Do we need KACo?

During tight budget times, the questions should not stop with: Has the Kentucky Association of Counties (KACo) implemented the kind of internal controls that will prevent future agency officials from tucking taxpayers' dollars in bikini strings and using KACo credit cards for escort services.

The questions shouldn't even end with: Will KACo be more transparent with future spending? Senate Bill 88 ensures that KACo will be even more transparent with their public dollars than will the opportunistic politicians who voted for the bill will be with state government.

The question that must be asked, but isn't -- for obvious reasons -- by Denny Nunnelley, KACo's executive director and CEO, is: Why should taxpayers be forced to continue funding this profligately wasteful organization?

Like labor unions, KACo may have served a legitimate role when it began in the 1970s of providing insurance plans that county officials couldn't find or afford. Like KACo president Michael Foster, Nunnelley doesn't indicate whether KACo has even researched whether the private sector provides needed services at competitive rates.

As I asked in a recent Bluegrass Beacon column: Is it time to "right the ship or mothball it?"

But at least if KACo is allowed to stay afloat, would it be too much of taxpayers to ask that it do so without new $12 million digs, especially during the current economic downturn?