March 2001

March 29, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 26, 2001)

School financing politics

In the next two weeks, both Republicans and Democrats in the Legislature are going to be leaning against political fences to see if there is any give in efforts to create new financing for Kansas elementary and secondary schools.

For Republicans, of course, the big test is whether primary election voters in 2002 are going to reward candidates who tried to raise school spending, and at the same time included significant opportunities for teachers to break out of the union-school board negotiated salary schedule. That’s the Gov. Bill Graves/Lt. Gov. Gary Sherrer plan, heavy with base state aid improvements, but with millions for rewarding excellence in education.

Excellent teaching, for example, is interesting and cosmopolitan talk, but there isn’t a way to measure whether, for example, GOP primary voters are going to accept an excellent, national board certified third-grade teacher making $45,000 a year. That’s a question that is implicit in the encouraging excellence rhetoric that Kansas voters haven’t had to broach yet...

Maybe Graves’ massive victory in the 1998 primary election over former House member and GOP state chairman conservative David Miller has redefined a new, moderate GOP primary crowd, but maybe it hasn’t. Miller didn’t have much money to campaign with and had been so demonized by moderates that he had an extremely limited voter base.

Whether a Graves acolyte such as Sherrer, who is pro-choice and backing the education initiative, falls heir to the Graves primary voter base can’t be known yet. Expect some polling later this spring to determine that...

On the other hand, House Speaker Kent Glasscock, R-Manhattan, may find that holding the line on tax increases involves more than merely repeating that his chamber isn’t likely to increase taxes of any sort this session. That’s a traffic report, and at some point he is going to have to say that his plan for minimal new education spending is the right way to go, or that his plan is just an interesting wrinkle on the mainstream of school quality improvement.

It’s a decision that he’s going to have to make at some point: whether his plan is enough progress for one year, or whether it is a subset of a larger, more expensive school finance plan.

Both Graves and Glasscock also need to remember that many socially conservative Republicans aren’t eager for all-day kindergarten that the Graves plan starts. But, some number of those social conservatives aren’t interested in 4-year-old at-risk programs that Glasscock proposes, either. It’s the “taking the babies” syndrome that deeply upsets some conservatives.
For Democrats, the issues are a little different.

First, after weeks of yelping about bringing back the inheritance tax, it seems that Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate have settled into a basic “we don’t like new taxes” approach that actually leaves some room for votes for a Graves/Sherrer education plan. Staying out of the tax issues because of over-cutting of taxes two years ago merely isolates the already small number of Democrats in the Senate.

At some point, teacher unions which have heavily and reliably helped finance Democratic candidates are going to lose patience and want Democrats to vote for the tax increases necessary for the Graves plan. There is time, of course, but if not this week or next, Senate Democrats are going to have to line up behind the Graves plan.

In the House, Minority Leader Jim Garner, D-Coffeyville, is a curious co-author of the Glasscock strategy, but his staff clearly defines that strategy as a starting point, not the ending point for the year’s education legislation.

Garner makes the point that the special programs for K-3 are important and that studies show the benefit to getting youngsters off to a strong start. But Garner also is willing to talk about more expansive programs...just not how to finance them.

Count on GOP conservatives in the House and Senate to trash the Graves tax program. Already outfits ranging from Karl Peterjohn’s Kansas Taxpayers Network to the former Conservative Caucus, now called KLEAR, have been putting out releases indicating that school spending has increased steadily in recent years, and that though there is a softening in revenue projections, in terms of hard cash, the state has more money in hand this year than last.

March 22, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 19, 2001)

Right of way farming

There's another crop, that you don't hear about on the farm news programs, that is regularly putting out a bin-buster of a harvest month in and month out for the state's major cities: right-of-way farming.

That farming is done, of course, by the gas and electric and water companies that use city-owned rights of way to lay their pipes and wires and tubes... and then there is the big crop, the one that makes the mortgage payments. It's telecommunications.

Cities have been harvesting the right-of-way by charging telecommunications companies major-league fees for having their wires and fiber optic cables in those narrow strips of land beside the streets or in the alleys.

How much? Well, there's Wichita, which is charging telephone companies $1.81 a month per access line going into homes and businesses. And then there's little Roeland Park, which charges just $1.05 a month for the privilege of allowing use of the right-of-way for telephone service for residential accounts and $1.75 for the same wire if there happens to be a business at the end of it.

Oh, and the trend is upward. And even if the telecommunications outfit doesn't send its wires to citizens of the city where it run lines, the company is charged a right-of-way fee. A Williams Cos. division that runs a fiber optic cable through Topeka is charged $1 a month a foot for use of the right-of-way.

Now, it's hard to tell whether it is the price or the negotiations that those new telecommunications companies, like Sprint and Birch and a bunch of other "coms" and "nets," object to. But the concept that the right-of-way is there to be used by telecommunications companies to provide services to residents and citizens of a city is pretty clear. It's there to be used.

And, similarly, it's tough to say whether $1.81 a month or thereabouts is the right amount for a city to charge a phone outfit to use the right-of-way. But that money winds up one way or another on your bill. Count on that.

Now, once the phone line is buried all nice and neat, there doesn't seem to be a lot of ongoing maintenance that is needed that requires tearing up the streets or alleys or whatever they call that area between the sidewalk and the curb. So, Railsters figure that the continuing fee is pretty much gravy for cities, except for maybe the salary of someone to keep track of what wire is where and whether it's broken or not.

So, what's the Legislature's possible solution to cities piling right-of-way use fees on telecommunications companies that wind up on our phone bills?

Well, it starts with a freeze at up to $1.81 on cities that like to charge by the wire that goes into homes, and offers the alternative option of up to 5 percent of the gross receipts of those phone companies that use the right-of-way.

Big fight there? What all goes into the gross receipts? Right now, nobody in the Legislature is sure what's going to be there. Will that 5 percent include, say, the security system in your house, so when you open the back door, someone in Arizona knows about it? Or will it be a special phone service that forwards your calls or stores your messages at some central location somwhere?

Does it make sense for a city, once the wires are buried and the grass growing on the right-of-way, to be able to ride the wave of new services that telephone companies sell to customers? They are, of course, the same wires. They are just being used for new things.

A lot more is not known by the Legislature than is known about the complicated subject with its own brand of jargon that makes little sense to regular, phone-using Americans.

But there are millions of city revenue dollars at stake in those rights-of-way, and cities want them because they have cities to run and don't want to raise recognizable taxes to do so. So, watch the Legislature, and watch your phone bill and by summer, we'll probably know whether cities have another bumper crop from the right-of-way.

March 15, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 12, 2001)

Rep. X accepts toy truck!

Well, it looks like it is about time for one of those grand little experiments to be ended, and for peace to return to the community we call the Kansas Legislature.

The experiment is requiring lobbyists to list the names of individuals and small groups to which they give small gifts and meals.

The concept last year, ridden hard by the state's media, was that the public should know who got a meal from whom, who went to the football game, played golf or saw a rock concert.

This time a year ago, the state's newspapers and television and radio stations were up in arms, demanding that they be able to learn who went to dinner with whom. Legislators who made a big deal out of preparing the bill and voting for it got some brief but favorable publicity.

Media demanded the Legislature pass a bill that would require lobbyists to keep track of all this spending, that they enter it on their lobbyist reports, and that somehow, the public would know who got what and be able to judge who was officially on the take and who wasn't, and that the public would remember that until the next trip to the ballot box.

Even now, there are news outlets who demand that the Legislature not rescind its foray into ethics, or at least record-keeping.

Well, it didn't work, or hasn't yet.

What's the hangup with all this new information that is supposed to be available to the public? Who got the little toy trucks (which prove to be great gifts for grandchildren) or who got three pork tenderloins from a pork company? Who was craven enough to accept roses from the anti-abortion people or who was devious enough to accept short-term subscriptions to the Christian Science Monitor?

Well, most of you, nearly all of you, don't know.

Why? Because the same news outlets that were hammering the Legislature last year to require lobbyists to keep track of everything haven't bothered to spend the time or money or newsprint space to publish who got what.

The media haven't even bothered with the simple "what our leaders took" to conserve space. And they haven't done the simpler, but probably worthwhile stories on "what local legislators took." There have been a couple inconsequential stories about legislators who don't take anything, and while that may be a start, it is a pretty poor start at that.

Problem is that the media hasn't done anything with the information that some lobbyist has to spend hours putting together and checking twice.

Now, we're not asking for sympathy for lobbyists who have some more paperwork to do. It just seems logical, though, that if someone has to do a bunch of paperwork, that someone, somewhere should see the results of it.

Railsters who were never fans of this little enterprise in the first place have to wonder whether the state's news media is even embarrassed by its lack of use of this information.

Griping about efforts to rescind the lobbyist-meals law from the books sounds a little foolish now that they haven't used the information, doesn't it?

And the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission, which receives this information about who spent what on whom, doesn't come out much better. It's the repository for the ethics information, and promised to put that information on the Internet, but hasn't yet...almost four months into this experiment.

And...when the information does go on the Ethics Commission website, it will contain only expenditures by lobbyists on legislators that total $10 or more. Ethics maintains that it would take too much time and manpower to do the data-entry necessary to list everything. Hmmm....

If the same folks who demanded all this information are too lazy or cheap or something to even use it, then it starts to look like the media was either insincere when it demanded ethics reform last year, or ordered too much food for the party. Either way, we're still waiting for our first headline reading "Rep. X accepts toy truck!" or "Sen. Y goes to dinner with insurance lobbyist!"

Maybe the best thing to do is just to repeal last year's law, keep it on disk or however the state electronically stores stuff that might be useful in the future, and maybe roll out the bill in another 10 years and see if there are any takers then.

March 8, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers March 5, 2001)

Attracting power plants

There is one of those "just this side of the horizon" issues bubbling in the Kansas Legislature that everyone waiting for the toaster to pop up part of your breakfast, or the microwave to ping signaling that the chill is taken off the cat food, ought to consider, at least briefly.

The issue is whether Kansas can or should do something to get in on the boom in construction of electric generating plants. Nationwide, about 100 plants are under either construction or consideration and none of them are planned for Kansas.

Hmmm... There's got to be a reason that nobody with enough money to build a power plant is building or planning to build one in Kansas, where electric needs are growing like everywhere else and where experts predict in five or six years Kansas is going to need more power than its fleet of utility-owned plants can produce.

So, how does Kansas attract power plants? The only way that legislators have been able to think up is to lower the property taxes on new plants, so that they are cheaper to operate for those who want to gamble on whether there is a market out there for electricity.

And "gamble" is a key term, because when a regulated public utility puts up a power plant and is assessed property taxes on 33 percent of the value of the plant, it is guaranteed the chance to earn a profit on electric production from that plant. Something in the order of 11 to 12 percent, which all told, isn't a bad profit at all.

But the gamblers that some legislators are hoping to draw inside the state's borders are willing to trade off that guaranteed return and guaranteed market for the chance to make a little more profit. But no matter how they pencil it out, almost nobody in the business of generating electricity to sell on the open market without regulated prices and profits can figure how to do it if they have to pay property taxes on one-third of the value of their plants. Just can't be done, they say.

So legislators are considering a handful of bills to reduce tax assessment rates for companies that will forego guarantees they can sell every kilowatt of power they produce, and produce a profit even when they can't. The best deals being talked now in the Legislature? How about a 25 percent assessment rate, same as the Ford dealership or the grocery store, which are similarly speculatively built on the hopes that their owners will be able to sell enough trucks or canned peas to make a profit.

Would that draw merchant power plants to Kansas? Maybe, the experts say.

But, like a tough piece of meat that gets bigger the more you chew it, another question pops up. Do Kansans want to compete with their local merchant power plant to buy natural gas? Hmmm... Another head-scratcher.

House Utilities Committee Chairman Carl Holmes, a Republican from Liberal, says just lowering the tax assessment rates for those gamblers who want to put up power plants doesn't make sense if those plants are just going to burn up the natural gas that we need to keep our homes warm in winter.

Holmes figures that if we're going to have new power plants, they ought to burn coal.

With natural gas fields being depleted by the demands of electric generating plants, he figures that at some point, natural gas prices are going to rise again, so high that we're not going to be able to afford the doghouse heater, or Christmas lights. But Holmes figures that homely coal is almost always going to be there for power plant fuel.

Encourage coal? Discourage natural gas? Use tax policy to push independent electricity producers to one fuel or another?

Maybe it's a good thing that we have a couple years to figure this one out.

March 1, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Feb. 26, 2001)

Puzzling crime bills

When it comes to crimes, most Railsters, and probably most Kansans, are pretty much willing to let the Kansas Legislature decide what is right and wrong and there really isn't much question about lawmakers' decisions.

Now, there are the occasional fights over the death penalty, but for most lesser crimes--theft, battery, assault, drunk driving-- we're almost always sure that the Legislature is going to do the right thing or thereabouts.

After all, legislators live among us, and surely they fear and abhor about the same things we do.

But there are interesting shadings of crime bills that frankly are puzzling.

The Kansas Legislature dealt with a couple of them last week, and the decisions were, well, curious enough that it is worth taking a little time to reconsider them.

First, both the House and Senate soundly rejected amendments offered to crime bills that would create a special category of crimes known as hate crimes. Those are crimes motivated by hate for specific groups: defined by race or religion or sexual orientation or nationality or belief system.

The issue: adding a new layer of crime atop your run-of-the-mill crime of violence that would specifically allow juries to determine that crimes were committed as a result of hate, and double-up on penalties for hate crimes.

Hard to be against that, right? Well, yes and no. First, of course, hate crimes are...well, crimes anyway.

And although crime is statistically predictable, and the Kansas Sentencing Commission can compute how many more prison beds the state will need if a new crime is defined, or a sentence lengthened, statistics are a little weak on hate crimes. But in Senate debate, the clear case was made that creating special new penalties for hate crimes would crowd Kansas prisons.

Hmmm...

Nobody wants to spend state tax dollars to build prisons, but nobody wants hate crimes to be treated as run-of-the-mill crimes of violence either, because, well, they're worse.

It was Sen. Rip Gooch, D-Wichita, who mulled the arguments and rose in the Senate with probably the best analysis of that argument.

"It seems to me, that if toughening sentences for hate crimes is going to fill up our prison beds...then we better pass this law right now," Gooch said.

The Senate didn't, 12-27.

Wonder what else the Senate didn't pass last week? A bill that would include in the crime of aggravated battery the situation in which a drunk driver hits and injures a pedestrian.

The issue here is interesting. It deals with intention. Does a drunk driver, merely by being drunk, set out to do harm to a pedestrian? Probably not. In fact, most drunk drivers probably just want to get home from the party in one piece and not hurt anyone.

But, by becoming voluntarily drunk, does a driver give up voluntarily the defense of involuntariness of the action? Hmmm... That's probably worth a little kitchen-table discussion.

Can a driver create the circumstance in which he or she can be charged only with lesser offenses and face lesser penalties merely by becoming drunk?

Should drivers be able to do that?

The Senate thought so.