April 1999

April 26, 1999
     This is the time of year when us Railsters, the folks who have watched and kibitzed and hung out at the Legislature for at least a couple decades get split personalities.
     About half of our news-dog instinct tells us that we've finally got this raccoon treed, and the best practice is to hang out at the bottom of the tree, yelping and barking. That's the puppy in us.
     And about half of our news-dog instinct tells us if the Legislature merely met for a couple days, evened up the budget a bit and went home, well, we'd live out the remainder of this fiscal year and the first half of next fiscal year in pretty good shape. We'd live to run with the hounds another year. That's the old dog in us.
     If we were going to look at this 1999 session as an old dog, well, there actually have been some better-than-average little things attended to. Looks like the state's going to add $50 a pupil to the state school finance formula. That's the biggest one-year increase ever. Now, that doesn't automatically translate into smarter children, but if we have a little faith in local school boards, it could mean a couple new teachers in each district, or it could mean slightly smaller classes, or it could mean that the schoolteachers we occasionally see sacking groceries or selling shoes on the weekend might not have to have that second job. All in all, not a bad thing.
     And it looks like, after a little dust clears, that the state is going to be taking a little better care of the mentally ill and developmentally disabled Kansans out there and that's surely a good thing. Oh, sure, it wasn't pretty getting that done...
     Now, it was a little demeaning that the objects of that assistance had to play the role of props at some times during the session. Some hung out, or, rather, were placed, at the Statehouse as objects of pity and that made most of us who don't really see those people very often a little uncomfortable.
     Let's stop short of saying that for those who actually took the time to talk to the MR-DD group it was an epiphany. Let's just say that the state has decided to help more of those people who need help, and not delve too deeply into the reasons. But all in all, the right things got done.
     And a little over a year ago, someone, somewhere invented this little gizmo that lets health care workers stick a little ball of fuzz inside a newborn baby's ear and somehow tell whether the infant is going to have severe hearing problems.
     And, amid all the flurry of recriminations over legislative pay and highways and abortions and methamphetamines, the Legislature went ahead a passed a bill that requires hospitals to check out those infants to see if they are going to be able to hear well. And if they can't, well, it gives them maybe a couple extra years to start working with those babies to get them better hearing, or maybe to just help them get along better with the hearing that they have.
     And that's a pretty good little step that the Legislature took this year, without a lot of fanfare. All that said, and that's just a dab of some of the almost incidentally good things that the Legislature did, they still have to wrap up the session this week and probably part of next. And that's the old dog in us looking for some things that actually we're fairly proud of the Legislature for doing.
     But, wait, I think I see a little bit of the tree trunk that isn't already being jumped on by a dog, so it's time to get back to barking and baying... Because there's a little puppy left in all of us...

April 19, 1999
     There's this bill going around from a committee that most Legislature-watchers believe was an afterthought in order to provide a chairmanship for a friend of House Speaker Robin Jennison, R-Healy, that has a lot of us scared.
     No, it's not higher taxes, or some goofy new state slogan, or even an official state critter we'll have to learn. It's a bill that establishes a task force on consolidation of public safety agencies. You see, everything your parents told you about not tweaking the nose of people who are bigger than you probably is right.
     And this bill, which surprisingly passed the House with a big vote, 112-10, as we recall, not only tweaks the nose of big folks, but heavily armed big folks who, we understand, probably still don't want to be all mixed together like frosted and glazed donuts in a bag. The idea is one of those streamlining-government, chain-of-command, cut-administrative-overhead type bills. Sounds fine on paper; probably puts the organization chart on Slim-Fast.
     But take a look at last summer's interim committee that lifted the lid on the topic, found that nobody affected liked it one bit, and then shut the lid and nailed it down tight. Now, let's recount. The Highway Patrol didn't like it. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation didn't like it. The armed agents of the Alcoholic Beverage Control didn't like it. In fact, if we recall correctly, even the fire marshall didn't like it, and we're still not sure why that was. It's this chain of command deal, the blurring-of-missions deal.
     And it looks a lot like one of those bills that escapes from a committee that really didn't get much else accomplished except forcing some House members to cut short lunch with lobbyists who probably would have stood for dessert if legislators had the time to eat it.
     So, we're waiting to see whether there's going to be a task force appointed to investigate further this subject that most of the people who work for the state and who carry guns don't like and who don't generally buy legislators lunches or dinners or even drinks. Some are taking this as a measure of just how dull a summer most legislators think they're going to have...
***
     Most legislators start small. A little local bill, dealing with something that with some luck, nobody cares a whit about, so that unless other legislators are just cranky that day, there's no reason to vote again. Well, we've found what just might be that bill of the 1999 legislative session.
     Freshman Rep. Cindy Hermes, R-Topeka, thought it up, and it is one of the few individual bills pushed through by a freshman and signed into law by Gov. Bill Graves. What's it do? It allows counties which are responsible for burying the unidentified indigents who wind up in their counties, to cremate the remains, instead of burying them.
     Not a big deal, we guess, and, yes, counties do all they can to identify who it is who turned up dead. But when absolutely nobody can be found to take charge of the body, counties now can legally have it cremated.
     We're not sure what happens after that. Probably, the little box of ashes gets labled, and is put on a shelf at the county garage, next to the oil filters for the trucks...

April 12, 1999
     OK, folks, the way this is supposed to happen, is that nearly everyone out southwest is assigned to spend the next two weeks telling their legislators that they'd go at least a nickle, and maybe a little more, for a four-lane highway to replace two-lane US-54.
     And everyone in northwest and northcentral Kansas is supposed to implore their lawmakers for at least that much gasoline tax, if that's what it takes, to build the Northwest Passage-that road between Hutchinson and Hays, or possibly just Russell.
     And everyone else is likely to just tell their legislators that they're getting along OK, and when the Legislature reconvenes April 28, not a whole lot is going to have changed. Chances continue to diminish for a highway plan this session, sorry to say, because contractors have children they want to send to college, too, and not just state colleges, but Ivy League schools...
***
     Ever think you're having a bad day? Well, just consider the Juvenile Justice Authority. In the wind-down that enabled legislators to leave the Statehouse in broad daylight last weekend, lawmakers put off some decisions, like whether they were going to spend even a dime on the new JJA.
     Nope, they didn't, say, just vote to put in whatever the governor recommended to keep the lights on and allow some new furniture purchases for the main office. Nope, the House and Senate passed a budget that is a big goose egg for Juvenile Justice.
     Oh, the JJA is that agency that is supposed to be solving the juvenile crime problem, creating community-based counseling and detention centers, and maybe either one big maximum security juvenile detention hall, or a string of several of them around the state. Problem is, nobody much likes spending money on JJA. Don't look for juvenile delinquents to wander the Statehouse halls, saying they want nicer facilities if they are caught smoking dope or stealing batteries out of cars. Don't look for victims of juvenile crime to protest there aren't enough places to stick the kids who vandalized their homes or stole their cars.
     This JJA is an unpopular place to spend taxpayers' money. Now, is that good? No, not really. The idea, of course, is to delay the JJA budget until the veto session where it can be built into the big omnibus appropriations bill. But it's going to be tricky. It's like voting for money to groom a bad dog.
***
     Speaking of "tough on crime," it's starting to look like the Legislature is going to spend a lot of time and effort making Kansas an inhospitable place for folks who brew up methamphetamines, those drugs that tend to drive their users a little crazy...
     But...in order to rid us of this evil, law enforcement official want their cops equipped with guns with flash suppressors, so their guns don't give off a bunch of sparks when fired, that might cause the meth labs to explode. Well, it occurred to some that if there are criminal meth-brewers in the homes and apartments and wherever else they make this stuff, they aren't going to have flash suppressors on their guns, which means, well, what's the advantage?
     Oh...now we see...it's that the catalogs that the Kansas Bureau of Investigations get all show that flash suppressors come with silencers attached. So officers not only get the clunky flash suppressors, which aren't all that cool, but silencers, too, which are way cool among cops.
     Hmmm...Well, the Senate took out the flash suppressor/silencer stuff from the meth bill. A conference committee is going to consider the issue in a couple weeks. We'll see whether the cops get the silencers. There's a body of thought that maybe it's better to be able to hear when cops are shooting in the neighborhood, just so we can bring in the dogs...

April 5, 1999
    Seems like most of the last 25 years, us Statehouse regulars have been spending some extra days at the end of the session watching legislators fight over whether they could scrounge up a couple million more dollars for schoolteachers.
    Now, not that that's bad...just that it got pretty predictable.
    Well, this year's different, we have this feeling. And while the reasons for it aren't necessarily pretty, it looks like this year, instead of arguing over school finance, we're going to be talking about more money for Kansans who many of us rarely come into contact with, and are somewhat uncomfortable when we do.
    The session-ending fights are likely to be over increasing the state's support for Kansans with mental retardation, developmental disabilities, the homeless and the elderly poor. They're the people who many of us hope that the state is taking good care of, but which we rarely know the details about.
    This is different than recent years, when the school finance fight basically comes down to whether schoolteachers are going to be moving from Chevrolets to Buicks, or maybe even Chryslers, because on average more than 80 cents of every dollar we spend on school finance winds up in the paychecks of school employees. Real difference this year may be the style of House Appropriations Committee Chairman Phill Kline, R-Overland Park, who rarely does anything without a "talking points" brochure, or a visual aid that he and his staff whip out two or three times a day, pointing out at least the good parts of whatever Kline is up to.
     And this year, the brochure talks about providing services for the mentally retarded, the developmentally disabled, the poor elderly, homeless people... It's a big change from charts showing schoolteacher salaries.
     Politically, Kline has created a new group of Kansans who legislators are going to find it hard to vote "against." That's in quotation marks, because nobody doesn't want to help these people, but then again, it comes down to a numbers game. Is $24 million more spent enough, too much, too little? Nobody really knows for sure, and whatever number you run up the flagpole is good, but it's hard to know how good...
***
     Now, us Railsters are sure that we're going to hear about it later, but the Legislature seems to have killed pretty thoroughly a proposal-from the people who bring most of us those little tanks of propane that drive our barbecue grills-to form a Kansas Council on Propane Education and Research.
     It would have been financed by about $800,000 a year in surtaxes on propane. Now, us backyard maestros of the barbecue wouldn't have paid most of it. Most would have come from folks with those car-sized silver tanks beside their rural homes.
     But we're still wondering, propane having been around for years and years, whether there's a lot more to be learned about it. You keep the tanks outdoors, not in the garage, and if you can't figure out how to make the tank attach to the grill, you pay a hardware store guy a few bucks to come to your house and do it.
     Something tells us, though, that the lucky members of the Kansas Council on Propane Education and Research were planning some really nice lunches...