2026 Regular Session - Day 43 - HB 774 | Rep. Jennifer Decker

Mr. Speaker, House Bill 774 is called the Cost, Fines, and Fees Reporting Act. It aims to increase transparency and accountability regarding financial charges, meaning the multitude of costs, fines, fees, interest, and late payments that we impose in connection with criminal proceedings and civil traffic enforcement actions in Kentucky. I began working on this bill in 2023 when I became aware that there is no statewide tracking of Kentucky's sprawling system of fines, fees, and court costs, which at this point operates as a vast, decentralized, and largely unexamined web of financial obligations imposed. While working on this bill, I sought input from the Kentucky League of Cities, CACO, the Kentucky Jailers Association, the Administrative Office of the Courts, Auditor Allison Bull, and the Center for Statistics, Kentucky STATS. I amended the bill when wise suggestions were made by various members before filing, and at this point no one has expressed an objection to House Bill 774 among that group, and Kentucky STATS has expressed enthusiasm about collecting and compiling the data. When I spoke with the president of the Jailers Association, he assured me that the jails already collect and report this, but not to a centralized location, and that he expected it might take about 25 minutes a year to comply with this bill. Every government entity required to collect and report data already does so independently, so complying with this bill will require nothing more than working with Kentucky STATS to transmit it so it can be reported in one place, ensuring transparency and a basis for sound public policy. Our statutory provisions and local practices often independently impose these charges, generate untallied millions in revenue annually that is distributed far and wide without any comprehensive accounting. We know the revenues in the millions of dollars based on the fact that just one of the costs, the Administrative Office of the Court tells us, the court cost at $100 imposed upon a conviction in a criminal case results in an excess of $20 million each year, and it is distributed into various other places that are not the court. So as the name implies, court costs, if they're centrally located, we can all study them. We'll see where they go. While we know that about court costs, we don't know about hundreds of other costs, fines, and fees in our criminal law justice system and our civil traffic enforcement system for which there is no comprehensive centralized mandatory tracking and public disclosure. At this point, without House Bill 774, we simply don't have a transparent system for understanding the total costs, fees, interest, late payments. House Bill 774 directly solves this problem by mandating annual submissions starting in 2027 of all costs, fines, fees associated with our system of criminal justice and civil traffic enforcement. The bill requires LRC to provide legislative summaries of this compilation each year and provides authority for the auditor of public accounts to audit this data. Mr. Speaker, if there are no questions, I move passage of House Bill 774.