December 2003
Dec. 25, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 22, 2003)Looking at the environment
Nearly every aspect of life that touches government gets complicated pretty quickly.
That’s the nature of government, of politics, of the Legislature. That’s probably a good thing, on balance, because government is supposed to represent the people, politics are how people make their choices of who runs government known, and bless ‘em, if some people weren’t natural born meddlers, we’d have no candidates for the Legislature, anyway. Folks would have to be assigned to the Legislature, maybe as a condition of probation or something.
The problem with environmental issues getting to government is that they pop up here and there and are often locally polarizing emotional issues that are keyed to one particular city or county or region and there really isn’t a good clearing house for concerns.
Well...there just might be in the future. The Kansas Natural Resources Legacy Alliance, created by the Legislature in 2002, has studied and planned and fretted and had public hearings about Kansans’ natural resources concerns, and at the end of 18 months of work has come up with what might be a reasonable way to look long-range, short-range and statewide at issues dealing with the environment, land use, water use, the whole gamut of environmental issues.
And surprisingly, there never has been one spot to go if you have a concern about subtle environmental issues...are the suburbs growing too fast and trapping farmland, is there enough land anywhere to safely hunt, is it better to use water to irrigate crops or cool down air conditioners in the city?
The Natural Resources Legacy Alliance has proposed that the Legislature re-task the Kansas Water Authority, which does long-range planning for water, into a Kansas Natural Resources Authority with broader vision.
Now, that’s all fairly technical, will take legislative action and may be political before its all over with, but the concept is some place to take concerns, whether it’s urbanization, water use, air quality or tourist possibilities.
Kansas has long been a flinty practical state, with property rights No. 1, and the environmental balance may tip toward industry and agriculture and business. That’s been the politics of it for decades, but things are changing. Half of the population of Kansas is east of a north-south line that passes through Topeka. On the east side of that line, there are mostly urban people, on the west side largely rural.
This proposed Kansas Natural Resources Authority might just be the place that eastern and western issues meet to hash out differences. It might just be the place where the folks who are used to grabbing up their local legislator and having a bill drafted will stop first to see whether their idea is going to cause any problems for anyone else. It might be the place were a local solution might be seen as a template for a statewide solution, or it might be the place where a local problem is assessed as just a local problem that not all the state needs to be rescued from.
Sounds sort of, well, complicated and governmental? It might be, but the real problem that most people have with environmental and natural resources issues is that they are very complicated. Almost everyone wants the state to be clean and nice for visitors, but everyone also wants to be able to make a living here. Most folks like a nice drive in the country, but don’t want to live next to a gas station. And most folks want clean water and healthy crops and wildlife, but haven’t figured out how to accomplish that. A clearinghouse may well be the answer, or at least a place to clarify the questions so they are manageable by government.
In the short term, getting approval for the Kansas Natural Resources Authority from the Legislature may or may not be simple. It’s going to be more complicated than just reprinting letterhead and business cards.
But if the state doesn’t put together some sort of framework for considering natural resources issues, there are eventually going to be two Kansases, one east of that line, another west of that line, when with some coordination and planning that line might be just interesting trivia and not divisive.
Dec. 18, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 15, 2003)Overlooked issues
There are at least three aspects of the Dec. 2 Shawnee County District Court decision–which said the state’s system of financing public education is unconstitutional–that appear to be overlooked while everyone is talking about Judge Terry Bullock’s preliminary order that the state needs, oh, say, about $1 billion to fix the problem.
Now, everyone reads court decisions from his or her own experience and the interpretations vary widely, ranging from the judge is nuts to not much is wrong with the current system.
But three important aspects are that a suitable education is the constitutional right of each pupil in Kansas; that the Legislature is the sole agency responsible for providing funding for that suitable education for every pupil, and that the governor is just a very, very interested bystander in this lawsuit.
Because a suitable education is an individual constitutional right of each pupil, all this stuff about Kansas "comparing well" with another state, or students in one district "comparing well" with students in another district, is pretty much baloney. It’s nice, of course, but it just doesn’t matter.
It would be like a fire department responding to most house fires. If you’re in the fire district and your house is aflame, most just doesn’t cut it. You want those fire fighters at your house and have a right to have them there, doing their best to put out your fire.
Bullock leaned on this principle when he said that he wasn’t in a position to cut the Legislature any slack in making sure that every pupil gets a suitable education. This isn’t an "averages deal," it’s every individual pupil. That makes it a big and complicated job, but nonetheless he’s not going to allow most school districts to have enough money to provide a suitable education to most of its pupils. It’s a 100 percent thing.
Clearly, it doesn’t cost the same amount to provide a suitable education to every pupil in Kansas. Most are what we’d call "normal" students, who are bright, learn quickly, and require no more than a journeyman teacher and the right books to become suitably educated. Some can walk to school, carrying their own homemade lunches. It shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to educate them suitably.
But there are students who have real problems, handicaps, disabilities, language barriers, cultural barriers, poverty, or who live a long way from the schoolhouse. It’s going to cost more to give them the education necessary for them to reach their fullest potential. Not all potentials are the same, of course, or we would all be radiologists, instead of being a mixture of legislators and judges and such. The issue is that every individual pupil is guaranteed by the constitution whatever support is needed to reach his or her fullest potential.
The second and third important aspects of the decision are that the Legislature is the sole agency that can fix the problems with school financing that Bullock describes, and which probably are going be upheld by the Kansas Supreme Court once Bullock finalizes his decision sometime after July 1, 2004. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius isn’t a party to the lawsuit. She’s not a named defendant, and the decision wasn’t written about her.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the governor isn’t interested, of course, as she is the governor of all of the people in the state and that includes the students who are bright and doing well and those who are bright, but maybe disadvantaged in one way or another. And, because she is the governor, reporters wind up instinctively asking her what she thinks of the decision and if she has a plan to meet the judge’s requirements. We’re asking the wrong person.
Railsters are betting that legislators wish she had a plan, or will come up with a plan, but strategically–and this is one of those political lotteries that the judge spoke of–why would a governor propose a plan to solve the Legislature’s problem?
So, watch for some misdirection in the coming months, the Legislature asking aloud where is the governor’s plan when she’s not really obligated to come up with one.
Look for her to come up with some improvements she’d like to see made in the school finance system, some nice things, but it would be politically silly for her to try to solve the Legislature’s problem.
Dec. 11, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 8, 2003)Smart Start issues
Watch for an interesting little battle to pop up in the 2004 legislative session over whether the money–millions of dollars–that the state spends on programs designed to assist children is actually doing the job that we all hope it is doing.
The whole issue is how the state spends "free dollars" that it receives from tobacco companies for the health problems that cigarette smoking causes. Kansas gets upwards of $60 million a year from tobacco companies, and at least initially made the decision that the money should be spent on the state’s children. It’s spending about $45 million of the $60 million on children’s programs; the rest goes for things like heat in state offices, aid to education and other general government stuff.
Now, whether spending the tobacco money on children was a good idea is probably still up in the air, along with the tobacco smoke. It would have made sense to spend the money on teaching adults how not to smoke, or on health problems that smoking causes, but that wasn’t the decision, and the state Legislature in 1999 decided to spend the money on children’s issues. Fair enough. The decision is made and now the issue is what programs for children represent the biggest bang for smokers’ bucks.
Here is the interesting little issue: does the state really sort out which programs for children produce results or does the state spend that tobacco money on stuff that is nice, seems to sound reasonable, but doesn’t produce any hard-and-fast, measurable improvements in the lives of children?
A program called Smart Start appears to have passed the objective tests that many tobacco money-supported programs don’t. It’s an early childhood development program that focuses on high-quality child care, early education, and challenges and support that give kids a head start in brain development. It increases their capacities to learn and profit from later education. It’s like fertilizing the next crop of Kansas taxpayers.
The high-quality child care means that the growing number of Kansans whose children are cared for by day care facilities so the parents can work gets off to a good start. In fact, in 10 years, employment experts believe, 85 percent of the Kansas workforce is going to be made up of working parents. They need to know that their children aren’t going to be at an intellectual disadvantage because mom or dad isn’t at home with them during the workday.
So, if that’s the situation, what is the problem? Why wouldn’t the state just channel that tobacco money into Smart Start and be done with it? The reason is that there are dozens of other programs out there, all of which are well-intentioned and which are nice, but don’t have the quality performance rankings that Smart Start does.
But taking money away from those nice programs and putting the money into a program that actually works turns out to be a ticklish undertaking. Who wants to tell their local after-school program that it’s good, but not producing the results that the state wants? The local legislator? We doubt it.
That’s where the analysis of programs financed with that "free money" becomes very important, to make sure that even "free" money isn’t spent on programs that don’t yield the results we would expect from hard-earned tax money programs.
Will Smart Start fans be able to redirect money to a program that works? It’s a tough call now, before the session. They have taken the tack of redirecting within the $45 million of tobacco money spent on kids $7 million more for Smart Start. That means losers.
A study committee of legislators last week proposed skirting the hard choice of redirecting money, and instead voted merely to have the state spend more of the tobacco money on Smart Start but not cut any programs that are receiving money now. Getting that extra money for kids means allowing less tobacco money to be spent on general state operations which are already squeezed.
It’s the difference between culling the herd and just expanding the herd. It’s tougher choices. But, probably, the state’s smokers deserve the Legislature to make those decisions...after all, if they’re not going to get any benefit from the tobacco money, maybe their children or grandchildren ought to...
Dec. 4, 2003
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 1, 2003)A sales tax increase?
The stars are starting to fall into the proper alignment if Gov. Kathleen Sebelius wants to ask the Legislature for an increase in state sales taxes.
Some of the stars aligned when she started a fairly workmanlike assessment of what the state is spending money on. She touts more than $80 million in savings from little things like not publishing a state phone directory, putting light switches in state office buildings and selling off cars that a previous administration bought for the state.
Is that just low-hanging fruit? Sure, but it makes for news releases and headlines and while Statehouse insiders will snort that the savings aren’t as big as the governor proclaims, practically that comes off as sniping and runs the risk of sounding mean-spirited.
But the real question–and things get a little hypothetical here because she is only talking about a sales tax increase to her most inner circle of advisers–is how much to seek in sales tax increases.
Too little, and even her political friends and allies will wonder whether it is worth the effort...too much and a whole new level of "tax and spend Democrats" rhetoric comes to the front during a legislative session which proceeds by only months the election in which every House and every Senate seat is up for grabs.
Oh, and the governor has to target something specific for a sales tax increase, something tangible, not like the $252 million in tax increases approved in 2002 which went for...well, nobody ever got clear about what specifically that tax increase was for except to improve the revenue flow coming into the state treasury.
Logically, Sebelius would ask for a tax increase for something specific. The Legislature is out of the mood for nonspecific "we’ll take the money first and figure out what to spend it on later" tax increases.
What’s better than education as a destination for new tax revenue? Everyone wants better education for their children and grandchildren and Kansas is in deep trouble if we ever have a generation of children who aren’t smarter than their parents.
So, what’s the right amount? Well, a quarter-cent is about as low as anyone is willing to have a bill written and printed up about. And a quarter cent, well, that would raise about $95 million. Which is nothing to sneeze at, but $95 million doesn’t do much for the annual multi-billion-dollar investment in education in Kansas. Health insurance premiums for schoolteachers alone could eat up that amount.
A half-cent raises about $190 million, enough to provide some raises both in the K-12 and higher education branches of the education industry. That’s enough money that one can imagine the teacher union actually contributing to the campaigns of legislators who vote for it. At the quarter-cent level, don’t expect the unions to sponsor rallies or even print up yard signs for supporters of such a negligible infusion of money into education.
What’s the outside top? Probably a penny, taking the state’s sales tax to 6.3 percent, which is worth more than $300 million. Culturally within the Statehouse, that is probably too much money. At that level, there is so much money floating around that non-education interests get hungry. Like, cities and counties which had more than $100 million a year in state revenue transfers shut off last year. Sharks start circling the Statehouse at that level. And that causes problems in keeping legislators’ focus on education.
Oh, a .7 percent increase in state sales taxes would take the state rate to an even 6 percent, which makes the rate sound like something that people had in mind, not just some rounding error that is the result of applying some complicated formula to the price of milk or diapers or Chevrolets. At an even 6 percent, the additional revenue is about $255 million.
That’s enough to satisfy the education lobby, make legislators feel good about doing something for kids...and probably leave a little pocket change around for some election-year goodies for the people who vote...and finance campaigns...
We’ll see.