April 2009

April 30, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on April 27, 2009)

Intrigue? Try teacher negotiations

Something that most of us never thought would happen is happening.

After decades of most Kansans talking about schoolteachers not making much money, well, they still aren’t, but they’ve seen several years of consistent small wage increases in an economy in which other workers aren’t getting raises or are even losing their jobs.

Who’d have thought that at some point—especially in smaller towns where people know one another—Kansans are starting to notice that by and large, schoolteachers are keeping their jobs, and the labor unions representing them have consistently won at least small regular raises for them.

This may be the year all that changes.

Now, nobody becomes a schoolteacher to get rich. But this year, especially, with the state Legislature scrambling for money for the state budget, there’s going to be heightened interest in not only school funding, but where it goes.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate are scrambling to cut expenditures, and the Department of Education—which forwards billions of dollars to local school districts—is clearly in the gunsights because school funding is the largest single expenditure made by the state on behalf of, well, us…

Count on K-12 education getting less money next year. The majority of that money is used by school districts to pay teachers…maybe 80 percent, the rest going for administrators’ salaries, the heat and light bills, buses, and the stuff that makes school possible.

In many industries, both union and non-union, there have been headlines about layoffs and headlines about labor making concessions, taking pay and benefit cuts to avoid layoffs.

That’s what makes this spring, the start of schoolteacher salary negotiations sometime after the Legislature adjourns, intriguing:

• Do the negotiators shoot for higher salaries, which is likely to result in fewer teachers or—in the argot of negotiations—bargaining unit members?
• Do they try to hold salaries stable—which due to dropping resources may mean somewhat fewer bargaining unit members?
• Do they negotiate for lower wages and maintaining the same number of bargaining unit members?

It’s going to be interesting to watch, district by district, to see what happens.

April 23, 2009

(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on April 20, 2009)

Cuts or taxes?

OK, we know about the dire financial picture for the state, the latest report showing that while there’s a chance the state will have money in the bank on June 30, the following year requires major cuts or new taxes.

Budget cutting is almost a black art, shrouded in acronyms and with “State General Funds” and “All Funds” columns on complicated charts.

The House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Ways and Means Committee meet separately to put together their versions of what will at some point become a single bill that both chambers will have to approve.

That work is being done this week, before the Legislature reconvenes April 29, with the hope that each chamber will have its money committee’s version of how to make the books balance for the upcoming fiscal year—2010, which starts July 1 and ends June 30, 2010.

This behind-the-scenes work involves scouting how either to cut $328 million from the budget which was already pared down sharply in the “mega” appropriations bill which the governor signed into law–minus some line-item vetoes—last week or to find new revenues.

And, the House and Senate, almost institutionally, have different outlooks on how to make budgets work. That predilection changes over time, depending on the membership of each chamber.

So far this year, we’ve seen from the new House leadership and membership less angst over cutting funding for elementary and secondary school funding than funds for Regent institutions.

In the Senate, from all appearances so far, there’s less fear about cutting funding for state colleges and universities. Nobody likes to do it but the kids are nearly grown-up by the time they’re going to a college or community college and while not everyone lives in a college town, well, everyone lives in a school district.

Why dwell on education spending? Because it represents the biggest pot of money in the state budget. If you’re going to save money, you cut where the money is.

That other option? Raising revenue through taxes? Chances look very slim. There’s an easy pick-off worth a total of $75 million in payments made to counties, and that’s almost in the bag. But new taxes or suspending tax cuts lawmakers gave away in previous years? Very, very tricky. The people—and mostly businesses—with tax cuts are extremely protective of them.

This ought to be an exciting wind-up session of the Legislature.

April 16, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on April 13)

A special class?

There’s this pervasive movement in the Legislature, this year again, to make some people, well, “special.”
Our mothers always told us we’re all special in our own ways, but this year legislators are showing increased interest in making law enforcement officers more special than the rest of us.

It’s about making a battery—basically slugging—of a law enforcement officer a more serious crime than slugging, well, you or me.

It makes some sense to make sure that people don’t mess with police or sheriff’s officers, because we need them in good shape to take care of the rest of us. It’s a variation of the same basic instinct that leads us to check the smoke alarm batteries when the time changes because we want those smoke alarms to work and warn us when there’s trouble in the home. Taking special care of something that protects us makes sense on some level.

But, well, at some point, there’s this funny feeling about making hitting a cop a more serious offense than hitting anyone else. It’s like setting up a special class of people who are more important than everyone else.

And it’s probably worth remembering that those law enforcement officers are dressed up special so that we know that they are law enforcement and a symbol of authority. That’s why they wear dark uniforms and shiny badges—that gives them a little extra gravitas, so people know who they’re fooling with and so they tend to inhibit people from hurting other people while law enforcement is around. It’s a psychological thing.

But, when it comes down to it, they’re cops. They are trained to stop people from hurting one another and trained to make sure they don’t get hurt so that they can protect the rest of us.

They carry clubs and Tazers and pepper spray and guns and such so that they can protect us and themselves, too.

Maybe it makes some sense to make hitting a cop something special. But somewhere in your stomach, if you think about it, does it make sense to make law enforcement officers more “special” than insurance agents or notaries public or schoolteachers?

We’ll leave that one to you. Law enforcement likes the extra penalties if you swing at them, and legislators are generally agreeable to about whatever police think they need to do their jobs.

But, does it seem like pandering to them a bit with the special crime of battery of a law enforcement officer?
Does that make sense? We’ll have to figure that out for ourselves…

April 9, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers April 6, 2009)

It’s politics

There’s another abortion bill on its way to what will probably still be the desk of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius when it gets there that, well, has become increasingly politically touchy.

The bill, passed to the governor by the state Senate just minutes before it adjourned the main portion of the 2009 legislative session, would require more specific information about late-term abortions. The specific requirement is that abortion providers diagnose—for the public record—exactly what life-threatening or life-changing malady a post-22 week abortion is performed to cure.

It also broadens the possibility of lawsuits against abortion providers—which essentially will insert the issue of abortion, not just who is “toughest” on crime, into every Kansas county and district attorney race on the ballot if the bill becomes law.

Now, here’s the tricky part. Pro-choice Sebelius signed one abortion-related bill this year that provides women with more information about the procedure and access to sonograms of the fetus and a chance to hear the heartbeat of the fetus. Practically, it didn’t do much, but antiabortionists have had so few victories in recent years they celebrated it as a major victory. You know how that goes.

The latest abortion bill is dramatically more powerful and contains many provisions Sebelius has vetoed in previous years.

But…this year, she’s seeking U.S. Senate confirmation as President Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services and is being challenged for that Cabinet post by antiabortionists.

And, there is a good chance that Sebelius will have to sign or veto the new abortion bill before the Senate votes on her confirmation to the HHS post.

But while pro-lifers want the bill signed, they also wonder, among themselves, whether a veto would reduce chances that Sebelius would get Senate confirmation for the Cabinet post, which they don’t want her to get.

So here are likely possible outcomes: Sebelius vetoes the bill and gets confirmed, and pro-lifers take a double hit, losing political juice. Sebelius vetoes the bill and isn’t confirmed, that’s a split decision, politically an antiabortion loss in Kansas but maybe a national victory but only if President Barack Obama doesn’t find another pro-choice candidate for HHS.

Forget the abortion business, and it’s just politics, isn’t it?

April 2, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on March 30, 2009)

Drug testing the poor?

One of the best things about life here in America is that you don’t have to have read the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or any of those founding-father era documents to know that something just doesn’t feel right.

It happens on the floor of the Kansas House every now and again, something that, well, just doesn’t feel like something that we want to do to Kansans. It makes you a dab uneasy.

This time, it is a bill passed by a surprisingly strong 90 votes to 26 that will require people who apply for cash welfare assistance to undergo a drug test.

Let’s look at this one. It might be OK, it might not, but it does leave you a little uncertain about whether this is the thing that Kansas wants to do to poor people who need state assistance to survive and take care of their children.

The House-passed program calls for drug testing—if the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services can afford to do the testing—of welfare applicants, or recipients, and if they are found to have drugs in their bloodstream, they have to attend a counseling and education course. A second failure, more counseling. Third-time failure and there’s no welfare for that person.

Now, nobody wants welfare recipients to be spending their state-provided money on drugs. Nope. And nobody wants a parent who is using drugs to be shaping the impressionable lives of their children. Nope.

But, there’s this strange feeling you get when the state makes a drug test mandatory for receiving welfare.
It’s been touted as not using taxpayer money for Kansans to buy drugs. Hard to be against that. But it’s also been portrayed as taking some of the state’s poorest people and testing them for drug use just because the state can.
We don’t test, for example, people who receive income tax refunds or businesspeople who receive state-backed economic development loans, do we?

Is drug testing something that we want to do? And do we just want to do it to poor people? Or, is it something that we privately would like to do to everybody? There’s little doubt that the state would be somehow better if nobody in Kansas used illegal drugs. We’d all like that.

But do we want to test everybody, or just poor people who need government help to survive?  Is it somehow OK for people who don’t need welfare to do drugs, or is it just a little invasive to demand drug testing for people who support themselves and pay their taxes?

It’s one of those iffy deals that is probably worth discussing.

It’s something that members of the Senate are probably wondering about, as the bill heads to their chamber for possible consideration.