Frankfurt, K. – Was the reported $6,000 spending for a Lexington Legends baseball game an example of excessive executive branch spending or the chance to give hundreds of foster kids their first experience in a professional ballpark?
In Frankfurt, it depends on who you ask.
A long-running conflict over executive branch spending came to a head at the Capitol this week, as the state’s Republican auditor and Democratic governor clashed over a spending presentation that Gov. Andy Beshear called a “political attack.” The Lexington Legends spending cuts were among dozens highlighted in appropriations and revenue testimony from Auditor Alison Ball’s office on Feb. 10, including several that ran into the millions.
The report was not a full audit, noted Ball, who presented it to lawmakers along with general counsel Alex Magera. It was a review of fiscal year 2025 expenditures in eMARS, which tracks state payroll and other expenditures, as Kentucky legislators work in the current session to craft the commonwealth’s FY 2027-28 budget.
But the review highlighted several expensive tabs and other eMARS entries that may raise some eyebrows.
About $7.5 million went to out-of-state travel — Beshear has taken several trips nationwide in the past year, but some of that was racked up by the Kentucky Department of Education and other state bureaus — while more than $23 million went to in-state travel.
More than $16 million was spent on training, conferences, food and trade shows, with the presentation often detailing where that money allegedly went, from food served to attendees to menu items.
About $70 million was spent on “temporary manpower services,” including about $8 million by the Department of Motor Vehicles’ Vehicle Registration Division, which is under investigation for an alleged scheme involving temporary workers Magera called an “alleged black market of underground ID sales to undocumented noncitizens.”
And a little more than $118 million fell into the “other” spending bucket, used by organizations when they “don’t know where to put the spending,” Magara said.
Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball, left, and General Counsel Alex Magera speak during a state House Budget Committee meeting on Feb. 10, 2026.
Rep. Jason Petrie, R-Elkton, the committee chairman and sponsor of this year’s executive branch budget bill, noted that the presentation was “not an exhaustive list of points of interest” and that “some have been left out that are odd, or their aggregates are odd, or the process is strange or unknown.”
“The money the state gets is tax revenue,” Petrie said, couching his remarks by telling attendees he wasn’t there to make the decision. “If you get a group of regular people in a room and you start going down these expenses with them, what do you think they’re going to say? What are you going to feel in response? What are you going to think in response? It’s a good time to take a moment to see what we’re looking at (budget) basis.”
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There are some big numbers on that list. And at his weekly news conference two days later, Beshear acknowledged “there are expenses here and there that we can do better.” The executive branch budget bill approved by the state Legislature in the 2024 session includes more than $125 billion in spending over the next two years.
But the report submitted to the House committee was put together without input from executive staff members who could provide key context, the governor said — “I don’t think it should be called a report, because they didn’t ask us any questions, and you have to do that if it’s an audit report” — and drew a “political attack” from the auditor’s office.
Some of the entries are incorrect or not properly characterised, he said. The $198,000 Department for Aging and Independent Living expenses described as going to the state’s senior dining program in a media campaign, amid funding shortfalls for the service, was actually a “membership fee they have to pay to be part of a federally required public education program,” Beshear said.
Some of the expenses listed were paid for with federal funds and not taxpayer dollars, he added, and he took issue with the alleged driver’s license scheme as a “black market,” a dispute under investigation that led to five indictments in February — “U.S. attorneys were not involved in any country illegally.” The recently announced indictments were over licenses issued to non-citizens who are legally in the US.
And while the $6,000 line item for the Lexington Legends baseball game was one of the smaller expenses highlighted, Beshear said the money was “purely federal.”
“And what did it do? Four hundred and thirty foster kids got to see what was their first professional baseball game,” he said. “During the game, the team runs commercials teaching people how to become a foster parent and why you want to be a foster parent.”
Governor Andy Beshear speaks in his annual State of the Commonwealth address in January 2026. Beshear retracted Auditor Allison Ball’s report that highlighted spending by the executive branch.
Taking his office out of the process while putting the report together, Bessier added, meant key context was left out of the presentation.
“They didn’t ask questions because it was just a political attack,” he concluded. “If you’re in the auditor’s office, just work. We’re asking. We have nothing to hide.”
It’s not the first time Beshear has clashed with the Eastern Kentucky Republican Ball, who was elected auditor in 2023 after spending eight years as state treasurer.
The governor criticized Ball earlier in the session on pushback over potential budget cuts in her office, saying her staff had uncovered “wasteful spending” that could have been used to balance the budget amid a projected shortfall of more than $150 million.
Ball also sued Beshear last year over the administration’s failure to implement Senate Bill 151 of 2024, which passed with bipartisan support in an effort to support kinship care in Kentucky. The governor said that the necessary $20 million was not included in the budget, so it could not be implemented.
The case was dismissed in September, but the issue has been fierce among advocates, along with Republicans in the Legislature. It is one of 11 bills in recent years that Beshear has said he has been unable to implement due to a lack of appropriated funds — in response last spring, House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, said the Legislature would “remove all doubt that he does not have the ability to spend money moving forward in the 2026 budget cycle.”
Petrie’s initial budget proposal this year was much smaller than last year’s, with what the longtime western Kentucky representative described as “bare bones.” In this session, members of the Cabinet and other administrative officers appear before the Budget Review Subcommittee and put their case for the budget.
Ball also sued Beshear and other administrative officials in 2024 for access to iTWIST, a database that tracks abuse and neglect cases in Kentucky, which has since been settled. And Beshear called a 2024 audit from her office a “political tool” on critical issues within the Department of Juvenile Justice after the report blamed problems in part on the executive branch’s “lack of leadership.”
On his part, Ball stands by the report submitted to the House Committee.
In an emailed statement after Beshear’s Feb. 12 comments, his office said everything in the report “came directly from eMARS as reported by Beshear administration officials,” and that the presentation was “simply a spending review reported by the governor’s administration on eMARS.”
The email provided invoices related to some of the expenses Beshear took issue with, including a $6,000 invoice from the Lexington Legends to the Department of Community Based Services for a sponsorship that included a 30-second commercial to be played at home games — there was “no evidence given to us that this expense was connected to the children playing the game.” A $198,000 invoice billed to the Department for Aging and Independent Living lists “12-month PEP statewide advertising campaign” as its description.
“In short, the governor failed to address the most relevant expenses to which we testified, and he provided no evidence to support his claims about the expenses he spoke about today,” said a statement from Ball’s office sent after Beshear’s comments.
Lawmakers will continue meeting in mid-April as they work through the legislative session and continue to craft this year’s executive budget bill, House Bill 500.
Reach Lucas Aulbach at laulbach@courier-journal.com.
This article originally appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal: Beshear pushes back against auditor’s accusations of wasteful spending.
