February 2000

Feb. 24, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Feb. 21)

Now, it's probably worth taking a look at a bill that probably is OK, but well, let's check it together.

Here's the bill: Simply, it raises the minimum wage that Kansas employers must pay their workers to $5.15 an hour.

Nope, that's just the city wage. This being an agricultural state, whoever agriculture is doesn't have to pay that much. Or anything at all. If it's ag and if it's in Kansas, it's exempt. So just don't go there for some reason that's probably not germane anymore anyway.

OK, now that we got that settled, the minimum wage in Kansas, for employers who must pay the minimum wage, is now $2.60 an hour. That isn't much, is it?

Well, State Sen. Don Biggs, a Democrat from Leavenworth, proposed earlier this year that the $2.60 be raised to $5 even. That's 15 cents less than the federal minimum wage, but he figured it was progress, and he was willing to let nearly anyone who wanted to one-up him on the
minimum wage boost.

Well, it happened. A move was made to increase the Kansas minimum wage to $5.15, same as the federal minimum wage.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

The Kansas wage applies to a lot of small businesses, generally those which don't do interstate commerce or take credit cards, or gross more than $250,000 a year in business. Think small restaurants, some beer joints, non trademark dairy stands and the like.

Oh, except for agriculture, of course, which is not covered by the Kansas minimum wage.

Well, while the federal minimum wage contains provisions so that an employer winds up paying at least 40 percent of the minimum wage in hard cash, the Kansas minimum wage proposal doesn't have that provision. So, as long as an employee who receives tips manages to average at least $5.15 an hour, the Kansas minimum wage employer doesn't have to really pay that worker anything.

Business folks say, "no, that will never happen." They say that they'll always pay something to their workers.

Maybe, maybe not.

Sorta sounds funny, doesn't it? That a business could have employees and not pay them anything. Well, we'll probably just go with the business boys who say that surely everyone will pay something to their employees.

Except agriculture, of course, which is purely off limits and shouldn't be asked about anyway.
***
Hogs & Realtors.

No, they're not in the same bill, actually, but Railsters, those of us who like a little barbecue with our beer, are amused at a little anti-hog bill by people who say they just want pure water and really don't care one way or another about hogs until there get to be more of them than they an learn the names of.

One of the newest anti-hog efforts is to prohibit the Kansas Department of Health and Environment from issuing permits for large-scale hog operations above the Equus Beds, a shallow water table near, but not under, Wichita but from which Wichita gets its water.

Now, the permit-stopping for hog farms was considered responsible and reasonable because, well, just because.

So when the anti-hog folks got done one better, they were upset. The one-better bill prohibits any discharge into the soil above the Equus Beds. That's not just hogs, or just big hog operations. It's new permits for lagoons by cities and counties and industries and, yes, even septic tanks.

The big hog boys (also known as corporate hoggers) call this evening-up the score. All the little-hog guys, those with just a few hogs who spend half their time feeding the hogs and half their time griping that corporate giants won't buy their hogs from them, all of a sudden got sucked into this argument.

Suddenly, hogs are hogs, no matter who owns them, or how many of them live at one Rural Route address.

And, discharge into the soil above the Equus Beds in southcentral Kansas is discharge, whether it's from hog lots, or factories, or...even rural housing which is almost all plumbed to septic tanks and lateral lines and discharges atop the Equus Beds.

And that's why, we're confident, that this no-discharge stuff is going nowhere. Because of the Realtors.

 

Feb. 17, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Feb. 14)

One of the wonders of the Kansas Legislature is the absolute faithlessness of members who need cooperation to get something done.

And, no, we wouldn't have brought it up if we didn't have an example.

The issue is school finance and the need of two very differently situated school districts for money. In Johnson County, where school district patrons gripe occasionally but generally have learned that the better their schools are, the higher prices they can get for their homes when they sell them, the schools need money.

In western Kansas, some districts' enrollments are falling faster than the state can figure a way to prop them up. So they need money.

And, so here comes a bill, that is cosponsored by two House members who were at each others' throats last session, aiming at providing the chance for school districts to hold an election to get the voters' OK to raise their budgets by 10 percent--all from local property taxes.

The cosponsors? House Speaker Robin Jennison, R-Healy, at the west end of the state, and un-House Appropriations Chairman Phill Kline, R-Shawnee, from Johnson County.

Kline, remember, was fired from Appropriations by Jennison last spring for consorting with the enemy--House Democrats.

Will their bill pass? Even in the House? Too early to tell. But you gotta like the cooperation, we think.
***
Well, the governor's seat belt bill, the one that makes it possible for police to stop your car solely because they notice that your seat belt is unbuckled, doesn't look very healthy right now.
And chances are, it's not going to get a lot better.

When Gov. Bill Graves proposed it at his State of the State speech, few observers gave it much chance. But they didn't expect it to fizzle away this quickly.

Most are blaming the governor's lack of attention to the topic. Seems he hasn't been calling legislators on the phone to invite them into his office to discuss strategies. In fact, the governor says, he doesn't have much of a track record when he puts on a full-court press to get legislation passed.

Guess we should overlook a couple of tax cut plans, and oh yes, a nine-year highway plan approved just last year.

Nope, we'd guess that when the governor decides to play high-stakes with the Legislature, he generally does well. So we're guessing that Graves either hoped that this whole issue would just sell itself to legislators, or that this was all just a consciousness-raising exercise that frankly isn't what governing is all about.

Will there be a seat belt bill? Chances are slim.

If there ever was a state rocked by tragic auto accidents in which reasonable authorities believe that lives could have been saved by seat belts, Kansas is it. Graves is confident that if he wanted to, he could probably get almost all the Kansas City Chiefs footballers to Topeka to lobby for the bill, after the death of Derrick Thomas. And even for those who don't follow sports, legislators were in town last week for daily stories about a tragic car crash in which a teenager--unbelted--was killed in an accident.

Graves doesn't seem inclined to call the football team. And next week, there'll be another car wreck with someone not famous killed while not wearing a seat belt.

 

Feb. 11, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers on Feb. 7)

Almost every year, some group of relatively cute kids suggests some cute bill that they’d like the Legislature to turn into state law. If they’re cute enough, sure, we get an official state fish or turtle or something like that.

It’s one of those little rites each year. Serious legislators and serious reporters all get grim and say that it’s a waste of time.

Now, chances are good that the reporters and legislators didn’t spend much time mulling the merits of that last change in probate law, or whether surveyors should have to sign off on real estate plats. For other things that are serious but apparently so far the other side of cute, legislators and reporters tend to get grim and say they’re unfamiliar with the issue so it must not be newsworthy.

All of that leads us to a bill that a bunch of high schoolers from somewhere out in the western reaches of the 2nd Congressional district decided they’d like to introduce into the Legislature to learn about how government works.

So, naturally these being high-schoolers, they didn’t pick an official state bunny rabbit, or suggest that a certain cloud be the official state cloud. Nope, they proposed, and got introduced by a friend of their local legislator, a bill that requires students to take a lot of abstinence-based sex education classes, study up on HIV and AIDS and the rest of that very serious stuff, and if they completed all the courses, well, something new would happen.

That “something new” is that the school nurse or counselor could give them condoms to...study, we guess.

We flatly don’t know how the students came up with that bill. Neither does their local state representative, who by the way is Bruce Larkin, a Democrat from Baileyville, who would probably have preferred that the high schoolers had say, wanted blacktop to be the official state road surface, or sunup the official state curfew on prom night.

But we’re both wondering whether the students missed the mark slightly. Now, it can’t hurt kids to learn all they can about abstinence, and sexually transmitted diseases and grown-up responsibilities and all...but there’s a chance that the condoms should to go the kids who fail the courses...
***
Now, there’s always something new coming up in the way of crime, we guess. And that means legislators have to keep changing the laws to stay a step behind the actual criminals, but usually several steps ahead of us regular citizens who do other things for a living.

Well, there’s a special crime tool out there that is relatively interesting. It’s a sack. A specially treated sack that somehow reflects or deadens or otherwise screws up the electronic theft alarms that retailers put on some clothing or record albums or other relatively high value-to-bulk items. The idea is once you put something inside the special sack, you can walk it past the little gatey thing at the exit to stores, and the alarms won’t go off and the store managers won’t know you’ve stolen stuff from them.

Now, who would have ever thought of inventing a sack that defeats theft alarms. And who would have thought to make a bunch of ’em and sell them to shoplifters. It just never would have occurred to most of us.

Well, settle down. There’s a bill introduced into the House Judiciary Committee that makes manufacturing, selling, offering for sale or distributing those sacks a moderately serious felony. And to think a day or two ago, we didn’t even know there was such a thing.

Feb. 3, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers on Jan. 31)

You know how outraged everyone was when it sounded like a Topeka law firm was going to get $196 million for its part in whipping the cigarette makers into paying the state $1.6 billion for, well, whatever it was that the tobacco boys were believed to have done?

We were ready to take ’em out behind the barn and make Entz and Chanay of Topeka cough up some of that money because, well, just because the number was too big.

Well, now that we hear that the Kansas firm is getting just about $27 million, some of the air came out of that peasant uprising, didn’t it?

We Railsters who watch the politics of issues just such as this are now having to reassess what we believe the outcome of this $27 million will be. See, everything has an outcome. That’s because politicians are natural-born meddlers, or they wouldn’t be politicians at all. They’d be regular people.

Back when Reader’s Digest asserted that the Kansas lawyers Entz and Chanay were going to mop up about $196 million, State Rep. Tony Powell, R-Wichita, had a dream.

Now, Powell is no friend of Kansas Attorney General Carla Stovall and by implication, he’s no friend of her old law firm that she hired to represent Kansas in this little tobacco unpleasantness.

Powell, a Reader’s Digest reader, was shocked and outraged as only a lawyer can be who has never caught a fish nearly so large as the one that he believed Entz and Chanay landed. He wants the state to take half of their winnings...er, earnings.

Well, back then, which was just last week, half of $196 million looked like, what...$98 million for the state and the same amount for Entz and Chanay, and the deal seemed doable. See, $98 million is still more than a couple of guys who became lawyers instead of tree surgeons or chiropractors really need, and $98 million is enough that the state could actually do something identifiable with it. That’s identifiable as in building a building, or starting a new program or some “one specific thing” that we could all associate with the mugging of one specific law firm.

But $27 million?

Now, if the bill worked out right, the state would get about $13 million and change, and if Entz and Chanay hired some good tax lawyers, probably quite a bit less.

All of a sudden, what seemed like the chance for the state to make a killing, and still leave the lawyers so much money they’ll never have to settle for well drinks again, has shrunk. Instead of grabbing nearly $100 million, the effort to tax half of the proceeds seems more like stealing a waitress’ tip off a restaurant table. And because we’ve become accustomed to that $100 million range, well, this doesn’t seem like a real heroic undertaking, does it?

Once, or maybe twice removed from the whole fray, Gov. Bill Graves merely says that all lawyers charge too much, and while that’s a shame...well, they helped win the state $1.6 billion that we never had before, and that’s to the good. Graves is figuring, of course, if they hadn’t won the state any money, they wouldn’t get any money, either, which they wouldn’t.

And Entz and Chanay really didn’t have any idea how big a fish they were going to land when they took this job at the direction of their former employee, Stovall, who probably knew chances of the state winning were fairly good, but didn’t have any idea how much money could be involved in legal fees.

So, they’re going to get half of the $54 million total fee for lawyers who lined up on Kansas’ side (the contract between Stovall and Entz and Chanay calls for that firm and the national firms that also represented Kansas to divvy up the legal fee award). And the Kansas Supreme Court may or may not have final say on how much is too much for what Entz and Chanay did.

Now, Powell maintains that at most E & C worked maybe $200,000 worth. C, in private conversations, always got serious when asked whether he’d downloaded any good motions recently. Surely nothing they did was worth $196 million, but boy, here we go again, it could have been worth $27 million?

That’s because there is value to being in the right place at the right time, and licensed to practice before Kansas judges, unlike the state’s two national law firms (who were hectoring tobacco companies while Entz & Chanay were looking for a few good wills to write).

This may turn out to be a deal where deflation has done its dirty work. Nobody has very much high ground when the settlement drops from a $196 million level to $27 million.

Stovall looks crass and defensive, but, then again, she’s the attorney general and she makes the decisions. She thinks Powell’s bill is unconstitutional, but...well, she’s a little fussy about this entire topic.

Powell, well, he looks like a tobacco fee multimillionaire wannabe. Or, maybe just an attorney general wannabe.

Kansas? Well, it looks like we’re $1.6 billion to the good. And, no, the $54 million doesn’t come out of Kansas’ end of the settlement, so it’s not like we’re taking money out of the mouths of anyone who was going to do anything very noble with it, anyway.

Oh, but riches have their own rewards. See, by this time, every mutual fund salesman in the western world has called Entz and Chanay at their homes during supper trying to sell them stocks. And...there’s a chance they are going to have to hire a lobbyist to defeat Powell’s bill to take half their money...the other half....