Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate has dismissed a lawsuit that sought to make the Cabinet for Health and Family Services implement a 2024 unfunded law and cooperate with a related investigation.
This ruling comes four months after Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball sued over Senate Bill 151, the unfunded 2024 law that was drafted to help kinship care families but hasn’t been implemented due to a $20 million funding dispute between the legislative and executive branches of government.
That law — on paper but not yet in reality — allows relatives who take temporary custody of a child, when abuse or neglect is suspected, to later become eligible for foster care payments.
In October 2024 Ball launched an investigation into the cabinet’s ability to implement the law and alleged in her May lawsuit that the cabinet wouldn’t cooperate with that fact-finding mission. Then, she sued to gain access to information for the investigation and asked the court to force implementation of the law.
In his Monday ruling Wingate found that the cabinet “has not failed to respond and has not refused to comply to the same degree as that found” in case law and that “no subpoenas have been sought, CHFS has complied with many of the auditor’s requests, and, finally, CHFS has asserted that the auditor ‘need only provide a name and CHFS will set up an interview just as it always has.’”
Wingate also said Ball “has not yet exhausted administrative means to obtain documents and the matter has not yet ripened into a concrete dispute.”
Norma Hatfield, the president of the Kinship Families Coalition of Kentucky who is also raising two grandchildren, said she’s “very frustrated” by the ongoing dispute, which she called “political game play.”
“I don’t know how this can be happening a couple years later,” Hatfield told the Lantern. “It’s like we’re on a train that doesn’t have any stops.”
An auditor’s office spokesperson said Ball has “directed the issuance of subpoenas as the necessary next step to protect Kentucky’s kinship caregivers and the children in their care.”
The auditor has 30 days to decide if she wishes to appeal the ruling.
Gov. Andy Beshear, who was previously dismissed from the lawsuit, said in a Monday statement that the “dismissal of this unfounded lawsuit proves that Team Kentucky isn’t letting politics get in the way of doing what’s right.”
“My administration has always prioritized the safety and wellbeing of Kentucky’s children, and we’re committed to working with any office to see that goal through,” Beshear said in a statement. “Implementing Senate Bill 151 requires more funding, yet the General Assembly failed to do so in both the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions.”
Ball said in a statement that she will “remain committed to fighting to ensure these families get the resources they rightfully deserve” and that the subpoenas she’s preparing “will reveal the truth about the actual cost and all available resources to fund this program.”
Kentucky’s kinship care landscape
In 2024, there were around 55,000 Kentucky children being raised with a non-parent relative, according to a report from Kentucky Youth Advocates. These families often make hasty decisions about taking in their minor relative that leaves them without needed financial support.
When the state removes a child from a home, grandparents and other family members often choose to take temporary custody rather than have the child go into state custody. State custody is the first step toward foster care. That first decision is permanent under current law which has excluded kinship caregivers who take temporary custody from ever receiving the $750 a month that foster parents receive for each child, the Lantern has reported.
Senate Bill 151 is supposed to give kinship caregivers 120 days to apply to become foster parents for their minor relatives and allows children who are being removed from homes to request their preferred familial caregivers, if they are able.
Hatfield, the kinship caregiver and advocate, said this whole ordeal has left her with some distrust of the state government.
“This is a problem that is across the board, with the legislators and the cabinet and the governor, and we need to solve that,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of faith, right now, in the process. I just feel like the people that could make that better — all of them — need to get to the table and — let’s start problem solving.”
Meanwhile, she said, kinship care families are left out to dry.
“I just know there’s a big, big problem here, and as a result, the people needing to be served are being ignored,” Hatfield said. “We know we can do something different for these kids and those families, and we’re not. And it just covers me with sadness.”
This article was originally published by the Kentucky Lantern.
