July 2009
July 30, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on July 27, 2009)Balding gracefully?
There’s an interesting little phenomenon cropping up in Kansas politics: The birth of political action committees that you can’t tell what or whom they are for or against.
For people who follow politics closely—closely enough to wonder who is for or against a candidate—the political action committees that contribute to the campaign is a tipoff of just who the candidate’s friends are.
The whole idea of a political action committee is that it allows people to come together and pool their money to support candidates they believe will support issues that the contributors are interested in. It’s giving campaign money to folks who will help you—and a PAC has the ability to give enough money pooled from its contributors to influence candidates to support the PAC’s interests.
That’s why businesses, doctors, lawyers, unions, homebuilders, nearly every specific interest group has a PAC in Kansas to support its favorite candidates.
Know a candidate’s friends and you know something about the candidate. Your mother told you that: You know a person by the friends he/she keeps, or maybe by the friends who give a candidate campaign money.
Well, now comes the tricky part. Those PACs are required by state law to file reports with the Secretary of State’s office that help people find out what the PAC is about, requiring a name that reflects the “trade, profession or primary interest of the committee.”
So, when the Moving Kansas Forward PAC listed its primary interest as “promoting the election of responsible public servants,” the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission wondered whether that tells people anything. Probably not.
Now, Moving Kansas Forward is a good idea, of course. But how do you do that? That’s what has Ethics apprehensive.
If you organized “Mother’s Love” or “Gracefully Balding” or “Cute, But Not Smart” PACs, who gets the money, and what sort of public policy is the PAC trying to encourage? Hmmm…
Yes, there’s a purpose for naming a PAC so you can tell what it is for or against, and even if the name is tricky, somewhere the PAC probably ought to say what it wants elected government officials to do or not do.
A little thing? Maybe, but probably something that Ethics ought to figure out a way to manage so we know who’s getting money from whom for what.
Because nobody goes bald gracefully…
July 23, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on July 20, 2009)
Abandoning programs…
OK, we’ve all been hearing about a tight state budget, about services that the state can’t afford to provide anymore. Just two weeks into brand new Fiscal Year 2010, we’ve got our first example.
It’s not a service that many of us need or use, but the Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced last week that it is discontinuing its little-known Clandestine Drug Lab Response Program.
It’s a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of program that, after the police are gone, cleans up homes and offices where people have been making illegal drugs, generally methamphetamines.
And, be assured, this is the start of small programs, many of which are actually a pretty good idea, which will be the subject of short press releases announcing that agencies don’t have the money to continue.
The drug lab response? Say you have a home or a trailer that you’ve rented out to someone who decides to gather the dangerous chemicals to cook up meth. You don’t know what they’re doing, the rent checks come in on time, and the first you know something is amiss is when police call you to say that the rental property you had is now contaminated with drug residues and is unfit to re-rent until it is chemically cleaned up. You now have an asset that isn’t producing you any revenue.
The KDHE crew removes hazardous chemicals—a good thing that takes specialized training and often those people wearing white coveralls so they don’t get contaminated—and tests the structure to determine what else needs to be done to render it safe again, say, for rental to a family with a baby who will be crawling around on the floor where dust and residue and stuff from dangerous drugs remains in the carpet or on the walls or somewhere that an adult or a baby could lick it.
The landlord does the fixing up and cleaning up and KDHE tells the landlord what needs to be done to return the property to the rental or sales market—without its owner assuming potentially crippling liabilities for any illnesses that occur to future occupants of the place.
This seems like a little thing. But many of us have friends or kids or our kids have friends who are looking for somewhere cheap to live and safe to live in. It’s more than just the 170 illegal drug labs that have been cleaned-up after, it’s potential homes or offices for Kansans. Just because you rent to the wrong people once doesn’t mean you should virtually lose that rental property, have it prominently labeled as unsafe and unrentable in the future.
This is a little program, but it’s just the first as state agencies tighten their budgets and abandon what are generally good programs because of their cost.
Just wait. There will be more…
July 16, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers July 13)It’s a tough one
This is the time of year when local units of government—cities, counties, school districts, for example—are putting together their budgets for the next calendar year, and it’s going to be tough.
The problem, of course, is that tax revenues are likely to shrink this year.
For cities and counties that have local option sales taxes, they’re braced for those tax receipts to drop next year. People either have less money to spend on sales-taxable items or they’re spending less on those purchases to save money.
For those without sales tax revenues, it’s mostly property taxes, and this year it is likely that most taxing authorities are going to have to increase mill levies. That is often the death warrant for those seeking reelection.
The real problem is that there is likely to be either small growth or negative growth in the amount of property that local units of government levy taxes against.
It means the end of what was nearly a free ride for cities, counties and school districts. When property values were increasing, either through higher home prices or new homes and businesses being built, the same mill levy raised more money each year. Local officials could proudly proclaim that they didn’t raise the mill levy even though rising assessed valuations meant that the same mill levy produced more revenue. There is this little public notice that governments run in the local newspapers about the actual dollar increase in the budget, but hardly anyone ever noticed those ads.
This year, it’s likely to be level or even decreased spending by local government. And increased mill levies are likely.
So, what happens when the new mill levies are announced?
First, the local newspapers go nuts, if you’ll pardon the term. The attention, of course, is given the mill levy because that is what most readers know. It won’t be often that the first couple paragraphs of the stories will announce that the taxable valuation of the city or county or school districts has decreased. It’s the mill levy because not increasing the mill levy is what local officials bragged about for years.
It is going to take a dramatic change in terminology for local officials to start talking about actual dollars approved for expenditure, which over the past several years have consistently risen while that mill levy was held level.
And, it’s going to make some property owners feel a little sheepish griping about rising mill levies when for years as long as the levy didn’t rise, they didn’t pay much attention to what money was being spent on…
July 9, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers July 6, 2009)Pulling a Lassie?
Yes, he’s said it over and over again. Gov. Mark Parkinson, who ascended to the governorship when Kathleen Sebelius became U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, keeps saying that he won’t seek election to a full term as governor next year.
He may not. It would be keeping his word, and there’s never a downside to that.
But, if he manages to get the state through this difficult budget year and puts together a reasonable budget for the coming fiscal year, well, that would be the equivalent of Lassie pulling a child out of a burning barn. That’s what Lassie did each week, and we all kept watching.
Now, is balancing the budget the political equivalent of that level of heroics? With the fiscal problem facing Kansas, it just might be.
Look for some interesting political insider maneuvering in the next few weeks, some by Parkinson to make sure that if he doesn’t seek election next year, he’ll be remembered as the guy who saved Kansas from its most severe budget crisis in memory.
Some of that maneuvering may be by Republicans to make sure that Parkinson at some point has to do something so distasteful and drastic to save the state’s budget that he virtually kills his chances for popular election. Republicans are happy to hear Parkinson say he won’t seek election, but being the party of belts and suspenders, they’d like to make sure he couldn’t be elected, anyway.
So far, it’s all about the budget, about Kansas digging out from the recession, and Parkinson proposes the least-political-heat approach, cutting the already-in-law budget for this fiscal year and borrowing from agency reserve funds in hopes that no more budget cuts are necessary. He’s taking an approach that disrupts government—as the Legislature funded it—as little as possible, making small cuts in spending approved by lawmakers.
The trick will be to see whether Republicans go along with Parkinson’s approach, which so far is likely to generate the minimum political splash-back on the man who says he won’t seek the governorship.
For long-time political junkies, this seems easy…too easy…
This is going to be an interesting one for political junkies to watch. Whether you believe Parkinson won’t run, or if he decides that he is the truth and the light and the way and must run, this is going to be a fun couple months for political junkies.
July 2, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on June 29, 2009)When it just doesn’t feel right
We’re all Americans, and Kansans here, right?
You know how sometimes you read about something happening that…just doesn’t feel right. It’s just not how we do things in America and in Kansas.
It’s probably one of the beauties of the Constitution. You really don’t’ have to have studied it at length; you can tell if something is unconstitutional by the way it feels in your stomach. It’s that “this doesn’t feel right” sense that we Americans and Kansans have.
The Kansas Supreme Court apparently has that sense, and at least on one occasion, the Kansas Legislature didn’t.
The case was a guy in Emporia, who on July 6, 2006, was called out of the passenger seat of a car in a parking lot at an Emporia convenience store by an officer who learned that there was an outstanding warrant for the passenger’s arrest.
Nothing fancy here, the guy was wanted by police, he was arrested. But, because some legislators were interested in “getting tough on crime” in the 2006 session, they had enacted a law, which went into effect July 1, 2006, that allowed officers to search a vehicle for just about anything they could think of. The Emporia officer searched the car and subsequently arrested the guy for possession of drug paraphernalia. What was the officer looking for? “I don’t know until I find it,” he testified at the trial.
The law change had been simple, from searching for evidence of “the” crime to evidence of “a” crime of any sort.
Basically if you can think of a reason to arrest someone for anything, you can search the car for…well, whatever it might turn up. Get the suspect back to the stationhouse and find out that he/she isn’t a missing 9-11 terrorist or isn’t the person who robbed the liquor store, and you apologize, release him/her…except if you have found anything in the search of his/her vehicle that justifies an arrest.
The actual arrest might be just a diversion to get to search a car of someone who looks suspicious to a law enforcement officer for reasons of race, haircut, maybe even wearing a University of Kansas T-shirt in Manhattan.
Stemming from the Emporia case, the Supreme Court last week struck down the “a” crime law, so that searches of a vehicle are related to the reason for which a person is arrested. That sounds pretty fair. Vehicle searches won’t turn into just hunting expeditions.
Not anything that is going to affect most of us…but it doesn’t upset our stomachs… And that’s a good thing.