Last week, the Kentucky House of Representatives announced chair and vice chair appointments for the various committees that will be meeting throughout the upcoming 2025 legislative session. Among those appointments was 82nd Rep. Nick Wilson, who will be serving as vice chair of the House Committee on Children and Family Services.
82nd Rep. Nick Wilson
“This committee does a lot of work with bills that would fall under the Cabinet of Health and Family Services,” Wilson explained. “We will look at issues involving things like social work and child care.”
Wilson has served as a member of the Children and Family Services Committee in the past, sponsoring a bill last session that, among other things, was designed to require an increase into investigations involving child abuse complaints across the state.
Despite Gov. Andy Beshear signing the bill (HB 271) into law last April, Wilson said that he has been disappointed to see that it has yet to be implemented, with the governor claiming that legislators have failed to secure an adequate amount of funding necessary to follow through with the law’s demands.
Wilson refutes this, pointing out that he and his fellow legislators allotted the Cabinet of Health and Family Services over $2 billion last session, which is to be distributed over the course of the next two years.
“Kids are dying, so we really need to have eyes on this,” Wilson said of his wishes to see the full implementation of HB 271, assuring that the funding is there and vowing to use his new position as vice chair to revisit the language in the bill in hopes of ensuring that it will “do what it was intended to do.”
“We have to try to fix this bill, and force the governor to act on it,” Wilson said.
Wilson will be working with 18th Rep. Samara Hearvin, who will serve as the chair of the House Committee on Children and Family Services in the upcoming legislative session. The two have collaborated in the past to craft legislation, with Hearvin serving as a co-sponsor on HB 271.
“I expect us to work very closely together,” Wilson said. “I wasn’t expecting to be appointed as a vice chair in just my second term, so this is very exciting. It will be a pretty big role, and I am very proud.”
Wilson said that, as a vice chair, he is hopeful of having a greater voice when it comes to determining which bills will get heard, and which won’t. He explained that the biggest step in a bill eventually becoming a law is for that bill to be heard in committee. If the committee votes favorably, then he said the overall likelihood of success increases drastically when/if it is heard on the floor of the House.
“If it doesn’t go through a committee, it has zero chance of becoming a law,” Wilson said. “Every bill must go through a committee. That’s why this is so important.”
The 2025 General Assembly is scheduled to convene in Frankfort at noon on Tuesday, Jan. 7.
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