Our new Kentucky House and Senate Bunkers

While the capitol is being refurbished, temporary House and Senate chambers were built without galleries for citizens to attend in person. It will be like this for years. It was not an accident.

On March 4, during this year’s Kentucky General Assembly, I grabbed a front row seat in the House gallery to watch floor debates. The next morning I emailed GOP Floor Leader Steven Rudy and cc’d representatives Jason Petrie, Pamela Stevenson, James Tipton and House Speaker David Osborne.

That gallery no longer exists.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that, during a media tour of the temporary workspace, Senate President Robert Stivers said about there being no gallery at all for the public that it “didn’t seem like a relevant expenditure that we wanted to incur” and that the public would still be able to see what is happening via live-streams in two large rooms in the temporary building.

As a citizen who often sits in both the House and Senate galleries and attends committee meetings, I can tell you that what I witness in person vs. what I see watching livestreams on a laptop are not the same.

Often what is happening outside the view of the camera is just as important, troubling, shocking or eye opening as what is happening on camera.

Kentuckians who are interested in policy take the time to drive to our capitol and spend hours there for the same reason you go see a UK basketball game (or even your child’s basketball game) in person.

Would you bother to fight traffic, park, and walk to your seats in Rupp Arena if they told you that you could not be in the arena or see the players? That for all your trouble you’d just have to watch tonight’s game on a livestream from a large room inside Rupp?

Of course not.

That would be ridiculous.

During the 2024 General Assembly, I met with a lawmaker in his office. We were scheduled to meet for 15 minutes to talk about gun laws, but we ended up having a nice chat about a number of issues and I was there for almost an hour. I left his office thinking he was a nice, sensible man.

Later the same week, I watched in-person as this seemingly sensible man voted with his party on bills that made absolutely zero sense based on the private conversation we’d just had. So I sent him a note saying exactly this, that I’d watched him vote and did not recognize the person I had just talked to in his office. He did not respond. Since then, when I see him in the capitol — on the chamber floor, in the annex hallway, in the lunch room — he has trouble looking me in the eye.

Being there, in person, matters.

Being in the galleries, which will be closed for the next few years, can also surprise you.

On one of the last days of the 2024 session, I arrived so early one morning in the Senate gallery that I was the only person there with the ushers (two elderly men) who work in the balcony.

It was the year that state senator Whitney Westerfield had filed Senate Bill 13, commonly called the CARR bill for Crisis Aversion and Rights Retention, specifically addressing mental health and access to firearms. And I was wearing a “I Support CARR” shirt.

One of the ushers stepped out to get coffee.

While he was gone, the other usher asked me about my shirt.

When I told him what CARR stood for, he said that a bill like that could never get legs in Kentucky because it’s a free country and gun rights are God given and the Second Amendment protects our rights, etc.

The usher who’d gone to get coffee came back as we were debating the Second Amendment. By then I’d stood up and walked closer, saying, Sir, I understand the Constitution and the Second Amendment, and while I might look like some dressed up, shiny, city girl sitting up here today, what you can’t see is that I live in rural Anderson County, all of my neighbors own guns, and I’ve been to the law enforcement shooting range with my police department where I’m the only woman and the only civilian and I’ve shot everything from an AR-15 to what can fit in my purse.

The usher with the coffee stepped forward and said, “I apologize, Miss” and as I went back to my seat I heard him whispering to the other usher with alarm.

This week, the Kentucky senate president said they did not budget for a public gallery in the temporary space because it “didn’t seem like a relevant expenditure that we wanted to incur.”

What they want is less exposure, less public mingling (citizens often find their allies and opponents in those galleries) and less oversight.

No one responded to my email back in March about Floor Leader Rudy’s behavior, but later that day and in the days that followed I witnessed a palpable shift of energy in the chamber: calmer, more professional, no grown men bouncing around like boys with pent up energy, no giggling behind fellow lawmakers' backs during debates.

Being there matters and they know it.

What they have built is not just a temporary space for them to conduct taxpayer business during a renovation.

What they have built is a storm shelter, a bunker where they can hide out and do whatever they want while protected from our gaze and our voices, where they don’t have to tolerate in-person scrutiny from the public they swore an oath to serve.