July
2001
July 26, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 23, 2001)Taking some casualties
Now, this is going to look a little silly at first, but there is good reason to believe that the State Board of Regents may have to take some casualties in next year’s legislative battle for the good of the state.
What? That sounds a little out of character for the regents, the crew that sets the vision for the state’s postsecondary education and training institutions? It sure does, but the Regents have some big plans ahead for the state’s three research institutions: Kansas State University in Manhattan, the University of Kansas’ Medical Center in Kansas City and Wichita State University, in Wichita, of course.
Well, it just might turn out that the regents have more guts than the Legislature, which would surprise few who know members of the Legislature, but which might just be a surprise for those who knew the “old regents” and are just getting acquainted with the “new regents.”
The deal to watch is that next year, the Legislature is expected to have almost no new money to spend on anything. Some agencies are going to be asked to cut their spending, actually make reductions, not just reduce the rate of increase.
It’s amid that background of smoke and shells that the new, bold regents are proposing a $110 million bond issue to build some buildings that can draw federal research grants to the state. And the regents are proposing that the Legislature next session promise to spend $10 million a year to pay off those bonds, and after five years, the regents will finish paying them off.
Now, that’s risk taking.
And, that risk-taking is going to be proposed at a time when the operating budgets of regent institutions are being penciled in for no more money than the current fiscal year at best.
Here’s the deal: the regents have finally learned that the federal government finances billions of dollars a year in research–health research, ag research, aviation research–but the federal government generally likes its research done indoors and it generally likes that indoors to be already paid for when it sends out the money for research projects.
Yes, there’s a presumption that the federal government has paid for a lot of campus research facilities that never got off the ground, and that the federal government has finally wised up and decided to finance research, not second homes and girlfriends for contractors.
Anyhow, KU Med wants $65 million for facilities in which to study health sciences, K-State wants $42 million for buildings in which to study food security (think foot-and-mouth, Karnal Bundt) and Wichita State will get in for $10 million for aerospace engineering. Yes, that’s a tad over $110 million, but the universities will work out the differences.
The regents are confident that they have the real deal here, that if Kansas builds research facilities, the grants and research projects will come.
It’s bold. It sounds risky, but then, doing nothing is risky, too. If we don’t get something interesting going with university research in Kansas pretty soon, we’re going to lose the professors, lose the research assistants, and wind up with a lot of aging, tenured faculty at the universities who will turn out generally dull-normal students to keep Kansas moving onward and upward.
Want to guess what’s going to happen if salaries stay flat for professors next year, and money is instead invested in getting some research facilities that will draw some research funds and generally get Kansas’ economy in gear?
Not hard to guess, is it.
July 19, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 16, 2001)Sort of a contribution
Now, there's only one candidate almost sure-enough in the GOP gubernatorial nomination race, and already, Gov. Bill Graves is tossing a big political bone toward him--House Speaker Kent Glasscock, R-Manhattan.
Glasscock has set up a gubernatorial campaign committee, but hasn't filed the papers that officially make him a candidate. So he's probably two-thirds candidate.
That bone? The promise to fiddle around some this summer and fall pressing for a tax increase, and then quietly put away the fiddle and recommend a no-new-taxes budget to the 2002 Kansas Legislature.
What's that amount to? Well, first, it keeps the governor in the GOP liberal/moderate game, by studying a tax increase, wishing that he had more money to spend on public elementary and secondary education (hereinafter referred to as K-12), and then, essentially removing the item from the mix of issues that will arise during the last year of Graves' term. That year, incidentally, is the last year of Glasscock's leadership of the House as he ramps up for a gubernatorial election campaign.
It means that a popular governor won't be clubbing a moderately popular, if politically indeterminate House Speaker with an issue that the chamber Glasscock leads won't go for.
Railsters consider the governor's plan, unveiled at a press conference last week, to be the equivalent of an in-kind political contribution--not money, but a campaign contribution nonetheless because it means that Glasscock is going to get virtually a free ride on the only issue that most of the press in Kansas considers more important than, well, we guess the right to send newspapers to subscribers by low-cost second-class mail.
Imagine the boost it gives a campaigner not to have to respond to the No. 1 political question of the year by saying over and over again that while Glasscock is a big fan of public education, the governor hasn't pushed the issue, and therefore, Glasscock doesn't have to lead, or even appear to lead, the House toward more funding for the K-12 industry.
It means that Glasscock can wear the boxing trunks, the gloves, probably even the mouthpiece that fighters wear, and when the bell clangs, can dance around the ring as a winner because his opponent didn't show up. A default win, but a win nonetheless on the K-12 funding issue.
Now, there's a way for this political plan to backfire on the governor and Glasscock, but it doesn't look likely.
What the governor is saying is that sometime around September, after the weather cools a bit, he's going to float out a tax increase plan in support of K-12. If, by about Halloween, there are torchlight parades every night by members of the House and Senate demanding the right to consider a tax increase, then the plan has failed. But since nobody can authorize mileage for legislators to descend on Topeka torches in hand and since raising taxes is probably not the soundest political platform for members of the Legislature heading into an election year, don't look for that to happen.Is Graves' decision to go through the motions of seeking tax increases for K-12, being shouted down, and then preparing a no-new-taxes budget going to work? Will Graves deliver in his State of the State address a vision for the state that paves the road for a Glasscock governorship?
It's starting to sound like it, isn't it?
July 12, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 9, 2001)Disassembling a state agency
OK, we've all heard about "zero-based" budgeting, and how it is supposed to be the grown-up way to figure out how much money a government agency needs to do its job.
And, it sounds pretty efficient. This summer, we'll find out whether the Kansas Legislature is a group of grown-ups that can make zero-based budgeting work.
Chances? Probably no better than 50-50 that the Legislature's Interim Committee on Budget can actually zero-base something, anything, and then figure out whether the state apportions too much or too little or maybe just the right amount to some relatively unlucky state agency.
Zero-based budgeting is when a group of leaders literally disassemble a state agency and see what it really ought to cost to do whatever it is that the agency is charged by state law with doing for us.
It starts with a review of just what the Legislature has told an agency to do. Whether it is check the accuracy of gasoline pumps or water the Statehouse grounds or call Kansans to find out whether they've paid their taxes in full.
And this zero-based budget is a lot different than the way the state budgets your tax dollars to state agencies now. Currently, lawmakers seize upon a state agency's budget as recommended by the governor, figure out whether the agency did a pretty good job of whatever it is supposed to be doing, and then add maybe two or three percent to its budget to account for raises that its workers get, maybe throw in a little for utilities and figure that the agency has been put through the ringer.
Under zero-based budgeting, the agency is disassembled on paper, and legislators go through the list of what its responsibilities are, figure out how many people, how many copying machines, how many computers and how much other gear is necessary to do the job, and appropriate about that amount and not a dime more.
All that, in theory, is supposed to comprise a zero-based budget. It requires a lot more steps than just adding a couple or three percent to the agency's existing budget, but it is supposed to be fiscally more satisfying.
And, it sounds like the right way to do a budget, really. Nobody doesn't want, say, the Department of Agriculture or Revenue or something or other not to have enough money to do its job. That's not workmanlike. But, nobody wants an agency to have too much money, because then the new furniture catalogs come out of the bottom drawer and everyone gets desks the size of aircraft carriers, and those fancy credenzas for workers to put their family photographs on and store their lunch sacks in until noon.
Will zero-based budgeting work? Well, maybe yes, maybe no.
That's why the Interim Budget Committee is going to try it on just one agency, to see whether it turns up anything, or whether the citizen legislators have enough time in one summer to dismantle and reassemble a state agency. It's going to take time, it's going to take research and there is always the chance that legislators are going to find out that some agency is doing a lot with not enough money and be embarrassed into increasing appropriations for some agency.
It all sounds pretty businesslike, though. It sounds like something that a state with its unlimited taxing authority really ought to take a look at.
And, surprisingly, it's something that many new legislators figure has been being done anyway.
Will it work? Will state government--or at least the one agency that will be named later and disassembled and reassembled this year--actually get more efficient, more cost-effective, or cost less to operate?
You've been in Kansas long enough to have your own ideas. But Railsters are betting the chances are just 50-50, or thereabouts.
July 5, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 2, 2001)Summer's heating up
In about a month, look for the real action in reapportionment to heat up to an August-in-Kansas sizzle. That's when the Legislature gets the population figures from which new House and Senate districts are going to be drawn.
See, all this talk about congressional reapportionment, whether the eastern Kansas 3rd congressional district can be rejiggered to make sure that Democrat U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore of Lenexa can't be reelected to a third term, or whether the 1st District will contain either Kansas State University or Fort Riley, is pretty abstract for the Kansas Legislature.
What REALLY matters is whether the House's 125 members and the Senate's 40 members can keep their seats if they want.
After all, there will always be a congressman from somewhere in Kansas who might or might not get that extra dab of highway money for the state, or get a research grant for something or other at some university.
But when you talk to legislators, that congressional stuff gets a little distant, and it's much more interesting to talk about whether the guy or gal in the next seat is going to have a district to go home to, or whether his or her house has been moved into someone else's legislative district.
The U.S. Census is done, we now know about everything but the average shoe size in every hamlet and city in the state, so what's the holdup on starting legislative redistricting? It's massaging the census data to remove college students from their college towns and reapportioning them back to their homes, and moving soldiers for reapportionment purposes off their bases and back to their homes. (Kansas doesn't do that little dance of moving students and soldiers for congressional reapportionment.)
Expect that massaging of census numbers to be done by around the first of August, and the neck-craning to start in earnest.
Meanwhile, however, there are enough numbers that--if you don't pay a lot of attention to college towns or military bases--you can draw some pretty good conclusions about which legislators may have to make a lot of new friends in the next year.
Republicans control both houses of the Legislature, of course, but some of them are from areas that are, at least from tentative figures, pretty sparsely populated; some have dropped as many as 4,000 in population in the last decade. And at least one Democrat (Sen. David Haley, of Kansas City) is in a district that is more than 13,000 people "light" of the roughly 67,200
people who will be in new Senate districts drawn in reapportionment.Who's on top? Well, at least 26 of the Senate's 40 districts need to add population, and at least 84 of the House's 125 districts need to be redrawn to include more people. And, because Railsters, the hardy if small band of us who virtually live in the Statehouse, keep track of everything by political party, 17 of the Senate's 30 districts now held by Republicans need to add population, and nine of the Senate's 10 Democratic districts need to grow. Oh, and 46 of the 79 Republican districts and 38 of the 46 Democratic districts in the House need to add population by expanding into other districts.
...And add to that land war in both chambers the real estate ingredient--some legislators live just a few yards from the edge of their districts. That means they could well be put into a district that has two or more current legislators...and they'll have to fight it out amongst themselves at the 2002 elections to see who wins the right to spend their winters in Topeka, home of the free and land of the lobbyists.
See what fun we're going to have?