Licensing, Occupations, & Administrative Regulations - September 17th | Chair, Rep. Matt Koch

Hey, good afternoon. Matt Cook, State Representative from the 72nd District here down in Frankfort. I am the Chair of the House Licensing and Occupations Committee. For September, we had three topics. The first was vintage spirits brought to us by Representative Dietz. Vintage spirits actually became a law. It's a way to move collections, you know, collection bourbon bottles, signature bottles of bourbon that people have. So this law was created back in 2018, and then several years ago, we reduced that number. We had a problem with a little bit of bootlegging was going on, and it quite the bill that we wanted to be. So a number was actually put on that for 24 per year. In the Commonwealth, in licensing and occupations, we want to make sure that we're facilitating industry and we're not restricting it. So this is something that we're looking at right now with Representative Dietz. The second part of today was dealing with fingerprinting and background checks. We passed two bills this past session for licensure boards, and there was a problem with implementation of that. And Michelle came in today, gave a great synopsis of what happened and why the delay. It's also been fixed, but it's important. We had several constituents that graduated with their degree, were not able to get licensed right away. So we want to make sure that that's fixed and operating smoothly in the future. Third part of today was dealing with respiratory licensure, and it's a scope of practice issue. Anytime you have scope of practice, that's going to be highly, highly debated and talked about. We have several doctors, nurses on the committees. Representative Thompson did a good job presenting what they want to do, and he got some feedback today on stuff he's going to need to talk through and work out before session in January. So interesting stuff to work on as we move towards 2027.