Every year after the legislature adjourns a small band of dedicated legislative professionals who work hard throughout the session, alongside bill analysts in writing and revising bills requested by legislators, go right back to work to update our Kentucky Revised Statutes with all the changes from laws that passed and were signed into law. This, as you might imagine, takes a fair amount of time. Multiple statutes get amended and the print and online versions both have to be updated.
Adding further opportunity for confusion are the various go-live dates for the laws that were passed. Most default to July 15th as the effective date for new legislation (or amended language), but if a bill has an emergency clause (usually included at the end of a bill) it becomes effective upon the Governor's signature. Still other bills have a delayed effective date, allowing agencies and other directly affected parties time to ramp up in preparation (see 2015's HB8/Dating Violence, 2014's SB200/Juvenile Justice).
This morning we received an email notifying us that the changes to the KRS have been completed and are now available. For those wanting a deeper dive their instructions are below. Even if you don't care to dig around Kentucky statutes, feel free to give a word of thanks to the hard working statute revisers and bill analysts for their service to the Commonwealth; service that too often goes woefully unnoticed and unrecognized. Tweet your thanks to the LRC Director about your favorite bill that passed and use the hashtag #LRC!
The update of the KRS database to reflect changes made in the 2016 Regular Session >is complete. The updated statutes and the 2016 Acts have been posted on our Web >site. You may access the Acts by either Acts chapter number or bill or resolution >number. The Acts Disposition and KRS Sections Affected tables are also posted. >From them you can see how each section of an Act was treated, and especially the >KRS numbers that were assigned to newly created statutes.
You will notice for amended statutes that were not part of emergency legislation, >there are two versions presently displayed on our Web site. One is for the current >statute version with unchanged text that is effective until July 15, 2016, or some >other effective date, and the other is the version containing the 2016 changes, >effective July 15, 2016, or some other effective date. Once the effective date for >the 2016 changes has passed, only the new version will be displayed on our KRS Web >page.
Eighteen statutes were amended in more than one bill, all with no conflicting >provisions. The updated statutes contain the merged language to reflect the >multiple amendments. In some of those cases, the amendments to a statute in one >bill were emergency legislation, and amendments made in another bill were not. The >changes made by the emergency legislation will show in the “Effective until(date)” >version, and the “Effective (date)” version will contain the merged amended >language. Once we hit the effective date for the later-effective version, the >“Effective until (date)” and “Effective (date)” language in the statute catchline >will go away.