Is Kentucky's legislature waging another 'war on Louisville'? Depends on who you ask

Is the Kentucky legislature's war on Louisville back?

Some Democrats seem to think so, like Rep. Keturah Herron, D-Louisville, who told The Courier Journal it “never went away.”

Targeting Louisville isn’t anything new for the state legislature. The "war on Louisville" phrase was coined in 2017 over a bill concerning Metro Government that would have given the governor - then a Republican - appointment powers if the mayor or a council member left office. In 2022, the legislature passed House Bill 314, which put term limits on Louisville mayors and allowed unincorporated parts of Jefferson County to form their own cities. Another bill put limits on how frequently the Jefferson County Public School's board can meet and shifted power from the elected board to the district's superintendent.

This year bills making their way through the legislature take aim at how the state’s largest city operates, focusing on topics ranging from pet sales to how the city council regulates housing discrimination and the nature of city elections. There's also an effort to reconsider the structure of the school system following the bus delay fiasco at the beginning of the school year.

Republican lawmakers say the proposed state laws aimed at Louisville are needed to ensure educational success, good government and property rights.

Republican Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Middletown, appears to be the leader of a group of seven Republican representatives from the Louisville area focused on passing bills about the city.

Nemes denied that there is any coordinated legislative onslaught on Louisville. State lawmakers should be concerned with Louisville, he said, because it is the state’s largest city and a driving economic force.

“I think we will say at the end of the day that this has been the most successful session for the history of the city of Louisville,” Nemes said.

But those efforts have prompted criticism from Louisville’s Democratic state legislators. While not all are willing to call the GOP legislative agenda a “war on Louisville” they say the bills undermine local democracy and represent a top-down and ineffective approach to local governance.

“I don’t like using the word war on Louisville because it divides and keeps people from coming up with solutions," said Rep. Pamela Stevenson, D-Louisville. "But I do want them to ask the question, why do you think you can live not in Louisville and yet tell Louisville what to do?”

Local versus state control?

Democrats have said the bills aimed at Louisville’s local government bodies are inconsistent with the Republican party’s commitment to local control.

Take, for example, House Bill 18, which gained House approval and is likely to get a Senate floor vote this week.

The bill prohibits local governments from passing and enforcing ordinances banning landlords from considering sources of income — especially federal “Section 8” housing vouchers — when deciding to whom to rent.

That would mean an anti-discrimination ordinance passed by the Louisville Metro Council in 2020 could not be enforced, nor could a similar measure adopted by the Lexington City Council this month.

“This General Assembly advocates for local control — unless they disagree with how the locals are controlling things,” Rep. Tina Bojanowksi, D-Louisville, told The Courier Journal after a committee hearing on the measure. “While they speak about local control, they are many times willing to vote against it.”

Republican legislators reject the notion the bills are inconsistent with the party’s beliefs.

“I've always been a strong proponent of local control, but this is not a local control issue. This is a property rights issue,” Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, told a Senate committee. He said such local ordinances represent “blatant government overreach.”

The apparent internal conflict arises because of two sometimes competing principles within Republicanism: local autonomy and property rights, said University of Kentucky political science professor Stephen Voss.

In this case “you have competing principles of decentralization versus property rights," Voss said.

Another bill would prohibit local governments from enforcing or adopting a law banning retail sales of dogs and cats – a measure Louisville’s Metro Council enacted last year. That would open the way for retailer Petland to build a store.

The bill has gained the approval of a Senate committee and needs a full floor vote to advance.

At least one Louisville lawmaker feels Frankfort lawmakers are riding roughshod over Metro Council's decisions.

"More than anything, this is just a continuation of what is clearly one of the state legislature’s top priorities during this legislative session: to govern every aspect of the lives of ordinary Louisvillians from Frankfort," said Metro Councilman Andrew Owen, a Democrat who cosponsored the measure banning pet sales with Republican Stuart Benson.

'A throwback to the busing era'?

Of all the Louisville-focused bills, Democratic Sen. Gerald Neal said he is most concerned about resolutions that would create a task force to consider restructuring JCPS.

Neal sees the measures as an attempt to split poorer and underperforming parts of the school district from wealthier parts. Whether intentional or not, the move could have implications for racial equity in Louisville, he said.

“I think it's a throwback to the busing era as well. We've gone back to 1975 in mentality,” Neal said. “Some (people) in that mentality are going back to … ‘Let's separate some of these folks out of here. We didn't want them in here in the first place. And we want to localize what we need around our own communities.’”

Republicans from Jefferson County say the JCPS task force is needed to ensure the state’s largest school system is providing taxpayers a return on investment in the form of educational effectiveness for all of its nearly 96,000 students, including Black students.

“We have one in three of our kids are reading on grade level, one in five of our African Americans are reading on grade level. I'm not going to sit still for that,” Nemes said at a recent press conference about the proposed task force.

Nemes also said that a state task force must get involved because state laws may need to change if JCPS is to be restructured.

Rep. Ken Fleming, R-Louisville denied that the task force will necessarily conclude JCPS should be split up: “I think all options are on the table,” he said.

Rep. Stevenson said that rather than focus on restructuring the school district, lawmakers in Frankfort should find more resources to support it.

JCPS officials are also opposed.

“This task force is obviously stacked in a way to come to a preordained conclusion, that is, to split up JCPS,” district spokesman Mark Hebert said.

Political power

Nemes also has sponsored House Bill 388, which would - among other changes- make Louisville council and mayoral elections nonpartisan. That bill is being cosponsored by the same group of Louisville-area House Republicans sponsoring the JCPS resolution.

The move to make the elections nonpartisan came from a recommendation by a commission appointed to study Louisville-Jefferson County consolidated metro government, Nemes told lawmakers on the House floor last week. He also said most cities in Kentucky have nonpartisan elections.

Democrats said the move contradicts the will of the people, who voted in 2000 to merge the city and county governments and conduct partisan races for mayor and city government.

Stevenson and Rep. Sarah Stalker said Louisvillians should be allowed to decide for themselves whether their elections are partisan or nonpartisan.

Other Democrats said the nonpartisan mayor bill is an attempt to provide an opening for Republicans, who have not held the Mayor's Office since 1969. The GOP also has never held the majority on Metro Council, created in 2003 under the city-county merger.

“It's only sponsored by Republicans who may have an interest in running for mayor in the city of Louisville who know that as a Republican, they can't get elected because it's a majority Democratic city," said Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville. "So, it's extraordinarily self-serving.”

Rep. Josie Raymond, D-Louisville, asked Nemes directly if he plans to run for the Louisville mayorship during a recent debate on the measure. That drew laughs from the House floor, though House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, disallowed the question as irrelevant.

Raymond and Republican Rep. Kevin Bratcher both plan to leave the state legislature to run for Metro Council this year.

That’s a reversal of the usual trend of local politicians graduating to state elected positions, said Voss, the political scientist.

“You've got this attempt to limit local governments at the same time you've got some prominent people leaving the state for local government, maybe the story there is, well, these fit together,” Voss said. “They both show you how important local governments are in Kentucky right now.”

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Some cooperation?

Nemes said he speaks to Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg, a Democrat, and his staff “frequently.”

Greenberg supports many provisions in a wide-ranging criminal law reform bill, the Safer Kentucky Act, even though many Democratic lawmakers have been critical of the measure.

The mayor has visited Frankfort at least twice this session. That’s drawn praise from Republican legislative leaders.

“I’ve had more conversations with you in the first four months of the year than I did with your predecessor in four years,” Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, said to Greenberg during the mayor's late January visit to the Senate floor.

Reach Rebecca Grapevine at rgrapevine@courier-journal.com or follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @RebGrapevine. Reach reporter Hannah Pinski at @hpinski@courier-journal.com or follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @hannahpinski.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky legislature waging 'war on Louisville' again, Democrats say