April 2007

April 26, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 23, 2007)

Good news for the Supremes & pals

What a difference a year makes!

Remember about this time last year, when the Kansas Legislature was in the gunsights of the Kansas Supreme Court over school funding? While some lawmakers scrambled to come up with a plan that they hoped would satisfy the court, others were lining up to cosponsor bills that would limit the authority of the state’s highest court to produce any rulings that might force increases in state spending for “suitable” education for Kansas schoolchildren.

The Legislature last session even performed the “insult by omission” trick of handing district court judges a $9,000 a year raise while tossing the Court of Appeals judges a $2,000 raise and giving Supreme Court justices nothing. Nada.

This session? Well, the battle across Topeka’s 10th Avenue—which separates the Kansas Judicial Center where the Supreme Court works the south side of the street from the Kansas Legislature working the north side from the Statehouse—apparently has ended.

Not only did the House, which was generally the more hostile toward the high court last session, approve $9,000 raises for Supreme Court justices this year, but the remaining $7,000 raises (to a two-year total of $9,000) for Appeals Court judges. The Appeals Court judges really didn’t do anything “wrong” last year, but hang out at the same joint as the Supreme Court and therefore were vulnerable under the “friends of our enemies are our enemies” doctrine.

What’s changed? One single issue: school finance. The Legislature struggled last session to come to a three-year plan that would make suitable provisio for financing K-12 education and was buoyed late in the session by a record $290 million “windfall” in the form of an authoritative estimate of projected revenues that provided enough money and optimism to craft a nearly $500 million school finance plan.

It was one of the tensest power plays that the Kansas Legislature has seen in recent years: the Supreme Court wasn’t specific but it was clearly herding the Legislature toward a dramatic increase in spending on public education and the Legislature was split. Some wanted to spend considerably more money on schools in hopes of satisfying the court, some didn’t and didn’t like the pressure that the high court obliquely asserted on school spending.

The crisis, of course, was averted when the high court was satisfied by the Legislature’s work on school funding and the issue just melted away.

So this year, after the House stood for reelection last November, the issue of raises for Supreme Court justices and their pals on the Appeals Court bench was up in the air. It was frankly surprising to Legislature-watchers that the House would propose $9,000 raises for Supremes, $7,000 raises for the Appeals Court. That the proposal made it through a budget subcommittee that was assembling the House’s version of the Omnibus appropriations bill, which is the final funding bill of the session, was shocking. And that the full House Appropriations Committee agreed, well, that was almost shocking enough to call for drinks at lunch.

The Senate, which is assembling its version of the Omnibus bill, quickly signed on, which essentially means that unless the Supreme Court strikes down the gay marriage ban or maybe declares the Sunflower a noxious weed in the next week, the high court gets its raises, which take the chief justice to $139,912, justices to $132,590, the chief judge of the Court of Appeals to $131,463 and Appeals Court judges to $128,310.

Quite a year.

And, we guess, the Supreme Court is going to decree that the next-best thing to kissing and making up with the Legislature is…receiving checks…

April 19, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 16, 2007)

A good idea!

It’s not often that you see the state come up with something that makes so much sense, or appears to, that you wonder what else government has up its sleeve that we haven’t heard about yet.

The most recent good idea: either buy, or induce folks to give the state, land in the four quadrants of the state, with that land being turned into multipurpose training facilities for broad classes of emergency response stuff ranging from Kansas National Guard to police, sheriffs, Highway Patrol, fire departments, hazardous materials spills…nearly everything that you’d call 9-1-1 to report.

Plan here is to put high-intensity training sites in the regions so, for example, fire fighters (about 80 percent of Kansas fire fighters are volunteers) could get their practice and figure out how to be safe and effective, with no real lives or property at risk. Practically, wouldn’t you rather that the fire fighters trying to put out the blaze at your house know exactly what they’re doing rather than just being enthusiastic?

Does that sound like something homeowners’ insurance agents might be interested in? Having fire fighters who are skilled in how to put out a fire as quickly as possible and mitigate the damage is probably about as important as having a hydrant close by for use by eager but lesser-trained fire crews.

Now, we’re not sure how often sheriff’s deputies need practice at gun-fighting door-to-door terrorists, but there’s an excellent chance that National Guard troops might. And, the possibility of getting that training maybe an hour’s drive from home rather than a day’s drive seems like a way to get important training conveniently…

There’s, of course, a Homeland Defense aspect to all this pretty logical coordination of training facilities. Homeland Defense is a big seller in the Kansas Legislature, which will be asked to authorize up to $32 million in bonds to be sold to buy, if necessary, and outfit those four new training facilities.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius isn’t the only one talking about it, but she’s most vocal about lack of training facilities for Kansas National Guard troops. They need the training for responding to natural disasters while they are under her command, of course, but the picture changes dramatically when they are ordered for 12 months of service by the federal government.

Sebelius says some Guard members spend up to five months out of state at military bases practicing and getting training before they are deployed overseas. And their 12 months of active duty starts when they leave the country, not while they’re training in this country.

Training those Kansas Guard members close to home keeps them near family and jobs, cutting their out-of-contact time.

The four rather remote locations—and the governor and Kansas Adjutant General Tod Bunting are looking for empty farmland for these facilities—might or might not turn out to be an economic development deal for counties or private individuals who want to donate land to the project.  We’re thinking that maybe restaurants and bars, maybe hotels, might see some pickup in business, but who knows?

There’s probably a little quality-of-life angle here, if you are a little queasy about having the local school playground or church parking lot used as a mock disaster drill site.

Will the Legislature OK the bonding authority? Probably. Will some city or county or just private land owner donate land to the effort? Probably. Will the convenient training make those folks who are sent into combat, or who respond to tornados and floods and fires, a little safer and more effective? Probably.

Now, let’s just see what happens…

April 12, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 9, 2007)

No red meat

Through the main body of the Kansas legislative session something both subtle and potentially dramatic in political effect has happened to Kansas social and political conservatives—and by implication the Kansas Republican Party that outnumbers Democrats nearly 2-1 in voter registration.

What’s happened is that on issues ranging from immigration, or at least the state’s effort to weigh in on what is really a federal issue, to “domestic partnerships” to the fringes of abortion policy, socially conservative legislators have lost horsepower.

They’ve lost on immigration issues ranging from photo ID to vote to presenting birth certificates to prove that potential voters are U.S. citizens and on the effort to prevent Lawrence from registering domestic partners so that there is somewhere a record that Julie and Janet, or Bill and Phill, are a pair, not married, of course, but a unit. And they’ve lost embryonic stem cell research bans and even an effort to force Attorney General Paul Morrison to prosecute Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller.

Those are the sort of issues that in previous years would have been powerful ones for Kansas Republicans, the family-values agenda that brings even the traditional “less government is better” GOP voters along on issues that they probably didn’t really think was the legitimate role of government.

It is early, of course, to tell just what all that means. But it all points to 2008, when Kansas voters will go to the polls to elect new House and Senate members. After most of a legislative session this year, there hasn’t been a single substantial red-meat issue that social conservatives have successfully pushed through the Legislature.

Last issue that galvanized conservatives was the gay marriage amendment in 2005, which passed in all but one county—where the domestic partnership issue is afoot. That gay marriage vote, which might have been a political lifejacket for conservatives had it been at the November general election last year instead of being wasted as a vote-generator in the spring of 2005, now appears to possibly have been the last significant issue that conservatives could bring home to their political base.
How does all this shake out? Like nearly everything in politics, it’s complex.

Socially conservative Republicans can complain that they need more colleagues in the Legislature. If this is really a socially conservative state, then voters need to elect more socially conservative legislators. It’s that simple in one respect.

But more moderate Republicans can point to conservative failures and say that conservatives aren’t getting the job done: If this really is a socially conservative state, well, the social conservatives in the Legislature aren’t effective enough to pass legislation.

It comes down, and will come down, to the GOP primary election more than a year from now, when typically low voter turnout means that the social conservatives can survive by getting their base out to vote and shutting out moderates in August.

For Democrats, the choices are more interesting. Democrats came up with record numbers of candidates last year willing to run in Republican-heavy districts and saw some successes, both from just flat out-campaigning Republicans and from seeing Republicans change parties to run as Democrats. Moderate Republicans not confident, or willing, to run in what has been a conservative-tilted primary election mowing machine overall haven’t fared badly. It’s not dramatic, but Democrats did pick up five seats in the Kansas House and in some districts moderate Republicans replaced more socially conservative Republicans.

All of this may change quickly, of course.  But time is running out. Next year’s session will be too close to the election for conservative Republicans to chance embarrassing losses that can be used against them in either the primary or general election.

So the legislative wrap-up session that starts April 25 may be especially telling and may yield as many political implications as governance decisions.

April 5, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 2, 2007)

No strappy heels but the ‘plain child’ wins anyway

If you want to find the big winner in last week’s passage of a bill that will expand gambling in Kansas, it’s the one that wasn’t even a player in the debate.

Yes, the people who own race tracks which will get to have slot machines in the building will be winners. Yes, whoever gets the right to build destination casinos in the state will be winners.

But the folks who weren’t mentioned in the passionate debates over gaming are probably the big winners—the people who depend on economic development activities ranging from operation of the Kansas Department of Commerce to technology and technology education centers. Huh?

Yes, because the bill on the way to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius that contains the expanded gambling amendment started out as a simple little bill that would allow the Kansas Lottery to keep operating past its scheduled June 30, 2008 “sunset.”

The effect of sunsetting, or more plainly just closing down the Kansas Lottery, is that by July 1 of this year, no Powerball tickets would be sold in Kansas. That’s because if you win (and some of us still like to believe your chances are 50-50—either you win or you don’t), you have a year to collect your winnings and there wouldn’t be any place to turn in that life-changing ticket if the Lottery is shut down.

Keeping the Lottery alive means that the state won’t be shutting down what is a $60 million or so source of revenue. It also means that virtually nothing changes, and the Lottery and its profits really don’t become the focus of attention. People are watching the gaming stuff, not the “plain old Lottery.”

Now, nobody much doubts that had the Lottery/gaming bill been killed the Legislature would have found a way to pass another bill to keep Lottery in operation. Nope, it’s too good a revenue source and it’s by now considered pretty benign. If you believe gambling is just sinful, well, it’s the difference between showing a little ankle (Lottery) and donning a miniskirt and strappy high heels (casino gambling).
Rejuvenating the Lottery would have come at a price—count on it. And that price would have been redirection of the money that it raises for the state.

Economic development is important to Kansas, and the millions spent on research, on grants to rural businesses, to figuring out ways to take good ideas and commercialize them and teaching youngsters vocational skills are the raw ingredients of expanding the state’s economy. That was the goal about 15 years ago when Lottery got under way.

But if you ask people now, huge majorities believe that Lottery money goes to finance elementary and secondary schools and most would be surprised, and maybe upset, to learn where the Lottery money is really going.

Had the Lottery been killed along with the expanded gambling measure, and had to be resuscitated, you can bet that the allocation of the lion’s share of the Lottery money would have been changed from eco-devo stuff to education or to repairs to buildings at the Regents’ colleges or maybe even to bolstering the state’s pension fund.

The economic development? It’s important, but it’s not exciting. Call it the “plain child” of the state’s budget priorities.

If there ever was a bystander to a historic event who didn’t—and maybe still doesn’t—realize just how lucky it was, it is probably the state’s business and economic development community.

Sorta like buying one of those Lottery tickets and not scratching off all the silver stuff that gets under your fingernails, and being a winner but just not knowing it…