It’s deja vu all over again! Shed a tear!
You could have had a free license this year.
Instead, kiss about $150,000 bye-bye. That’s about how much home inspectors could have saved if 2020 fees had been waived.
That was the deal offered in a March, 2020 Covid law, SB 150.
Instead, the Kentucky Board of Home Inspectors (KBHI) just kept its hand in inspectors pockets.
Your $150,000. Gone.
About that free license: The KBHI could have “waived” license fees, under Emergency Covid 19 legislation, effective back in March. SB 150 Sec. 1(1)(b).
Waiving fees might not have cost the Board a dime. SB 150, the same legislation, says licensing boards can be made “whole” for waiving fees, using any Covid-19 funding, such as federal grants. In other words, this could have been like an accounting entry in state government. (For the curious. Find SB 150 at https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/acts/20RS/documents/0073.pdf.)
Blow the foam off the beer and “free licenses” – with fees waived – were low-hanging fruit for the taking — for about ¾ of Kentucky’s home inspectors (everyone who renewed after April 1).
That’s around $150,000 that could be in home inspector pockets, assuming the Board waived fees starting in April, after SB 150 too effect, and it last to the end of this year.
Of course, individual home inspectors could have used an extra $400-$500 this year. Most never got on the government dole this year.
It also all adds up. The more money government keeps in people’s pockets, the better our economy recovers from this recession, sooner. In fact, $400 is the amount President Trumps executive order picked to help do the same for most Americans, as the same kind of economic boost. In Kentucky, the more people spend, the more the state balances its budget with sales taxes, for example.
But Noooo.
Oh, by the way, have we mentioned that KY license fees are astronomical in any case, compared to our neighbors? Indiana is $50! Tennessee is half-price — $200 for 2 years. And both states are practically instant in sending back licenses. Late fees? Think $50, tops, in TN and IN.
Maybe the KBHI needs the money? Not. They’ve never been able to spend all the loot they took in.
Take a peek where all that loot goes.
The Board never made any accounting public – at least not since about a decade ago, when Steve Pennington, a CPA, was a “public” rep on the Board. He resigned in frustration, or maybe disgust, over a board with no budget and no accounting. A former city treasurer, with years of government experience, his parting comment was “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Oh, wait: We do know one thing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of KBHI money has been “swept” – that means “taken” – into the KY General Fund, starting with $125,000 in 2008 alone.
You probably know the only reason that can ever happen. Either the Board takes too much from home inspectors or it fails to put it to work. In fact, year after year, The Board collects a bunch of money and, then, does nothing with it. The cash could go into things that might help home inspectors – like PSAs (Public Service Announcements), or billboard by expressways, or publications for real estate agents, or a State Fair booth, etc.
But Nooooo!
When Board money sits there collecting dust, it gets taken.