April
2002
April 25, 2002
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 22, 2002)Heady stuff
Gov. Bill Graves, who faces the unfortunate legacy of leaving Kansas in worse financial shape than it was in when he was sworn into office nearly eight years ago, finally put his foot down last week.
He said he doesn't have much faith that the unsteady maneuvering for political advantage likely in the legislative wrap-up session will yield a budget that is sound or acceptable to him.
At least for now, it appears that Graves may be correctly reading the political tea leaves, and he wasn't bluffing or joking when he said he will call the Legislature back into session after it adjourns, probably in mid-May, if it can't produce a workable budget.
It was the toughest stance the governor has taken, well, probably since he put his foot down in the face of political criticism and pronounced that if KU made it into the national basketball championship game, he was going to take the state plane to Atlanta to watch the Jayhawks play. That's right. This is not a governor known for testosterone-fueled outbursts.
Practically, the Legislature has to formally adjourn before the governor can haul them back into emergency session, and by about mid-May, the legislative clock runs out of time. It is shooting for a May 31 final adjournment, and before that date it has to allow the governor 10 days to consider bills and crank in some more time for the bills to be formally printed up and submitted to him. So mid-May is about as late as the Legislature can meet.
Legislators have already extended the legislative session once, and by law they can't extend the session again. They have painted themselves into a time corner that Graves doesn't believe they can get out of, given the nasty choices that are going to have to be made in terms of cutting spending on things that people generally like, and raising taxes on people who will be voting in elections in August and November of this year.
But the issue for legislators now, who will return to the Statehouse May 1 for a wrap-up session that could last a week or 10 days or two weeks, is whether they think the governor is really going to accept whatever budget/tax increase package they can agree on. There has been a lot of focus on the Legislature hammering out a deal that 63 in the House and 21 in the Senate could agree on, and then literally forcing the governor to accept it.
In Graves' view, of the Republican majority in each chamber, anti-tax Republicans may be able to put together a budget that looks balanced, but don't have the votes, probably, to get it passed. Moderate Republicans who want to put together a budget but believe some tax increases are necessary to do it don't have the votes, probably, to get a budget and the taxes necessary to fund it, passed.
Democrats? Usually, they side with moderate Republicans, but that hasn't happened yet this session. The Democrats don't like budget cuts, but they keep wandering around talking about "regressive" tax increases that would tax, apparently, people they believe are either so down-and-out they shouldn't be taxed, or people who just don't want to be taxed. It's a little confusing.
In his polite way, Graves signaled that he isn't going to leave the state broke, in the same fiscal crisis next year as this year, and that if he has to mess up summer campaign plans and vacations, well, he is willing to do it.
There are only a few times in a governor's reign that he has this much authority. Graves can't seek reelection, so he can't be beaten up at the polls. He has a job lined up on the East Coast, so there really isn't much of any way for the Legislature to make his life miserable. He is, at this point, able to force the Legislature to do what he wants how he wants it without fear of retribution.
Heady stuff.
And, Graves last week even threw down the spectre of a disaster that Kansas has never seen. At about midnight on June 30, if there isn't a budget in place for the upcoming fiscal year, well, the state can't spend any money or authorize any money to be spent.
You want to come into work on a state job on Monday, July 1, if nobody has any authority to pay you for your work? Or even write down that you were there, in case sometime later a budget is approved and bills start getting paid again?
That sounds like a shutdown and that has political ramifications that we've never had to try to divine in Kansas. Then, do voters just vote against anyone with anything to do with it? Do they scan the newspapers to see who voted for things that might have averted a shutdown? Who knows? But it makes hauling the Legislature back into session against a tight deadline for action sound like a nightmare that most legislators would prefer to avoid and may become compliant to avoid.
Is there posturing going on here? Sure. Is the posturing a little more intense than we've seen it in recent memory? Sure. We'll see how it turns out.
April 18, 2002
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 16, 2002)No song-writers this year
The Legislature is home for a couple weeks before the big wrap-up session. At this point, it is usually possible for thoughtful legislature-watchers to determine which chamber is going to write the lyrics to the session--but not this year.
What's going on this year? There are some factors that are having some interesting effects on the tactics for wrapping up the session.
Let's start back in December 2000, when after a series of ties, Rep. Kent Glasscock, R-Manhattan, was elected Speaker of the House by just a handful of votes. Right then, we were thinking, well, this doesn't bode well for Glasscock's ability to galvanize his super-majority party to see the will of moderate Republicans be done by the Kansas Legislature.
But, he got through the 2001 session of the Legislature, when late in the year lawmakers learned they were going to have about $185 million less than expected to spend, and the House and Senate approved a series of spending cuts that most people last year thought were pretty severe.
This session, the news was worse, about $700 million in shortfall, and budget cuts are obviously going to have to be a lot bigger. For the first time recently, it appears that tax increases are going to be absolutely, positively necessary.
So, what's the key if you are a moderate-to-liberal House Speaker who has political troubles in his race for governor, then lieutenant governor, and now, perhaps, governor again? It is to end this legislative session with at least some measure of control. Something that might translate into a campaign slogan about "Finding answers to tough questions," or "Managing through the crisis," or something equally sexy for Republicans who, though badly split on social issues, are still a pretty fiscally conservative bunch.
Railsters figured that in the last days of the main session, Glasscock would somehow pull his party together to take the tactical high ground: pass about $200 million of new taxes, probably cigarettes and those Class C heirs for inheritance tax purposes, and call it a day. With $200 million in new taxes--far less than Democrats and left-wing Republicans in both chambers are hoping for--the House would have established a nearly unassailable position on taxes...and, by inference, spending.
Yes, it would have been a tax increase, but the House could have rightfully and forcefully told the Senate and the rest of the state that it raised a significant amount of taxes and spending would just have to be cut to make the budget work.
The House could have forcefully and finally said it recognized the dire state of the state, it weighed in with a substantial but not crushing tax increase, and it will refuse to consider any new tax bills this year. It could have virtually shut down taxes, telling the Senate to take it or leave it, and then watched the Senate, well, take it.
The House's roughly $200 million would be a ceiling on taxes, and all in all, that's probably not bad news.
But, no. Glasscock's attention was diverted by the disintegration of his lieutenant governor campaign, the weather was nice, the House was itchy to go home, and so it blew a grand opportunity to end this legislative session on its own terms.
What happens now? Everything gets more complicated. In the days before the May 1 start of the legislative wrap-up session, House and Senate spending mavens will put together a compromise budget plan for the state that will inevitably leave a hole to be filled by taxes. Without a House-imposed lid on taxes, watch the budget bill require a lot more than $200 million in new revenues.
And watch the House, which had a chance to get out of town on the cheap, have to agree to more spending and more taxes.
What does that mean for the state? Who knows? Railsters figure there will always be a Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, and probably always departments of Corrections and Agriculture.
But for the winding-down of the session, and the getting-home and the starting of statewide office and House reelection campaigns, the House's inaction just before the break means nothing gets simpler.
April 11, 2002
Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 8, 2002)Getting out of the budget hole
There is a lot of similarity between the $700 million "budget hole" that we've been hearing about for months, and the work being done just north of the Statehouse, where contractors are digging a 45-foot deep hole for an underground parking garage.
The budget hole is just simply the difference between the amount of money the state has and the amount of money that it would like to have. If the state all of a sudden came up with $700 million, we'd have a nice, orderly adjournment of the session.
Everything that the state planned to spend money for this year would be taken care of.
There would have been some increases in spending on elementary and secondary schools, some new money for the state's higher education system, maybe an increase in state employee pay and pensions, all the poor people would be taken care of, and the elderly folks would be assured they would get all the care that they could reasonably expect.
It would'a been a cakewalk this election year. There probably would have been some money for nickel-and-dime tax cuts for a handful of businesses that have canny lobbyists, and maybe something extra, something nice that we didn't expect.
Well, all that is out the window, and the state is scrambling to find enough money to just get by...to keep things going for another year in hopes the economy improves. The way the Legislature intends to do that is to cut spending sharply, raise some taxes, and balance out at about $600 million.
Yes, the figure changed. Some of those nice little things won't get done.
And even the greenest of legislators can find $100 million in cuts to make.
So, we're at about a $600 million hole, and here is the real issue: Does the Legislature fill that hole by grinding every spare dime out of the state, run down the state's rainy day fund, spend all the money that is stored up for specific purposes, use trust funds and cut every spare dime in spending?
That doesn't sound all bad. And, it is do-able. The House of Representatives came close, falling just about $130 million short of assembling a budget that fills the hole. Nicking a few extra dollars from K-12 education and essentially putting the highway program on hold, would have done it. It wouldn't have been pretty, there would have been a lot of whining and gnashing of teeth, but it could have been done.
So, if you like that concept, it is probably still possible. But, if it rains next year, we get wet. There isn't any extra money laying around for anything.
But the Senate chose, alternatively, to cut spending severely, and raise taxes. It is looking at maybe half budget cuts and half tax increases for its plan, and it stumbled briefly last week when it discovered that it had ground a little too much money out of state spending and trust funds and didn't need to raise taxes enough. Yes, didn't need to raise taxes enough to allow some of the spending cuts to be avoided and to keep some of that rainy-day money around for, well, next year's rain.
Now, what's this got to do with the digging of the $15 million two-story underground parking garage at the Statehouse? That's the link that only a trained Statehouse lounger could figure out.
See, we noticed that in the process of digging that 45-foot deep hole for the two layers of parking, the construction guys are actually making the hole bigger than they need. There's a slope on one side of the hole that the trucks and graders and bulldozers and all that neat yellow construction equipment can use to go into and out of the hole.
And, then it dawned on Railsters, that it would have been quicker and easier for the contractors to just dig straight down 45 feet, with no extra dirt moved, and they'd have a fine hole ready for the other contractors to come into and build their parking garage.
Except...with no slanted sides, no extra dirt moved, all the construction equipment would be stuck at the bottom of a 45-foot-deep hole with no way out. We're figuring that the bulldozers and tractors and digging machines would either have to be disassembled, or just concreted-over. Someone would have gotten a pretty lumpy parking spot down there on the bottom level of the garage.
Now, maybe there's a link here. Maybe the Legislature has to do something more than just dig through agency budgets and find $600 million or $700 million and call it good.
Maybe the Legislature has to have some ramps available for next year, so they can get themselves out of that budget hole. Maybe those ramps are leaving a little money around, or raising a few taxes to produce a way out of this year's budget hole.
April 4, 2002
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 1, 2002)Because we're Kansans
You hate to start with cloying, effusive praise for the Legislature not doing something that it might yet do, but so far, in at least three weeks, the Kansas Legislature has not seized upon a real dollar-saving option that it learned of last month.
That real dollar-saving option is to strip out of the state's Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services budget nearly $170 million of state spending for health care for the state's poorest of the poor.
Putting aside the voracious demands for money from the state's school districts and regents institutions, health care for people who aren't sure where their next meal is coming from--and those people's children--is probably the most important money spent by the Legislature each year.
The whole Medicaid program of providing long-term care and health care to the poor--adults and children--started back in 1965. Under current rules, the State of Kansas pays about 40 percent of costs of that care and the federal government picks up the other 60 percent of costs.
But it is a program that, at federally required minimum levels, would see tens of thousands of poor Kansans not qualifying for assistance. The state provides services to "optional" recipients--those not mandated to get help under federal law but who Kansas, well, because we're Kansans, helps.
We'd like to think that Kansas has expanded its coverage of the poor and ill because it is the right thing to do. At some point, we just don't want to see or hear about people who desperately need help. We don't want people dying right in front of us as we head to the mall, or enter government buildings.
So, we're doing the right thing here, at substantial cost, but it is the right thing to do. And, we suspect at some level, Kansas provides those services to "optional" Kansans because even though the federal government doesn't require we help them, it will still kick in 60 percent of the cost of helping.
Oh, and besides the option to not provide services to the "optional" Kansans, there is another facet to the cost. Kansas provides "optional" services.
There are two ways to save money: either don't provide any services that the federal government won't help pay for, or don't serve people who the federal government doesn't demand we assist.
Who turned up the information that, for example, Kansas spends a total of $173.5 million (of which about $73.4 million is state money) on these "optional" Kansans? The Legislative Division of Post Audit, which was tasked by the Kansas Legislature to determine whether there is any way to reduce the cost of Medicaid for the state. (And being auditors, that's why there are decimal points after the millions of dollars. That's how auditors are...)
Post Audit also turned up the information that the state spends a total of $233.7 million for services that Medicaid doesn't require be paid for. And, yes, auditors again, computed that of that expenditure for services that don't absolutely have to be provided under federal law, the state's share is $93.1 million. It's that 60 percent federal/40 percent state split at work there.
Those services that the federal government doesn't require that states provide? They include prescription drugs, mental health intervention, dental care, hospice services, drug and alcohol treatment and even hearing care.
Can you imagine a federal program that won't require that states help poor people and their children who can't hear? Well, the state can't, either.
Now the good news.
After that information was dutifully reported to the Kansas Legislature, absolutely nobody with any political horsepower paid any attention to it. The report was received, read, and (except for a part that showed the potential to save money on some billing errors) probably filed away somewhere.
Even in times that are financially rough for the state, and even in times when there are the occasional complaints about welfare abuse and fraud that eventually work themselves out under normal welfare investigation, nobody reached for the lever that would cause people who need help not to get it.
And the fact that the state has consistently provided more services, more health care and more assistance for the outright poor speaks well for Kansas and a majority of a quorum of the legislators they send to Topeka each year.
Now, the budget crisis isn't over by a long shot. People will lose jobs. Taxes likely will go up. Inconveniences will multiply. Things probably won't get much better for anyone who depends on the state for assistance.
But, at least for now, things won't get a lot worse than they absolutely have to be.