Three Kentucky senators, seven representatives and three community leaders spoke in the Manual auditorium on Friday, May 9 at a town hall meeting hosted by Manual’s Young Democrats club.
Manual’s Young Democrats president, William Shavkey (12, YPAS), briefly spoke before it began about the importance of local government and elected officials playing a role in their communities outside of politics.
The meeting lasted from 6:30 to 8 p.m, and audience members could submit questions on notecards, though the panel only got to a few of these. The crowd filled the first few rows and applauded after nearly everyone’s comments—which, through firm moderation from Jefferson County Clerk candidate Roz Welch, were kept to a maximum of two minutes.
“Y’all got a room full of voters in here. But don’t y’all start running off past your time,” Welch said.
More than a few speakers playfully bemoaned this, especially Representative Al Gentry (D–46), a former hydrogeologist, who explained Nixon-era clean water regulations in a matter of sentences.
In the 1970s, he said, “We had rivers catching on fire. We had a crisis, environmental crisis and some major, major acts were passed—Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act.” He said that Kentucky had just undone that progress through Senate Bill 89, which removed protections for groundwaters.
“The Republican supermajority—I’m going to be very blunt,” Gentry said. “They seem to be run by some kind of corporate overlord–type situation.”
Welch said as the town hall began that it would primarily focus on housing and labor, and both of those topics saw a few discussions. A decent portion of the time, however, went to criticizing President Donald Trump’s policies and the ways the Republican-dominated statehouse reflects them.
Of Republicans’ efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion, House Floor Leader Pamala Stevenson (D–43) said, “they want to make you think that, if they do away with all the protections we put in place, then you’ll be safe.”
“All of that has been removed from the colleges and universities by his law. And the [university] presidents [have] mostly been going along with it, because they knew they wouldn’t get their money if they didn’t.”
“This session, it was diversity, equity, inclusion. A couple of sessions before, it was abortion. Couple of sessions before, it was CRT [Critical Race Theory],” Rep. Keturah Herron (D-35) said.
Senator Cassie Chambers Armstrong (D-19) said, “We passed a Kentucky DOGE act out of the Senate this year. We had the Make America Healthy Again resolution. We saw legislation based on these national level ideas saying it’s illegal, if you have received the COVID vaccine, to donate blood. That is not an issue that people in Kentucky are emailing about or knocking on people’s doors about.”
The sponsor of the bill about blood donation, House Bill 25, said that the clause was a mistake. The correct form of the bill did restrict donations from people with COVID-19 antibodies, which an estimated 96.4% of donors have.
Among state senators and representatives, the Metro Housing Commission’s (a pro-tenet lobbying and research group) Tony Curtis and the Kentucky American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) , a labor union conglomerate, president Dustin Reinstedler were on the panel. Most technical housing- and labor-related questions were directed, respectively, to each of them. Curtis’s 4-year-old son joined him on stage.
“There was a housing gap analysis done by Kentucky Housing Corporation that showed the need for 206,000 units across the state of Kentucky,” Curtis said. “That’s projected to increase by 40% over the next five years, [I] believe to 287,000.”
According to a 2019 housing needs assessment, Curtis said, this would cost $3.5 billion.
“It’s a big commitment and it’s critical to solving a lot of other issues across our community,” he said. He joked that he would be collecting money on his way out.
The panel, with a brief stop for some environmental discussion, moved to labor.
“We really need to pass policies to put people to work, contribute positively to society, have well-paid wages and jobs,” Gentry said. “It’s not rocket science. Why the hell do we want to harm our workers and our workforce?”
“We’re saying federal OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] gets to drive the bus in Kentucky. OK, what happens if federal OSHA goes away? They said that will never happen. ‘No one’s talking about that.’ The next day, they filed a piece of legislation in DC to get rid of OSHA,” Armstrong said.
An audience member asked what young people could do in lieu of voting.
“Knock on those doors,” said Sen. David Yates (D-37).
A similar message went to all the attendees. After introducing herself, Rep. Mary Lou Marzian (41) said, “We need you. Desperately.”
“Every time they say we’re teaching CRT in the first grade and we spend all our energies fighting something that’s not true, that means we don’t have a strategy to fight for what is true and what is needed,” Stevenson said.
“It’s going to take all of us marching in the same direction on an issue you feel passionate about—consistently, locally there. This room should be filled. If we are serious about saving this democracy and making sure that families thrive.”
A full list of the speakers is as follows: Roz Welch (moderator), Rep. Pamela Stevenson (District 43), Rep. Al Gentry (46), Metro Housing Commission executive director Tony Curtis, Kentucky AFL-CIO president Dustin Reinstedler, Rep. Tina Bojanowski (32), Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong (18), Sen. Keturah Herron (35), Rep. Mary Lou Marzian (41), Rep. Rachel Roarx (38), Rep. Sarah Stalker (34), Rep. Joshua Watkins (42), Sen. David Yates (37), and Rep. Nima Kulkarni (40).
