April 2006
April 27, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 24, 2006)The more you chew it...
This wrap-up session of the 2006 Kansas Legislature may be the last shot some conservative Republicans in the House have at ending the state’s program of allowing undocumented foreigners under some circumstances to pay in-state tuition rates to attend Kansas universities and community colleges.
It’s been a long year for mostly Republican representatives lead by retiring Rep. Becky Hutchins, R-Holton, who have tried to slam shut that door to a better and more productive life to what the anti-immigrant tuition forces call illegal immigrants. Hutchins maintains that those illegal immigrants should not get the same tuition rates as American citizens who are Kansans.
Hutchins managed to get her amendment to prohibit in-state tuition for students who don’t have a federal government OK to be in the U.S. tacked onto the wrap-up spending bill of the session.
It’s a longshot and it has become highly politicized. It has even become an issue in the governor’s race, in which Republican gubernatorial nomination candidate Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, has blasted Democrat Gov. Kathleen Sebelius over her support of the tuition break. Barnett figures it has cost the state about $1.3 million in lost tuition fees, the difference between in-state tuition and out-of-state tuition.
The whole issue has gotten tangled up in U.S. immigration policy, which is itself tangled up in Congress now. It reminds one of a catch-phrase that a former state senator, John Crofoot, a cattleman to his boots, used to use. It went something like a problem “being like a tough piece of meat…the more you chew it, the bigger it gets.”
That’s about the situation we’re in now with immigrant tuition.
The students who receive the in-state tuition live in Kansas, have attended Kansas schools for at least the last three years and have the grades to make it to college or a community college. And, they have to vow to get on the path to formal U.S. citizenship, a lengthy and tedious process that demonstrates that the students are serious about becoming part of the mainstream of America.
So, the immigrants who want to attend Kansas higher education institutes have been in the state for three years, and well, at the end of three years, we guess we’d consider them Kansans. And the Kansas Legislature is about Kansans.
This isn’t a border state, and if there is illegal immigration going on, and there is, it’s at least a day’s drive–at least three years ago--for any un-federally documented applicant to a Kansas college or community college.
Now, this might be a matter of defending the borders, which probably brings us back to the basic duty of the Kansas Legislature which is to make laws that apply to Kansans. We suppose that at some point, there could be a fence built and border crossing check-points on roads and paths separating Kansas and its bordering states and a procedure by which if you aren’t all legal with the federal government, you can’t come into Kansas where the Kansas Legislature makes the laws. That would be defending Kansas’ borders, which might or might not be a legitimate interest of the Kansas Legislature.
There being no real “Kansas citizenship” requirement about who can and who can’t live in the state, we’d guess that anyone here three years probably is a Kansan, by default if nothing else, and by common good manners and social skills that we like to think Kansans show to the world.
Well, it’s one last shot at an amendment that would kill Kansas’ in-state tuition for undocumented Kansans. It will be buried in debate on scores of other subjects in the end-of-session appropriations bill, and most likely will be rejected.
And, likely Hutchins will return to Holton to retire from the Legislature and wonder whether she would have had a better chance in denying in-state rates to undocumented Kansans seeking…a fishing license…
April 20, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 17, 2006)Some things accomplished
It’s probably about three years too late but the Kansas Legislature almost secretly, gauging from the papers, took a step toward keeping Kansans with a little equity in their homes out of financial trouble that could dog them for years.
The new law, signed by the governor, creates a businesslike way for lenders to determine how much they will lend homeowners for a “non-purchase money” loan in which the value of real estate is the collateral.
Huh?
Yes, it’s one of those “little” bills for which just lobbyists showed up at hearings, and probably which a lot of legislators didn’t fully understand when it passed. It is going to make a difference in the lives of Kansans who decide that they just might have enough equity in their homes to spring for tuition for their children or maybe a new boat or something else they need or think they need.
The complicated part is for lenders or others to devise a system that is their own but which is very much like the automated appraisal system for property that county appraisers have been using for years to determine the value, and therefore the property tax bills, of homeowners.
It’s based on a computer program that determines the changes in property value based on the value of similar properties; it essentially charts that rising tide of property values in an objective way to see what your home is worth.
Lenders or companies that provide appraisal services to lenders will come up with that system, count on it.
But the real key may be that the new law has elaborate prohibitions on letting the appraiser know how much money the borrower wants to take out of the home as a second mortgage.
Now, if you were an appraiser and knew how much money a borrower wanted, or a lender was prepared to lend based on the value of a home, do you think you could probably find a way to make the deal work?
While getting an appraisal that allows you to get the amount of the loan you want and the lender getting an appraisal that shows adequate value to secure the loan safely are all good, both borrowers and lenders need to know when the value of the home isn’t enough to make the deal work.
Without making it sound like appraisers are walking on water, their role in the transaction is key to both responsible borrowing and responsible lending. Compromising an objective appraisal just to make a deal work damages borrowers by overextending their resources and lenders and in some tiny way, the economy.
Would this have been a good law a few years ago when housing prices were booming? Sure, if the computer models work, and they will, and if appraisers were turned loose to come up with an objective valuation of property, not just whatever it takes to make the loan possible.
Why bring up the appraisal bill? With the Legislature still wrestling with school finance, tax cuts, sex-predator legislation, eminent domain and the like?
Well, while those big issues are boiling, there is still some down-to-earth stuff being accomplished quietly, without a lot of fanfare. It’s stuff like the appraisal bill that will never make a candidate’s brochure, not get a mention in a speech or a coffee-shop tour that is also part of the job of running the state in an orderly and businesslike manner.
April 13, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 10, 2006)Whose law is it?
There is something vaguely troubling in the way some new and proposed laws are being peddled to the Kansas Legislature.
It’s the personalization of crimes--naming them after victims who have undergone horrible abuses and tortures and death. The range of crimes that have become personalized in Kansas and nationwide range from the “Scruffy” law, named after a little dog that was tortured and videotaped during its torture by some boys in Wyandotte County to “Jessica’s Law” which is named after a young woman who was horribly assaulted and later killed.
And there’s a new one on the way, the so-called “Kaufman House” laws, designed to provide unprecedented access to social service agency complaints of abuse of persons who are living in group homes of one sort or another, licensed or not.
For those with the stomach to see it, there were copies of the dog-abuse videotape, and the father of the Florida girl named Jessica has been on a testimony tour around the nation that included Kansas. Two women who underwent horrible abuses at a group home have been in the Statehouse on a regular basis seeking passage of a law that would provide thousands of reports of abuse and neglect that the attorney general’s office and the Kansas Disability Rights Center would pore over to see if there are criminal or civil prosecution possibilities.
To a lesser extent, there is the continuing effort to make assault on a law enforcement officer a more serious crime than an assault on a “regular” Kansas citizen, such as a painter or notaries public or shoe salesmen.
Maybe what seems a little “off” in the naming of laws and crimes and such for individuals is that the Legislature writes laws for the state and when the salesmanship and the photo ops and the teary interviews are over, the Legislature determines that some activities are crimes against the state of Kansas. It’s the state Legislature that hears testimony, debates bills and generally determines what can’t be done in Kansas without jeopardizing the entire reason for state government—to protect its citizens.
Now, there’s probably nothing wrong with ‘Jessica’s Law” which calls for longer sentences for sex predators. Scruffy? It is surely is a good idea to criminalize and require psychological counseling for people who abuse animals because those people represent a danger to the people of Kansas.
The verdict is out on the”Kaufman House” deal, because while the atrocities are serious and nobody wants group home residents with disabilities to be abused, there’s no telling whether this is the right way to solve the problem or whether it’s just a scrap for money and a chance for a politician to dramatically explain the abuses that might be stopped with the proceeds of the legislation.
The assault of a law enforcement officer? That’s a tricky one because no politician wants to be on the wrong side of law enforcement, but gee-whiz, law officers are specially trained and armed for that sort of thing, and your average plumber or schoolteacher or bank teller isn’t. If assault and battery are crimes against the state surely they are crimes against all Kansans, and singling out one class of Kansans against whom assault and battery are more serious crimes doesn’t make sense.
Personalizing legislation may make for juicier stories for the media--nobody ever turns off a camera when a victim is sobbing—but it tends to move the focus from the duty of the state to protect its citizens and determine what is unlawful to a sad story about a victim.
Bottom line: It brings the serious work of protecting Kansans into the realm of “are you for or against” whatever victim is the namesake of the legislation.
That’s not fair.
They aren’t the same thing.
April 6, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 3, 2006)Money can change everything
Amid all the editorial wailing and new stories recounting all that the Legislature didn’t get done before it wrapped up the main session last Friday, we folks who live and breathe the Legislature and politics see an upside that nobody’s much talking about yet.
It’s that in government, money is what really makes things possible. It’s a lot like life, except at the Statehouse it’s not the money in your pocket that limits your possibilities, it’s the money flowing into the state treasury from everyone’s pockets that determines what is possible for the state.
About mid-month, Kansas legislators are going to learn that there’s more money in the treasury than they thought and that it is suddenly possible to do more than they thought for schools and likely for Kansans queued up for tax breaks.
The Consensus Revenue Estimating Group’s new estimate—the state economic guru’s best guess at how much the state will receive in the current and upcoming fiscal years—is going to show at least $140 million, and maybe more, than was expected back when Gov. Kathleen Sebelius wrote her budget.
So for all the whining, lawmakers actually will have more flexibility--make that money—to spend on schools than they believed they had when they all left town last Friday.
Now, will all that new money go into K-12 education? Probably not. But that new revenue estimate is going to demonstrate that there is more money than legislators thought they had to address what the Kansas Supreme Court called a failure to make “suitable provision” for financing elementary and secondary education.
And maybe more important, it’s going to show that Kansas businesses and individual Kansans are prospering--measured by the amount of taxes that they owe to the state, which is probably the best barometer of economic health that is available.
We’ve seen years when businesses and individuals weren’t dong well, after the stock market burst and after Sept. 11, and state revenues were down by hundreds of millions of dollars. People and businesses suffered, and it showed up at the collective pocketbook that is the state treasury.
Now, Kansas business and individuals are making more money than even the state’s economic gurus believed possible, and suddenly there is money to address school spending to reach the social goal of producing the smartest children that the state can.
The delay in putting together a school finance plan to present first to the governor and then to the Kansas Supreme Court represents another tradeoff, one that can’t be measured yet. While it might mean more spending that would appear to move the state closer to making “suitable provision” for financing of schools, it also means that the court will have less time before the August primary election to consider the Legislature’s eventual product and decide whether it shows progress or needs to be rewritten.
The Legislature essentially has traded money for an extra non-special-session swing at producing a school finance plan that will satisfy the court’s decision that the state isn’t providing a good education for all Kansas children.
The question is, of course, whether that trade works out for the Legislature and the schoolchildren. There isn’t a way to know yet, but the Legislature wouldn’t have had either option if it hadn’t gone home last week without a school finance plan agreed-to.
We’ll just have to wait and see…