10-03-2025
Protest held against Kentucky waterway regulation rollback bill
FRANKFORT, Ky. (FOX 56) — This is the week for Kentucky lawmakers to get many of their priorities to the finish line. This means advocates are also ramping up their efforts to stop some bills in their tracks.
'I'm calling this a pop-up protest because it happened so fast,' Elaine Tanner said at a gathering of protesters on Monday.
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Just under a dozen environmental protesters met in downtown Pineville Monday to protest Senate Bill 89. It's the home of Sen. Scott Madon, who recently served as the city's mayor until a special election last fall and is sponsoring the bill.
'One has to question if the Cabinet even wants us to even mine coal in Kentucky,' Madon said as he presented the bill on the Senate floor last month.
Madon said the bill would reduce 'red tape' for coal mining and construction permits by legally redefining 'waters of the Commonwealth' with the federal definition of 'navigable waterways.'
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The current definition is expansive, counting 'any and all rivers, streams, creeks, lakes, ponds, impounding reservoirs, springs, wells, marshes, and all other bodies of surface or underground water, natural or artificial.'
'We're dealing with protections of a point of entry. We have a point of entry. Someone puts something into a stream we can go find out real quick where it's at. We fought hard to get those protections in there,' Tanner said at Monday's protest.
Now these advocates fear that hard work could be lost. The bill has already passed the Senate and received two of the three required readings to pass the House. This protest was to rally a few more calls and emails in an effort to kill the bill. Its supporters. However, argue the language being defended is easily weaponized.
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'Maybe they don't like your politics may like the type of work you in. That's not what government does. That's not the Cabinet's job. That's what's become of the Cabinet. And that is why, after many years of frustration of trying to work with them, that something had to be done,' Sen. Brandon Smith (R-Hazard) said in support of the bill on the Senate floor.
The House committee the bill is assigned to meets regularly on Thursday.
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