June 1999

June 29, 1999
    One of those really regular events, whether the state is flush with money or not, is the Legislature's summer interim committee on tax cuts.
    They call it the Interim Committee on Assessment and Taxation. But nobody is watching it because they care a whit about the technical aspects of assessing property for tax purposes, or because they care philosophically about the perfect blend of taxes so that each segment of the state's economy contributes its fair share to the enterprise of government.
     Everyone watches the tax committee hoping that he or she will get a suggestion by a learned panel that his/her taxes be cut.
     And, if at the end of the year, when the committee drafts its final report to the full Legislature, if your industry doesn't have a tax cut written in there, you've wasted your summer.
     So chances are pretty good that there are going to be a lot of lobbyists who wind up wasting their summer watching a legislative interim committee not cut their taxes.
     But, there's one slim area of tax cutting that could happen, not because legislators really care about it, but because the Kansas Supreme Court may require it. The case involves a long distance telephone company, one of those which has sprung up in the past dozen years, peddling low-cost minutes of long-distance talk for those who want it. It's not a monopoly, it's not a phone company that "has" to provide service it anyone. It's just a long distance company like the ones that call you at dinnertime and when you're on your way to the bathroom.
    The long distance company says it's not a utility. That nobody has to sign up with it, that it isn't required to provide service to anyone, that it doesn't have a monopoly on anything. Now, maybe for a monopoly, an absolute lock on long distance service, it would happily pay property taxes on 33 percent of its valuation every year.
     But, because it's scrapping around out there for customers, like a movie house, or cable television or any other business people can say yes or no to, it wants its property assessed at 25 percent of its value, like the bowling alley, the car dealership and the insurance office.
     (Residential property is taxed on just 11.5 percent of its fair market value, less than half the rate of businesses, and almost one-third the rate of monopoly utilities, like your local telephone, electric or natural gas company.)
    Well, early in July, the Kansas Supreme Court may decide whether long distance telephone companies should be taxed at the same rate as companies with a state-guaranteed monopoly. We can almost see it going either way.
    For a guaranteed market, well, many folks would be willing to pay higher property taxes to lock up that deal. But, for a lower tax rate, many folks would be willing to discount costs, to cut deals with customers, to be a little creative in making their business go.
     The court is going to make some pretty important tax law this summer...whether it rules in favor of the long distance company and lowers taxes or sides with the director of property valuation who is trying to maintain the 33 percent tax rate on the long distance carrier.
     Probably more important law, in terms of dollars, than the interim committee on assessment and taxation.
***
     Oh, remember, they're virtually rebuilding Cedar Crest, the governor's mansion in Topeka, home of the most famous shower curtain rod in the state.
     Remember? How many times did you read a reporter's shock and amazement at touring the private quarters in the home, and finding, shock! Pantyhose draped over the shower rod. Gov. Joan Finney was mad, most of the state was mildly amused, and the tale was recounted over and over and over.
    The shower rod was not saved for posterity. Maybe that's for the best.

June 22, 1999
    There's this feeling that you get sometimes, that something's not quite right.
    It's like, say, you get your handkerchief folded wrong, and you feel something not quite right in the back pocket of your slacks. It's almost like the fable of the princess who couldn't get a good night's sleep because, somewhere, under a stack of mattresses, there was a pea making a lump.
     It's one of those fine perceptions that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
     That feeling that us Statehouse Railsters are getting is that a legislative interim committee on taxes is going to start poking around to see whether it can get a handle on taxing sales on the Internet.
     Now, generally, we try to find a reason to justify taxes, because it is just natural that if you're paying taxes, somehow government is doing something to make your way of life better.
     Like, say, income and sales taxes. We always thought that somehow, for our income taxes, the state was helping pay to educate our children, or hiring highway patrol officers to watch the roads for us, or something.
     And, locally, property taxes were paying to keep the streets clean, firemen ready to put out fires, police on the alert to people breaking into our stores and homes.
     There was always this "we'll do this in return for your taxes" agreement that we don't really recall seeing written down anywhere, but was somehow understood between us taxpayers and the tax collectors.
     Well, we're not sure that taxing Internet sales really contains that same "this for that" deal. It's sorta like that pea under the mattresses, or the wadded up, instead of carefully folded-up, handkerchief.
     Seems like the government has very little to do with people getting on their computers in their basements and finding things for sale out there. You look around, find, say, a book, and then just put in your credit card number, and wait for the mail, which is going to come anyway, whether there is state or local government out there.
     It's hard to see the "nexus" or relationship between there being a state government and you getting the stuff you order.
     So, we're going to be spending some of this summer listening to mayors who basically just want more money to spend, and state officials who basically just want more money to spend, trying to figure out an excuse to tax Internet transactions.
     Oh, and let's not forget the local merchants, who are going to be on this Internet tax bandwagon big-time. The retailers are going to grouse that they have to pay state and local taxes, that shoot up their prices, and therefore, why shouldn't those Internet folks pay local taxes, too. It's one of those "level playing field" arguments that we all get disgusted hearing and leads us to suspect that anyone who believes there is truly a level playing field anywhere probably inherited their store.

June 14, 1999
     OK, let's take just a minute here, in the week when the Legislative Coordinating Council-that's the legislative leadership in the off-season-meets to assign summer interim study committees, to take a look at how much money there is in, er, well, legislating.
     See, legislators didn't get a pay raise this year, though there were some genuinely interesting ploys by legislators who wanted raises badly, but were afraid to vote for one for fear their constituents wouldn't think they were worth it.
     So, what you do, is you look not at just the salary of legislators, which is a pretty puny $72.06 a day, plus $80 in expenses, but to the number of days that legislators can find excuses-or interim committee assignments-to come to Topeka and get those dollars.
     That's why the number of interim committees scheduled for this summer at mid-week will to a large degree, tell us how much money legislators are actually going to take out of Topeka during the year 1999. That's relatively important, because next year, an election year, there are going to be more legislators wanting to spend time campaigning than hanging around Topeka, we think. But on legislative days, now, first, take a look at leadership of the House and Senate. They are the big boys and girls who can just sign vouchers for themselves because they're in Topeka presumably, and generally legitimately, managing either the affairs of their caucuses, or the affairs of the state.
     So, how many days do they voucher? Well, former House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer, in the year that he was running for governor against whomever emerged from the Gov. Bill Graves-ex GOP chairman David Miller scrap, vouchered 76 additional days between the end of the 1998 session and early December, when he passed the torch to a new House Minority Leader.
     Sawyer, by the way, took home $41,427 from the state during his last year in office. Now, that sounded like a lot...until it was computed that un-House Speaker Tim Shallenburger, R-Baxter Springs of all places, (and now State Treasurer, and on straight salary without any additional vouchered days stuff), took $41,063 home from the Legislature for a total of 162 days in 1998, his last year at the helm of the House Republicans.
     Turns out that the smaller Senate, with just 40 menbers, is apparently a lot more manageable than the House. Senate President Dick Bond, R-Overland Park, vouchered just 31 days during 1998 to watch over his clan of 27 Republicans in the upper chamber, while Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, spent just 12 days managing the Senate's 12 other Democrats.
     It makes the 90 days a year that we all hear about and talk about, and which really doesn't very well describe the job, sound pretty meaningless, doesn't it? Well, of course, those 90 days stretch over almost five months and pretty much wreck the year for anyone who has a conventional job or a conventional life, or really, much of anything conventional about them at all.
     But how do just regular legislative ham-and-eggers (non-leadership types) do when it comes to racking up those extra days? Well, more than 100 House members managed to log in 100 days' pay in 1998, which we figure, loosely, is two days a month from July to November. In the Senate, only four members managed to bill the state for just 100 days. The 10 additional days? That's about $1,500 a year, bringing the total of pay and expense money to about $20,500.
     How many legislators spend 110 days at the "90-day-a-year" job? Well, in the House last year, 42 did. In the Senate, 30 members did. Wanna try 130 days? That's 40 more than the 90-day session, and about enough to wreck any chances of having other jobs unless you work for yourself. In the House seven, in the Senate, 17.
     At that number of days, we're seeing salary and per-diem expenses of more than $25,000 a year, easily. Which, probably is about what legislators ought to be making for the regular session, without the need to double-up with summer study committees. But, if you can't get a pay raise one way...you can get it another...

June 7, 1999
    Well, the whole point of this story is going to come down to about $1.6 million in state spending next year, but how we're going to get there might be interesting for some of you, so hold on.
     Now, $1.6 million buys Kansas a presidential preference primary, in April, after most of the presidential preference primary dust will presumably have already settled.
     And, it's early yet, but going strictly by the number of big-dog Republicans who are already on the George W. Bush campaign train, it looks likely that Bush is going to get the national nomination unless we learn something really untoward about him.
     And, unless Al Gore does something really gauche, it looks like momentum might just win him the Democratic presidential nomination. Nope, it's not as locked-up as Bush looks now, but this story is really about a little further down the road.
     Like, how, in a tight budget year coming up, the Legislature gets to play politics, hardball politics, with financing the presidential preference primary.
     It breaks down like this: Democrats, of course, go to the polls and vote for anyone they want, and national party rules require that each candidate get an amount of delegates equal to their proportion of the Democratic vote cast. So no matter how it breaks down on the vote, Democrats can count on sending a split delegation to the Democratic national Convention in July or August 2000 in Los Angeles.
     (Further rules of the party just complicate things, requiring splits among boys, girls, majority and minority races, etc., which is why the Democrat National Convention always looks a little like a Village People reunion.)
     Now, Republican National Committee rules don't bother with this proportion stuff. It's up to the states, and Kansas has already decided that whoever wins the primary gets all the Kansas GOP delegates, at least on the first ballot, which is where Republicans like to lock things down, anyway. So, what's the deal? Well, Democrats are going to have a split delegation anyway. But Republicans, from the governor right on down to the three Republican congressmen from Kansas, are all aboard the Bush campaign train. But the only way they can deliver all 33 or 34 or 35 national convention delegates to young George W. is to have an election. That means spending $1.6 million on a presidential preference primary.
     If the state doesn't have a presidential preference primary, count on a district-by-district delegate selection process that is sure-enough going to yield some delegates pledged to other GOP presidential contenders. You think the Wichita-dominated arch conservative 4th District is going to go for Bush? Think again.
     So, to deliver Bush all the Kansas delegates at the Philadelphia, Pa., national convention next year, it's going to take a presidential preference primary...oh, and $1.6 million, in a year when the state is expected to not only have no money for tax cuts, but will probably have to cut spending in some areas even without a presidential preference primary.
     Now, let's see. Gov. Bill Graves wants a primary and he writes the budget, subject to legislative fiddling. And there are still enough conservative Republicans in the House and enough Democrats who just don't care, to maybe derail a primary. Which means Graves won't have a full delegation to offer up to his friend and fellow governor Bush.
     So you might want to do what us Railsters at the Statehouse are going to do...watch the polls, take the temperature of the state and wonder whether this presidential preference primary is going to be worthwhile...at least for conservative Republicans and Democrats...

June 1, 1999
     We have a whole year to stew over this Children's Trust Fund.
     That's the special fund, remember, that all the money that the state receives from our settlement with the big tobacco companies over the next quarter-century automatically flows into, and from which we're supposed to do really nice things for children.
     Those nice things? Well, among 'em, is to spend some money on programs that will encourage children not to take up smoking. Good stuff. But this Children's Trust Fund is also according to the legislation which creates it, one of the potentially leakiest pots that the Legislature has ever created.
     And maybe a good indicator of just how fragile that pot of special purpose money is can be had by watching the first withdrawals from that trust fund. Yep, $70 million, the first money that is expected to briefly bounce in and then rim out of the pot, goes into the state's general fund. That's the all-purpose fund from which the state pays salaries, buys prison uniforms, pays the light bill, and does just about all the rest of the spending necessary to keep Kansas afloat.
     But after that initial raid, the idea is that a Children's Cabinet, made up of grown-ups, of course, decides how to spend money from the fund. And that cabinet, 15 members who will be announced this month with considerable fanfare, "advises" the governor and legislature on how to spend trust fund money.
     We expect that the advice will be, well, good advice. Spending money to keep kids healthy, smart, well-adjusted so they don't blow up their high schools, virtually all the things we hope for for our children. But the key is that the Children's Cabinet is "advisory" and that means that the Legislature can take the ideas, twist, turn, slice and dice the suggestions as it sees fit, and spend the money on the phone bill, if that's what the Legislature wants to do.
     So a lot of the good stuff that we're all hoping happens may be suggested by the Children's Cabinet, but not done at all. And that means that it's going to take a lot of watching, a lot of lobbying, a lot of cajoling, to make sure that the Children's Trust Fund actually winds up being spent on children and programs that we think are good for them. ...Means we got another pot to watch...
***
     Us Railsters are wondering whether there is a constitutional right to fashion for convicts, because after taking a peek into the future of the budget, there's not a lot of money available for spending next session when, by the way, all legislators are up for reelection. There's not likely to be much money for the Legislature to spend on you before it starts campaigning for reelection in about a year, and some of us Statehouse hangers-on are thinking they need something snappy, something catchy, to show that they ought to be reelected.
     So, we're thinking horizontal stripes like in the old movies for convicts. We gotta buy them clothes anyway, and actually making sentences longer just means we gotta build a prison somewhere someday at great expense. So we're thinking stripes, horizontal, of course, which as we recall fashion-wise tends to make slim convicts look, well, a little more substantial, and make fat convicts look, well, like fat convicts. The uniforms also tend to make hitch-hiking away from jailbreaks more difficult.
     Now, we're not sure the Legislature will go for it, but it's a way to get tough on crime, or at least, criminals, for not much money.