May 2000

May 25, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 22, 2000)

When you consider that much of politics is choosing what battles to fight and against whom, the Kansas Legislature may have made a terrible miscalculation during the 1999 session when it approved the Higher Education Coordination Act.

That was the law, remember, that combined all the state's higher education institutions under one umbrella, a reformulated Kansas Board of Regents.

Now, when that was happening, there were some who warned lawmakers that they might be creating a monster. For about 25 years, the Kansas Legislature was able to pit the state's community colleges--they don't call them "jucos" anymore, we're warned--against the four-year colleges
of the State Board of Regents.

The two higher education interests each had about the same number of supporters, and when it came time to divvy up money, the community colleges and the regents were always on opposite sides of the fight. It was almost always an "either-or" deal, with neither regents nor community colleges getting all they needed. It was a bumpy ride because the issues were different.

Regents officials were basically after sound buildings and salary money.

Now, it was a little more complicated, but the state taxpayers and student tuitions paid the freight, and there was no major property tax lug attached to living in the same county as a state college or university.

Community College officials, though, well, that was a different story.

Sure, they wanted nicer buildings and higher salaries, but they had to figure a way to get them while not bumping the local property tax levy that supported the community colleges.

Same goals in both cases but different hurdles to leap in order to reach them.

And then last year, all the higher education institutions were brought together, the newly reformulated regents started figuring how to drive this beast, and...then the bottom fell out of the state budget. Remember that in 1999, the Legislature essentially created the structure, but put off until this year to start financing the costs of combining the systems, including salary increases for teachers and the start of buying down property taxes levied by community colleges.

Well, this session, when the first order of business was cutting about $60 million from the already-approved budget, the regents got their money, roughly $20 million to get the higher education coordination act under way.

What's interesting here is that there was not a serious complaint. Gov. Bill Graves just put the money in his budget, and it sailed through.

Democrats whined that the governor was stealing food from the mouths of retirees, but they never suggested cutting spending on higher education to resolve it. Republicans hoped to have money for economic development initiatives and tax cuts, but they never suggested taking anything away from the regents.

And, the regents, to their credit, merely sent lobbyists to explain the governor's proposed spending, answered questions, and watched the appropriations bills proceed. It was easy...too easy...in a tight budget year, and that's set some legislators to considering just what is possible in a good budget year.

There are enough votes among legislators who have a redefined "regent institution," either a community college or a four-year university, to appropriate money whether the governor wants it or not. In fact, legislators who recognize an iron fist even if it is wearing a velvet glove are starting to wonder just what sort of organization they've created with a unified higher education authority.

Now, just getting something mentioned in the governor's State of the State speech and inserted in the budget is probably 75 percent of the whole job in getting money appropriated. It's easier to keep money in the governor's budget than it is to put money into an appropriations bill and then shepherd it through the entire legislative process to see it actually become law.

So, the regents didn't have a giant hurdle this session. But next year?

Early predictions are that the state is going to be short of money again...about the same situation as the state was this year. Look for the 2001 session to be the real test of the new regent system of coordinated post high school education.

If Railsters are right, higher education might turn out to be a bigger force in the Statehouse than farmers, or economic development savants, or auto dealers or even the poor. Hmmm.

 

May 18, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 15, 2000)
OK, first the story about the shirts and gaining weight, and then, that little-reported bill that just might plug a sales tax hole in the state's revenues.

The shirt story? Well, the Railster orders shirts from way out of state from a merchant whose name is LL Bean and who, we suppose from the catalog pictures, has a bunch of Maine women, wearing flannel shirts and heavy-duty boots, who pick up the phone when they pass the desk and are willing to take an order for, say, genuine moosehide moccasins.

Well, it's been a couple of years now, but I remember one call clearly. I ordered six identical shirts, gave the model number, the color, and the size: 18-35.

Oh, and I asked whether Bean would include Kansas' sales tax on the order, so that the state would get its money, us people who report on state government and politics being relatively dumb in thinking that somehow because we've known all the Kansas secretaries of revenue for the past quarter-century, that the secretary would like me to ask.

Well, the conversation went sorta like this: "No, there's no way we could keep track of all the sales tax rates in all the states, so we can't collect sales tax." Well, right then, they had me stumped. Of course, there are 50 or so states and they probably all have different sales tax rates, and well, it probably would be a chore to keep up with them.

Somehow, I imagined the polite, attentive lady on the phone from either the North Woods of Maine or some regional calling hub in Nebraska or North Dakota, working off a scarred wooden desk with half an old sandwich back in a drawer, taking a none-too-sharp pencil from a cracked coffee cup and filling out an order form to send into the massive LL Bean procurement system....and then came the shocker.

"Size 18? Been putting on a little weight?"

And the voice was so fresh, so polite, so caring, that for a minute there, I almost blushed. Yes, I'd put on a little weight, and the neck measurement was, well, a half-inch bigger than the previous dozen orders. No way I could get mad at the voice. I just ordered the shirts, and agreed to wait four or five days until the brown truck arrived with my shirts.

It was later, like it always is when you have one of those red-hot retorts that you wish you'd have thought of back when you were still on the phone, that the gravity of what I had learned came through.

Here was a major catalog company, with tens of thousands of customers all across the country, and it knew from its extensive database that my neck size had grown... Somewhere, it knew that my previous orders had been for a 17-1/2-inch neck, and now it had grown. And probably, somewhere in the office, which I started thinking was probably more like a typical computerized ordering center, there was a chart showing my probable weight if I needed an extra half-inch in collar size.

But that same massive order-taking agency, with intimate information about the neck sizes of thousands of customers, couldn't figure out the Kansas sales tax?

Hmmm...

Well, that's the shirt story, and the moral is that of course, retailers know what they need to know to keep their customers happy, but they couldn't be bothered to figure out what Kansas' sales tax rate is. Nope, we're not talking local option sales taxes, the city and county levies.

LL Bean couldn't even be bothered to check what the basic state sales tax rate for Kansas is.
***
Well, Kansas has started on a possible "fix" for that situation. It was called the Streamlined Sales Tax bill, and it wound up getting stuck into another sales tax bill along with a bunch of other sales tax items, and it was passed by the Legislature and the governor's going to sign it when he gets around to it probably this week or next.

What it does is put Kansas into a group of states that are contracting with a database company that will track down the sales tax for every zip code in the nation, and put it all on a computer disk, and make it available to telephone sales retailers so they'll know the Kansas sales tax rate, along with the rate for every other state and county and city and hamlet and zip code.

We could know by fall whether Kansas becomes a pilot project state, so that the system is field-tested and out-of-state retailers start collecting Kansas sales tax and once a month or so send it to the Department of Revenue.

It's almost a longshot. The information is being compiled now. And someday, maybe next year, when it's time to order shirts again, and my neck measurement has returned to a svelt 17-1/2-inches, some nice-voiced woman from a computerized order center somewhere is going to say, "Congratulations on the weight loss, it shows a massive amount of character, and, yes, we'll add to your bill Kansas, then Shawnee county, then Topeka sales taxes.

"Call us again when these shirts wear out."

 

May 11, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 8, 2000)
Us Railsters, who are headed for the Statehouse basement in a couple years, are still a little enthusiastic about a multiyear, multiphase renovation of the Kansas Statehouse.

No, it's not getting vinyl siding or a nearby parking garage, but rather, a pretty thorough renovation of the Statehouse as it was supposed to be when it was brand new...or at least whenever the last piece of it built was brand new.

Initially, there will be $40 million in bonds issued for the project, and we'll get the money to pay them off from interest earned on unclaimed property. Nobody ought to even notice that.

Surprising is that the key appropriation was allowed to sail through the Statehouse without a lot of debate and a lot of posturing. And that's surprising because when times are tight, it's awfully easy to put off maintenance and improvements and claim you've saved money for something else worthwhile. It makes for relatively easy headlines and while it's pretty short-sighted, it makes a good story for early in nearly any week.

But there are a handful of legislators who believe that the Statehouse ought to be just this side of awe-inspiring. House Speaker Robin Jennison, R-Healy, saw his chamber literally bloom after restoration. And Senate President Dick Bond, R-Overland Park, was stunned by the effect of merely polishing the bronze columns that surround the Senate floor, giving visitors, and even senators themselves, a reason to look upward and get a sense of space, a sense that the room was supposed to last centuries.

Somehow, it just makes sense that when schoolchildren have ridden a bus three or more hours to get to the state capital, they'll see something that will stick with them. Some grandeur. Some history, some sense that when Kansas was just starting out in the business of being a state, some folks realized that it wasn't always going to be cowboys and Indians and buffalo, and that if government is going to be imposed on the state, it better be from somewhere imposing.

There's no doubt that the Statehouse is starting to come apart at the seams. Stone is chipping off--ablating is the term that is frequently used--elevators don't work all the time, and it's hard going for the physically handicapped and the just plain old-and-slow to get around, and there aren't near enough bathrooms. Boys do OK, girls fare worse, as they do in almost all old buildings that were designed by men for men to do work that at one point in history, it was believed only men could do or would ever be allowed to do--govern.

Want to sit in on a committee meeting? Good luck. Space is tight, and rooms are all over the building. Hearing impaired? Not all the rooms have even the simplest of amplification systems. There are lots of places where unless you are spry, you just can't get to.

What's the drill on renovation? Look for a couple years per wing of the Statehouse. It's complicated. Not only do workers have to tear up the building to renovate it, they have to move the people in the renovation area and make it possible for them to still perform their work. We'll see how it works first on the East Wing, where the Senate works. We'll see if we can tell any difference.

That's at least eight years, but the basement, well, that's where some of the early work will be done, getting a bunch of mechanical system replaced so that there's room for your favorites to have their offices.

Yes. The press moves down to the basement, safe and sound, and, to hear some tell it, underground where it belongs...

 

May 4, 2000
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 1, 2000)

Don't be surprised if, for the next week, your local legislators, returning from the annual session in Topeka, sound a little, well, let's say, incoherent.

No, we haven't done anything special to them here and the water has been checked, but they are likely to be talking in Statehouse shorthand for at least a week, while they readjust to regular English and start formulating how they're going to explain what they did and didn't do to people who haven't undergone full immersion baptism in legislation.

A proposition to allow residents of two eastern Kansas counties to consider a new range of permitted uses for a small local option sales tax becomes "BiState II," and a sales tax exemption for materials and labor used to build grain storage facilities and railroad tracks to those facilities becomes merely "grains and trains."

And "pay bill," which sounds almost self-explanatory, is just the short reference to a proposal to appoint a commission to determine what legislative salaries should be. The same concept is expanded with mention of "base closing" which has nothing to do with legislative pay, but refers to a situation where once the legislative pay figure is set by the commission, it becomes law unless specifically voted down by legislators.

It's that sort of Statehouse talk that will eventually, trust us, drop away, and your returning legislators will eventually relearn how to construct a sentence that makes sense to real people who don't live
under the Statehouse dome where the air is thin.

But, that's just for specific legislation.

There's a whole other range of legislation that is the OK for commissions and boards to do something. It is that legislation on which legislators voted, and will just have to wait to see how a body they can't control interprets the law.

Best example is the now-famous "lobbyist-meals" legislation, that actually doesn't have anything to do with how lobbyists eat, but rather whether lobbyists have to report which legislators they bought meals for. The whole idea there was, of course, that probably not your representative or senator but probably someone else's representative or senator can be influenced to vote for colder winters or special tax breaks or school uniforms or something else just because a lobbyist bought them a lunch or a dinner.

The premise there is probably flawed, but leave it to the Governmental Ethics Commission to figure it out, and it will in a series of meetings starting at mid-month. And watch for the most interesting piece of the Ethics consideration to be figuring out just what a meal (reportable) is and what is just snacks (unreportable).

We'll see a Washington, D.C., concept brought home to the plains of Kansas, or more specifically, the restaurants and clubs of Topeka, when the Ethics Commission sets about to tell us the difference between a meal and a snack.

In Washington, a snack is very much like a meal, except that it is eaten standing up, or maybe leaning. In Washington, congressmen and senators who don't sit down to eat at a reception or buffet or merely a chips-and-drinks event haven't really eaten a meal. They've had a snack, and nobody writes down their names.

A sit-down meal in Washington, by federal ethics rules, is very different than a reception. And, the simple matter of making sure that there aren't chairs enough for invited guests means, well, it must not be a meal because everyone's not sitting down to eat.

So, we're likely to find in Kansas, when Ethics gets done digesting the new lobbyist-meals law, that anything that can be eaten standing up, whether it is chicken wings, or prime rib sliced thin enough to fit into a hand-held sandwich, isn't really a meal. And so nobody's name gets written down and no official report of who ate on a lobbyist's tab gets recorded.

Virtually anything that can be eaten with one hand, while the other holds the plate, isn't a meal if you are standing up, and even bacon-wrapped chicken livers on a toothpick can become a meal if you
have a place to sit down and eat them.

Something tells us Railsters that the lobbyist-meals bill is going to spawn a whole new range of Statehouse-speak.