for each role that they're doing but that should make that a much better process for all the investigations uh third uh this is a big deal for quarter horse racing in the state of Kentucky we established the Kentucky quarter horse racing breed registar um we also established a pathway to increase the number of quarter horse race mirers that we have in the state that number is very low we have a track being built in ashin it's a big deal that we increase our quarter horse numbers the the mayor's the actual they are the economic driver on this we needed a way to get the Mayors in here quickly so we've created a pathway that you can bring a May in from out of state Fuller here two years in a row um the quarter horse racing Corporation they're going to have to create some regulations to go with this as far as establishing uh what is accredited Kentucky um quarter horse stallion Etc but we're hoping that's a sun that has a sunset on it in three years and we believe that that is going to greatly increase the number of quarter horse Mayers that we have all across the state that pretty well sums up the uh Bill I'm sure we have some questions but pending that I move Passage