August 2006
Aug. 31, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 28, 2006)From calories to BTUs
For city folks, there was an amazing new concept floated out last week, something that those living in the agricultural areas of the state probably knew, even if they didn’t have the quotable phrase to express it.
The concept: Much of Kansas agriculture and the agricultural world around it have shifted from producing only calories—that’s food for us—to also producing BTUs, or units of energy.
The food part, well, we understand that well from generations of Kansans working on the farm. It’s the row crops, it’s the wheat, and it’s the corn and milo that are either processed for us to eat or used for food for meat crops, the cattle, hogs and chickens that make up a large part of our diets. And, there’s a little sentimental pull for the ag industry when it produces our food, a tendency for Kansans, and at the Statehouse level for legislators and policymakers, to find ways to encourage that food production.
But the shift of a part of the agriculture industry to producing BTUs—that measure of energy that fuels our cars, heats our home, produces our electricity—well, that tends to put the friendly Kansas farmers in another crowd. The BTUs? It’s the production of ethanol for replacing petroleum in gasoline with the attendant environmental benefits, reducing demand for foreign oil, all those concepts that are popular in national discussions of energy but which just don’t have the sentimental, friendly, rural feel that farmers have enjoyed by bringing us vegetables and meat.
Folks at the Statehouse got a quick education in the shifting agricultural world when U.S. Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., stopped by last week, bringing along Tom Dorr of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural development agency. They had the interesting phrase—that the emphasis was moving from generating calories to BTUs—that put this little different twist on Kansas agriculture.
It is, of course, a good thing for farmers to produce our food. We’ve enjoyed some of the cheapest food in the world for decades so there is reason for city folk to wonder just a bit about whether those calories that we’ve been buying at bargain prices suddenly find a new market—essentially pitting calories against BTUs as farmers decide what to plant and how to manage their land.
If farmers are going into the energy business, for example, should their land still be appraised for property tax purposes based on use-value that sharply reduces ag land taxes, or should that land that is devoted to producing the inputs for ethanol-blended gasoline or bio-diesel fuel or even methane gas that becomes part of the production of electricity be taxed on a different basis? There aren’t crowds milling around the Statehouse looking for property tax relief for oil or natural gas producers or the petroleum industry. Not in the era of $3 gasoline and rising natural gas and electric bills.
The markets for grain in Kansas were pretty much split between food and meat production and that had an effect of lowering the price of beef for Kansans and those outside the state’s borders. Do Kansans want to see the price of steaks and hamburgers rise as the possibilities of other uses for grains drive up those prices?
It becomes an interesting change in perspective for Kansans—those of us at the meat counter in the supermarket or at the gas pump where the growing availability of ethanol doesn’t seemed to have shown up in lower prices for our fuel.
Of course, for the immediate future, there is a frantic level of planning and construction of ethanol plants, and for a time, that employment and new construction and activity are welcomed for the economic spin-off produced.
But there’s reason to wonder when the ethanol plants are built and operating, and millions of bushels of grain or thousands more acres are devoted to producing the inputs for BTUs instead of calories, what is going to happen to the nurturing feeling that lawmakers and the general public have toward production agriculture.
Does the appreciation of agriculture split? One side being the BTU folks, the other being the calorie crowd, producing the tomatoes that many of us are too lazy or inept to grow in the pots on our decks.
This just might get interesting, probably not in the next week or month, or probably even the next several years, but there’s a change going on here. Maybe we have time to puzzle it out and decide what’s agriculture and what’s not quite agriculture…
Aug. 24, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 21, 2006)It's not over
A lot of the smoke surrounding the state’s odyssey of school finance litigation has cleared, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still embers smoldering in the Legislature about the whole enterprise of providing a high-quality education for the state’s schoolchildren.
Key, of course, was the Kansas Supreme Court deciding, on a 4-2 vote, that the just-passed school finance bill which proposes to spend nearly $1 billion additional over the next three school years is lawful.
The Supreme Court-vetted law makes significant progress in providing school districts with enough money to teach not only the “normal” school students, those from good, secure middle-class and better homes where education is important, but those children whose homes are not secure. Those are the “at-risk” pupils who educators know need additional attention, more pupil-teacher interaction, and special teaching techniques to make sure the children are properly educated to go out into the world of work.
That special emphasis on the at-risk children appears to be the goal of the court and of the bill that sets a three-year program of additional assistance for those children.
The second key factor that now has been decided is that a Supreme Court justice didn’t tilt the equation by lunching with a couple state senators. A judicial qualifications panel determined that the justice’s indiscreet asking for assistance in parsing a newspaper article’s description of a school bill’s price didn’t prejudice the court’s decision that the school finance bill was sufficient to meet its requirements.
Does that mean that legislators don’t pay attention to K-12 finance for the next two years? Not in the least.
Already there are legislators, emboldened by the get-out-of-court card dealt them by the Kansas Supreme Court, who are saying that the state has committed to spending more money next year and the year after than the state budget can afford. Loathe to increase taxes, some of those legislators are wondering what the chance of paring the school finance commitment might be.
It’s hard to tell what their chances are. The Supreme Court essentially closed out the case that demands more spending and it might take years for a new lawsuit to wander from a district court somewhere to the Supremes again if it turns out that the Legislature is reneging on its promise to the court and the school districts and the schoolchildren.
And, there are legislators who apparently are willing to play within the confines of the money promised in the school finance bill but want to swap around how the money is doled out to school districts.
How is that done? By, say, allowing school districts to shuttle more money into support of charter schools or to create new schools that specialize in certain subjects, essentially creating a two-class school system within the state’s public school system. That can all be done within the confines of the money already appropriated and approved by the Supreme Court.
While there are lawmakers who are interested in either cutting money already promised or redirecting it for their own political/social purposes, there also are legislators who are interested in finding new money to spend for programs such as all-day kindergarten. All-day K, as it is called, probably gets children ready for first grade better than any other program, but some districts now offer it, some don’t and some offer it with the requirement that parents subsidize the additional half-day at school. And, yes, there are the physical problems—the need for more classrooms for those pupils who are spending a full day at school, instead of swapping out morning classes and afternoon classes—getting two classes in one room each day.
Is the K-12 issue over? Not by a long shot.
Aug. 17, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 14, 2006)The meanest cop?
If you’re looking for excitement this political fall season, you’re going to have to look down a couple races on the ballot to find much of galvanizing interest.
At the top, it’s a relatively popular incumbent Democratic governor against a Republican challenger who sounds pretty conservative and is unfortunately going to have to be pretty nit-picky to get much attention.
It’s the Kathleen Sebelius vs. Jim Barnett race, and it won’t be pretty, but it won’t be much to get excited about, either.
The real action is going to be for attorney general, where incumbent Republican Phill Kline faces former-Republican-now-Democrat Paul Morrison.
That’s going to be the firestorm. Both come into it with different skill levels and baggage.
Start at the beginning, what you’ll see in the TV ads. You’ll notice early that Kline is an excellent speaker and salesman. That’s how you get the job. Morrison, well, he’s a little plain-spoken, not flashy, but seems like the kind of guy who could make a living for more than two decades putting criminals in prison.
Kline’s baggage is his unswerving conservativism and opportunism. Now, that sounds like a bad thing, but it isn’t in politics. Everything good that happens on your watch is at least politically part of your record, and you take credit for whatever good happens. That’s the advantage of being an incumbent and you can not like it, but that’s how the world works.
Morrison is a longtime prosecutor, and, well, he looks like one. And while a lot of good has happened on his shift as Johnson County District Attorney—including murder convictions and even capital murder convictions—his good things played to a smaller audience in Johnson County. Explaining his courtroom victories is unnecessary in Johnson County and tedious nearly everywhere else.
So, chances are, we’ll get to see a lot of money’s worth of TV ads about what the attorney general’s office has become over the past decades…a race to be the meanest cop on the block, or failing that, the cutest.
The cutest worked well for former two-term attorney general Carla Stovall, who also was a mean cop; but cute’s not going to work for either Kline or Morrison.
But the meanest cop on the block race which really started with former Attorney General Vern Miller, who in 1971 was leaping out of car trunks to make arrests and stopping Amtrak trains for selling liquor, has become the mode of campaigning for most recent races for AG.
This edition of the race for attorney general is going to be about who can come up with the toughest laws, the longest sentences, the most discretion for law enforcement officers.
For most Kansans, we can count on either candidate being bad news for crooks and murderers and the like.
One hopes that it doesn’t just stop there. After all, we’re not electing the toughest cop in the state, we’re electing someone who essentially will let us go on about our lives without constantly being limited by what might look funny to a cop…
It almost makes one wonder what’s out there besides crime that the state’s chief lawyer ought to be concerned about. Surely there’s something, whether it’s the environment or consumer protection or free speech or even water rights.
There’s more to being attorney general than fighting crime. Maybe, just maybe we’ll hear about it… Or, not.
Aug. 10, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Aug. 7, 2006)Hot topic?
One of the hottest topics on doorsteps during the just-ended legislative seat primary campaigns was property taxes.
It seems almost like a homely topic, what with emotional issues of cloning and stem cells and abortion and immigration creating all the fuss.
But for most people, if you can do something about their property taxes, you’ve made a friend for life or at least a friend when candidates need friends—on primary and general election days.
Most candidates we interviewed said they were hearing about property taxes from retirees and while there are surely some exaggerations here, some were saying they met voters who are fearful that they will lose their bought-and-paid-for homes to rising property taxes.
Do candidates want to help those folks, maybe their parents or grandparents? Of course they do. Everyone does…but it isn’t that simple.
Property values against which taxes are levied increase when the value of homes increases and that’s a good thing. It means that assets are increasing in value. But the cost of city and county government services go up, too.
And, of course, those government services work to increase the value—and assessed valuation against which property taxes are levied—and that’s probably a good thing, too.
A legislative summer study committee is going to look at some relief for probably retirees and the disabled from rising property taxes.
Most popular? A freeze on valuation increases while the owner-occupants live in their homes, either a flat freeze or more logically a lien against that valuation-frozen property during the lifetime of its owner-occupant. Say the senior’s tax bill would have increased $100 a year for 10 years but because of the freeze, it was held steady. That means over the 10 years, the owner-occupant avoided $5,500 in property taxes—enough to be very helpful to a retiree, but punishing for the local units of government that levy the property taxes.
The concept that candidates were hearing was that when the assisted senior dies or moves or something, the property will go back on the tax rolls at its current valuation that would allow the city or county to receive taxes on its full assessed valuation.
That levels the playing field, but still leaves the local taxing units some $5,500 short over the decade.
Possible? Probably, but the real solution is to create a debt against the property so when it is sold, the taxing units receive the money they’ve lost due to the valuation freeze over 10 years.
Upside? The county and city are made whole, but with some manageable revenue disruptions.
Downside? Just watch the heirs squabble over the government lien against property they were going to inherit. Listen for the sobbing of children who see their inheritance shrink to cover the tax bill of their family home. And we’ll probably get to hear them recount the memories of prom night pictures in the hallway, the birthday parties, to ensure that their parents or grandparents get to continue living in their homes protected from property tax increases.
The issue is solvable, but it won’t be easy or pretty. And, it will probably remind some of us of the old days when after the kids left home parents moved to smaller houses—probably to make sure we didn’t come back…
Aug. 3, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 31, 2006)And the winner is...
OK, we’ve had nearly a week now of politicians telling us that the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision on the school finance case was “for the children” and they are the real winners of the school finance case and there really aren’t any losers.
Well, let’s take another look.
If there was a winner, though it denies the possibility, it’s probably the Kansas Supreme Court itself.
Through two years of rulings, the court prodded and nudged the Legislature into a major recasting of the state’s school finance law. And, the court is probably right in determining that the just-passed school finance bill makes substantial changes in the way the Legislature handed out money to school districts just two years ago. So, it made sense to dismiss the case.
Winner No. 1: The court. It ordered up changes in the school finance formula for distributing billions of dollars to schools, the Legislature complied, and that’s the end of that story. Note that the court didn’t issue a flat order about how money was to be spent. It urged, it directed, it implied but it didn’t use the “nuclear option” of closing down schools or upsetting the lives of parents of schoolchildren. A minimalist approach, it angered legislators who lost last summer’s vacation time, but the pain didn’t spread to the population as a whole.
But that’s not all the story.
Now that the case is over, the court probably has avoided any significant change in the way that its members are selected. That’s a big deal for preservation of the court, which is pretty hidebound by tradition.
The court’s decision essentially is vindication for the narrow majorities in the House and Senate that passed the school finance bill that the court says settles the school finance furor.
It was 21-18 in the Senate and 66-54 in the House, and from most viewpoints, one can figure that the 21 senators and 66 House members were winners in the school finance debate. They can, in whatever detail they care to explain, claim that they found the solution that ended the court case, got the Supreme Court out of the Legislature’s business, and pumped large amounts of money into schools—“for the children.”
And those narrow vote margins—it’ll change, of course after this year’s House elections—seem to pretty well demolish proposals to significantly alter the court appointment process. Chances look slim, after the decision, for proposals for Senate confirmation of the governor’s nominees for seats on the Kansas Supreme Court.
Loosely figure that legislators who were “no” votes on the school finance plan would go for a change in court selection processes, and note that they are not majorities. Even if there were a majority of votes to alter the judicial selection process, after a veto of the proposal by the governor, it would take 84 votes in the House and 27 in the Senate to override a veto. So, the court selection process looks pretty secure as it is now.
Another win for the court.
The last win for the court?
Not only those subtle victories that political insiders are talking about quietly, but the way Supreme Court Chief Justice Kay McFarland characterized the long, complex decision. “This case is not about winners and losers—it is about the children of Kansas. They will be better educated and better prepared to meet the challenges of our rapidly changing society. Kansas will be the ultimate beneficiary,” she said.
Brought to you by the Kansas Supreme Court…on a 4-2 vote…