Newspaper Columns - July 2005

July 28, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 25, 2005)

Better than square-dancing

In case you missed it, and I didn’t notice a lot of people milling around the Statehouse last week waiting, the state closed the books on Fiscal Year 2005 (which had ended June 30) and has money left over.

Now, that’s always a good thing, of course, to end the fiscal year with money in the bank. But for Statehouse loungers, the ending balance is a wondrous thing.

Officially, the state ended the fiscal year with not only more money than needed to pay the bills, but with more money than it thought it was going to have left over.

Here’s how that works.

The state had been estimating that at the close of FY 2005, it would have about $396 million on hand. As it turns out, the year ended with more than $443 million on hand. Sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it?

Well, on July 1, good old Fiscal Year 2006 started, and all the money left over from FY 2005 was transferred into FY 2006, which the Legislature has already budgeted for, and which projections indicated would end next June 30 with only about $187 million on hand. Lots of new money spent on K-12 education, remember.

Well, the additional $47 million in FY 2005 means that instead of the current fiscal year ending with just $187 million in the bank, it will likely have nearly $234 million. That’s important because the next fiscal year is really rough. Next fiscal year, FY 2007, will require probably hundreds of millions of new dollars be spent on elementary and secondary education.

In fact, projections for FY 2007–which also happens to be an election year–anticipate that school spending and general inflation in the budget would yield not only no ending balance, but $80 million worth of bills that the state isn’t expected to have the money to pay. Because the state can’t operate in a deficit, it means that the early projections were for an election year legislative session in which taxes would have to be raised.

That’s gotta be the worse possible thing for members of the Legislature–the entire House stands for reelection next year–or the governor, who is seeking a second term, to carry into an election season.

But, that $47 million in extra revenue that was discovered when the books were officially closed on FY 2005, and which flow into FY 2006 and which will flow into FY 2007, represents a silver bullet for tax-shy elected officials. It cuts by more than half the deficit projected for FY 2007–which the governor will write the budget for this winter, and which the Legislature will spend all winter and spring arguing over–and if the Kansas economy is really growing strongly, there’s a chance that the $47 million extra in FY 2005 might mean another $47 million or more in FY 2006 and more money still in FY 2007.

This projecting of tax revenue increases is more popular in the Statehouse than square-dancing. Tax receipts are the lifeblood of government, and if prosperity means taxes yield more money without raising rates, well, it doesn’t get much better than that for state government and its elected leaders.

Now, there’s still virtually no money, even if projections remain rosy, for significant new funds for K-12 education, and that is of course a problem. Because next winter, legislators are going to have to dedicate maybe $200 million or $300 million more to schools, and while there’s still money that can be cut from spending, carefully, there’s still a deficit looming in an election year.

That’s why gambling lobbyists are feeling good about next legislative session. They’re offering the state non-tax money if legislators will OK more casino gambling. Maybe, just maybe, enough that legislators won’t have to pass a tax increase in an election year. They hope...

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Recall last week’s At the Rail about Republicans looking at just whom they will allow to vote in the party’s primary? No, instead of figuring out how to expand the primary voter pool, the Republican State Committee by a voice vote Saturday rescinded last year’s resolution that would have made the GOP primary open to registered but unaffiliated voters.

Or, to cover the other base, Kansas Republicans may choose to find ways to not face an interesting little dilemma this weekend in Wichita.

The dilemma is, of course, all about who gets to choose the party’s nominees for the big dance, the 2006 general election. The issue may, or may not, come up at a Republican State Committee meeting Saturday in Wichita.

Democrats last year, remember, decided to let registered but unaffiliated voters participate in their primary elections. At least 11,000 Kansans took the Democrats up on the offer, and while it may have just changed one Democratic legislative primary outcome, it was a groundbreaking event in Kansas.

See, the neat deal about that registered-but-unaffiliated vote in primaries is that hundreds of thousands of Kansans don’t have a party affiliation. Some registered to vote when they got a driver’s license and probably would have traded away that registration for a choice among pictures to put on their driver’s license. Others who feel strongly about being independent for professional or business or family–yes, family–reasons, they get to vote in a primary without leaving any tracks. They don’t have to register as Democrats, they haven’t declared a party affiliation, they just vote and go home, still unaffiliated.

While Democrats are always looking for new voters of any stripe, and there is that feeling that if voters participated–even anonymously–in a Democratic primary, those voters might be Democrat-leaners. That can only be good for Democrats.

Oh, and that "unaffiliated" threshold also is important. Neither party wants the opposite party’s voters tilting primary election results, voting, for example, for the inevitable kook or probationer, who can get on the ballot for just a small filing fee, to provide the easiest target to defeat at the general election. So, registered Republicans couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary. Their unaffiliated friends could.

Last fall, just too late for the deadline for the registered but unaffiliated policy to be applied to the GOP primary election, the party state committee adopted, 68-50, a resolution calling for the party to put together a by-law change that would officially open the GOP primary to registered but unaffiliated voters. The resolution is a little shy of what the party believes is necessary to make that change official and permanent state party policy, and there are Republicans who like it that way... shy.

Why wouldn’t a party want as many people as possible to participate in its primary election? There are several reasonable reasons. First, primary elections are not generally well-attended events. Turnout is much lower than in general elections. That means if a candidate can get a lot of voters to the polls, a primary win tees that candidate up for–in many legislative districts in the state–virtual certainty of election. In a not-well-attended primary, it also means that the party’s hard-core voter base gets to choose the candidate. If you’ve worked in the party for years, put out the signs, licked the envelopes, there is a little natural hesitancy to let dilettantes play the game.

Conservatives like closed primaries which in most districts they can dominate safely... without having to run the risk that unaffiliated voters who may wind up voting Republican in the general election anyway, or who are ticket-splitters, will nominate candidates who aren’t toeing the line on some issue.

Practically, the conservative wing of the GOP has done well in primaries in most legislative districts in the state, and you have to wonder whether it’s in conservatives’ best interest to open the primaries. For fans of enlightened self-interest, it doesn’t sound like a good deal for conservatives.

But, there’s that second shoe. If the GOP primary winners are too conservative, Republicans who are moderate-to-liberal vote Democratic in the general election where there are serious Democratic candidates on the general election ballot, too.

From the old Cold War days when we were told that operatives in Washington, D.C., and Moscow were on duty 24 hours a day, their fingers poised just above the buttons to launch nuclear missiles at each other, a phrase caught on among folks who were interested in the possible outcome: mutual assured destruction.

The concept was that if one nation launched missiles, the other would, too, and before anyone could stop it, both the United States and the then-Soviet Union would be destroyed. That mutual assured destruction capability held everyone in check.

Several levels down the food chain, there was last week a mutually assured destruction showdown going on between the Kansas Supreme Court and the Kansas Legislature. The "assured destruction" was a potential court order that because the Legislature had not adequately funded public schools, the court would order schools closed, or, more likely, not opened this fall.

That was the public side of this little war of the worlds between the courts and the Legislature.

Attempts to defuse the potential that the court would rule the Legislature hadn’t provided funds for a suitable education and order schools not to open sprang from the Legislature. Members of the Legislature variously believed schools had enough money, the court couldn’t order more money to be spent or that the Legislature is the biggest dog in this fight, and the court ought to accept that.

Most noteworthy attempt for the Legislature to win this fight was, of course, passage of a resolution that would let voters decide any of several issues.

One was that the Legislature was the only branch of state government that could appropriate money. That proposal was really all about the Legislature and its power–and had virtually nothing to do with education of the state’s children, but made legislators feel good.

Another was that specifically in the issue of education, the court couldn’t order any remedy for the state’s failure to finance a suitable education that included closing schools. It was not only prospective, looking toward future legal rulings, but also retrospective, reaching back to an already-issued order that eventually prodded the Legislature in its 12-day special session to increase funding for schools. The Legislature could have–if voters approved the constitutional change–reeled back money that was already appropriated to schools.

Yet another would just say that schools couldn’t at any time be closed by the court, which, we guess, means that the only reason schools would ever close would be on account of snow.

None of those resolutions was approved by the Legislature. You won’t have to put back a clean shirt to go vote on a proposed constitutional amendment this fall, when you’re going to be busy getting children started in school, anyway.

Not-so-well noted was a clause in the special session’s $148 million school finance bill that was essentially a poison pill for the court. It said basically that there were two items in the bill that the court might find either unconstitutional or just the wrong way to go to equalize the financing of education from school district to school district, and if the court chose any others to reject, the entire bill would be void. Twelve days’ work for nothing.

That’s almost as good as a constitutional amendment. It was putting up two straw men which the court was allowed to defeat, but if the court wandered into the rest of the bill, well, there just would have been no bill, no new money for K-12 education.

The court in its order of last Friday didn’t wander into forbidden territory, and didn’t trigger that self-destruct mechanism. It didn’t even mention it, but we’re fairly certain that the justices read it, and were probably wondering, what if...

The special session’s product was just an interim step in increasing funding for schools, and there will be other confrontations along the way, notably next legislative session when it appears hundreds of millions of dollars will have to be raised and spent by the Legislature for schools. It feels like the mutually assured destruction phase of this cold war standoff isn’t over... yet.

It took the smoke and the fire from the legislative special session to produce a slim little document that gives Kansans their first real down-to-earth look at just what the elementary and secondary education industry means to the economy of the state.

Yes, we know about the nearly $3 billion spent on public education, about it being more than half the state’s general fund budget, we know all the pat little figures that are thrown about dealing with K-12 education from the Statehouse level. But at the local level, well, there are some interesting little insights.

For example, in 47 of Kansas’ 105 counties, the payroll of the local school district amounts to 10 percent or more of all wages paid in the county. No, not in the major population centers, but those little counties where populations are low–where there is business going on, but not on a large scale–the school district payroll is a major generator of economic activity.

Take Elk County, which is in southeast Kansas. In that county, according to this information from the education lobby, the school district general fund payroll amounts to 22 percent of the county’s total wages from all sources. That changes, of course, when non-payroll income is factored in (pensions and such) but that presents a pretty good picture of the importance of schools to their local communities.

Oh, and in another 17 districts, school district payroll represents 15 percent or more of the total amount of payrolls of all sorts in the county.

Now it’s looking like not the court nor the Legislature–anything short of a snowstorm–can close a school district down, but the economic weight of schools has become a major issues among lawmakers who are looking toward consolidating school districts.

Consolidation is going to happen, count on it. Spending by the state on schools is a big enough ticket that in the future there will be some sort of consolidation–or efficiency effort that falls well short of blending districts into unmanageably large, un-traversable administrative blobs. Think, instead–and some are–of the same number of schoolhouses, the same number of teachers, but regionally centralized services. It’s consolidation without punishing the children or their parents who have to drive them farther to the next school down the road.

Take bookkeeping, for example. There may be no real reason that the non-educational business of writing checks to the gas company can’t be done from somewhere outside the confines of the school district. Or, the payroll checks for all of eastern or western Kansas, or maybe all the state, written by a small corps of people sitting in Topeka or Wichita or probably anywhere but Bangalore, India.

We’ll still need local school boards to deal with local policies and there’ll have to be someone in authority in each district to make sure it is carried out, to provide administration and to respond to emergencies. But in the next couple of years look for almost invisible consolidation, behind-the-scenes consolidation, to become a fact of life in Kansas.

That’s how the state is going to improve elementary and secondary education, by letting districts concentrate almost entirely on education, not the business of education.

What’s going to happen to those sparsely populated counties where schools are now economic powerhouses?

Those districts may well learn that they now have the money available to offer top-flight salaries to teachers, they may become some of the first districts where newly minted schoolteachers look for jobs or where skilled experienced teachers send resumes as they decide to pursue their trade in areas where there is less congestion, a little slower pace of life.

We’ll be watching, because there’s no reason the economic boost that K-12 education brings to smaller districts should diminish, but it may be reshaped.