2026 Regular Session - Day 12 - HB 96 | Rep. James Tipton

House Bill 96 is on a similar topic from legislation that we passed in the 2025 session, did not make it through the Senate. It is somewhat different this year. We are dealing, this legislation deals with the makeup of the performance-based funding work group. Performance-based funding started in Kentucky back with the passage of legislation in 2017. We have seen a few changes to the makeup of that model over the years. However, we're looking at 10 years now. Some of the universities have expressed that they feel like there need to be some changes. So by statute, 2026 is the year that the performance-based funding work group is scheduled to meet, to come back with recommendations for 2027. Currently, there are two legislators on the work group, one from the House, one from the Senate. Currently, you have the president of the Council on Post-Secondary Education, the nine university presidents of our public institutions, and one representative from the governor's office. Having served on this work group for a couple of rounds now, I feel like it is very important to get more members of the General Assembly involved in this process. I think it is vital that more legislators understand how this process works. So House Bill 96 would have that the, there would be five members of the House, five members of the Senate appointed to the work group. In the House, there would be four members appointed by the Speaker of the House, one member appointed by the House Minority Leader. In the Senate, the Senate president would appoint four members, and the Senate Minority Leader would appoint one member. We would continue to have one representative from the governor's office. In the past, that has been our State Budget Director, who's been representing that. And we would also have that the president of the Council of Post-Secondary Education would serve as chair of that work group as a non-voting member, and we would continue to have the nine members. This is very important work. I look forward to this legislation passing and having the opportunity to have more members of this body and our friends down in the other chamber to get involved in this process so we can come back in 2027 with a good proposal. One other change is it references that the work group meets in fiscal years. I changed that language to calendar year, so it would be like a January to December, so the work group would be completed in time prior to the January 27th session beginning. This legislation carries an emergency clause because CPE and the presidents would like to get working on this process. They feel like it's gonna take some time as quickly as possible. So Mr. Speaker, if no questions, I move for passage of House Bill 96.