May
2001
May 31, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 28, 2001)The next-door neighbors
Old-timers at the Kansas Legislature, that is, Railsters who hang around the Statehouse winter AND summer, can't recall a year in which local units of government--cities and counties--had a worse session.
And while there were banking issues and telecommunications right-of-way issues and even airport and groundwater issues that local units of government were interested in, the 2001 session will be remembered by some as the year when local units lost a highly visible--at least in the odd culture of the Statehouse--battle over shooting ranges.
The premier issue for local units of government, of course, is maintaining "local control" over, well, almost everything. And zoning issues--because they are local government matters--are close to the heart of that local control mantra.
Cities and counties lost that control big-time, and over an issue that is so old in the Legislature and so well known that it goes by the simple phrase "range protection." It's the code for protecting shooting ranges from zoning commissions and neighbors' lawsuits when developers decide that they want to plop houses next door to the shooting ranges.
The range protection law was even more humiliating for local units of government because nobody can ever remember when a shooting range was actually sued by neighbors for noise, or actually closed by a zoning board as a nonconforming use. The whole issue was carried on the theory that those lawsuits or zoning cases might happen sometime in the future and would be expensive, or maybe just troublesome for the shooting range owners to defend against in court.
Through careful planning--and the happenstance that a lot of senators were off the debate floor drinking coffee and eating cookies at a a reception for a retiring sergeant at arms of the Senate--Sen. Kay O'Connor, R-Olathe, managed to get her range protection amendment attached to another bill. And, not just any bill. She got it attached to a bill that was important to the Department of Wildlife and Parks because it apparently dealt with something to do with either wildlife or parks.
And, because it was apparent to Gov. Bill Graves that whatever the Wildlife and Parks bill did was important for either wildlife or parks, he was pretty much cornered into signing the entire bill into law...range protection and all.
You'll note that the real action on the bill was in the Senate, because the House is almost a free-fire zone for range protection bills. It's passed them a lot of times, and members there apparently really like the idea of forcing developers to maybe put steel siding on houses built just across the lot line from a shooting range.
Local government lobbyists knew the amendment was coming up, they'd seen O'Connor offer it to different bills, and they knew what it did. They just couldn't mobilize fast enough to stop it.
So, if you want to put a housing development, or a nursing home, next to a shooting range you can't count on your local zoning board closing down the range. Or...the city or county condemning the property, or ticketing its owner for allowing too much noise, or really, anything short of allowing guests to shoot out the windows at passing game.
Local control? Well, how's that jingle go about "when you can pry it out of my cold, dead hand..."
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(If this was radio, we'd call this a segue...when one topic or word leads to another thought. Let's see how this works:)Have you been worried about the cremated ashes of Fido or Rover or Princess being blended in with the cremated remains of Aunt Floye? Worry no more. The Legislature has come to your rescue.
Somehow, it came to the attention of someone or other that the state has virtually no regulation on the crematory industry.
What? An unregulated industry? Well, lawmakers know how to fix that!
Was there some outrage afoot that we didn't hear about? Well, apparently no, there wasn't. But, nonetheless, the State of Kansas has used its police power to decree that absolutely no pets can be cremated in the same cremation machine that is used for humans.
Now, whether that's a comfort to anyone is, well, anyone's guess.
But...that's another of those little items that you probably didn't worry about much in the past, and now, you can save your time for worrying about something else. Like, maybe what those loud noises are coming from the building down the street...
May 24, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 21, 2001)Fun with maps
We have an interesting few weeks ahead, as members of the Legislature's House and Senate reapportionment squads make forays into the state to get advice on the simplest of reapportionment maps: those that effect the state's four congressional districts.
And while the biggest issue appears at first to be just what to do with the Johnson County-dominated 3rd congressional district, held by a Democrat, U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore, courtesy of too-conservative Republican primary election voters, there's also some play in the Wichita-dominated 4th District.
The tiff in the 3rd is very simple: Do legislators keep the juicy (Democrat-rich) parts of east Lawrence in the 3rd so that Moore's future is determined by the GOP primary election crowd, or do those voters become 2nd District (that's U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun's turf) voters?
And, of course, with the 3rd District population-heavy, what part of the district is cast off to the 2nd, and what will the ripple effect be on the state's giant shock absorber district, the 66-county 1st, which threatens like Pac Man, to gobble up three or four new counties?
The 1st, remember, now represented by U.S. Rep. Jerry Moran, of Hays, is the ultimate shock absorber. It's going to be a Republican district for, let's see, until, well, no, forever, unless we start seeing pictures of Moran wading in the Washington reflecting pool with a couple bimbos on the cover of People magazine.
So, in a heavily Republican state, why is congressional redistricting much of an issue, anyway? It's because moderate to liberal Kansas Republicans in most districts tend to find other things to do in early August. And with the moderates out of the voting booths, the die-hard conservatives tend to nominate candidates who are too conservative for that 30 percent or 40 percent of the GOP that count themselves moderate to liberal, and tend to, in disgust, vote for pretty conservative Democrats in November to send their own party a message it is too tone deaf to recognize.
There are fun wrinkles in reapportionment, though, and they are so far being supplied by fun-loving Democrats, who believe, for example, that southern Johnson County and Miami County, the netherworld of the 3rd District, ought to be cast out and forced to make their way in the 2nd District.
Democrats, with the first version of their congressional redistricting map, decided that anyone in Johnson County who lives south of Overland Park, Lenexa and Olathe, is probably, on second thought, not a good 3rd District citizen, anyway, and should be traded off to produce a most-of-Lawrence, all of Wyandotte and much of Johnson County 3rd District.
Oh, and Democrats also like the idea of putting Reno County (that's Hutchinson) in the Wichita-dominated 4th District again, to bolster its numbers.
Neatest aspect of that edge of the remap is that Hutchinson won't formally decide until later whether it wants to stay in the 1st District, or join the 4th for the first time in a decade.
Hutchinson, being a relatively political town, has to know that as a part of the 4th District, there will never be a congressperson from Hutchinson.
Remap folks say the "geography is bad" for a county at the northwest edge of the district to win enough attention in the population center of Sedgwick County to get the GOP nomination.
So, there are futures to be decided here in reapportionment. Maybe the future of Dennis Moore, possibly the future of 4th District U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, probably not the future of the 2nd's Jim Ryun, and probably not the future of whomever happens to be on probation at the time he or she decides to run as a Republican in the 1st District, should Moran get out of that job and decide to run for governor.
And, if the legislative committee has much of a struggle with a puzzle with just four pieces to it, imagine the fun we're going to have watching it deal with a state Senate with 40 districts and a state House of Representatives with 125 districts.
May 17, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 14, 2001)Things to come?
When the Legislature turned out the lights last week, it might have been on a session that will be remembered as a breakwater, a major shift of philosophy of government...or not.
The momentous event was, of course, passage of a budget that literally empties the sofa cushions of loose change in state government. Lawmakers were talked (tricked?) into cutting enough money from this year’s budget and next year’s budget to provide roughly $150 million for the governor to budget with this winter, ahead of the 2002 session of the Legislature.
Practically, that wasn’t necessary but it set up the scene in which sharp budget cuts starting July 1 were expected.
Agency representatives–we’re talking top staff here, so they watched for free, not on overtime–tracked cuts in their agency budgets so that they could report that money for almost all their programs was being removed. The old saw about “cut the money, but let us who run the agency figure out where to make the cuts” was repeated over and over. We’ll see whether it really means anything by the time Fiscal Year 2002, which starts with little fanfare on July 1, gets under way and agency managers have decided the absolute lowest level at which programs mandated by law are operated to save money. There’s wriggle room in there, remember.
Now, there’s probably nothing wrong with every couple years really wringing out an agency budget, holding hearings, seeing where every dime goes. And if the dimes are going to the wrong places, fixing it. That didn’t happen this year; there were wholesale cuts in agencies with little thought given to whether it affected programs.
But where’s the breakwater? Where’s the possibility for a major change in state government?
It’s the sharp cuts already made. The state budget has been set up for major-downsizing. The sort that conservative Republicans and a handful of Democrats have been talking about for years. If the “government is evil” crew wants to actually start dismantling agencies, this is the time. If enough members decide that it is family, not government, that ought to be taking care of the poor and the old, this is the time for them to cut state programs.
If conservatives decide that they want to take this government–and, yes, that would include “government schools”–south and starve them for funding from the state, then this is the time.
Democrats harken to 1998, when Gov. Bill Graves got on the tax-cut bandwagon as a way to slam-dunk David Miller in the GOP primary that year, and say Graves went for tax cuts that were too big for the state to afford, that set up the scene for declining state revenues and this year’s budget trimming.
Practically, there’s been a lot of time between 1998 and now, and a lot of other factors at work on the state revenues. But, if government is about to shrink in size and in reach and in authority over Kansans’ lives, next session is the year to do that. Tight money, tough choices over programs. A growing-louder no-new-taxes mantra. A governor in the last year of his term, with horsepower waning. Schools, a major consumer of state dollars, not as influential as in the past.
If this thing is going to happen, it’ll be at the 2002 session.
And there are a lot of conservative legislators who know that cutting spending in Topeka actually doesn’t stop the total tax bill of their constituents from rising. There are still county appraisers at work, and values–which are the grist for the most-hated property taxes–are increasing.
If conservatives are serious about reducing the size of government, they’ve got a good start. But the conservatives, remember, don’t have much experience at running a government, so nobody’s certain whether they know how to dismantle a Cabinet agency, or disassemble a program without forcing the cost of that program to the county or city level and justifying tax increases there.
Just days after the Legislature leaves town, there’s already curiosity about what it will do when it gets back. Dang. Railsters were hoping for a little time off to think about anything else.
May 10, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 7, 2001)Watch those triple fines!
Well, it's time for a little trickle-down theory from the Statehouse.
The specific topic? Whether Kansas cities will tumble to the thought that they are looking a virtual gold mine, or at least a silver mine, right in the face as a result of the Legislature's mad scramble for more money to stuff into the State General Fund, that giant purse in Topeka.
Scrambling for money, the Legislature seized upon the state's long-neglected list of uniform traffic fines, some of which hadn't been updated for 20 years. The solution? Well, play a little inflation catch-up, and then add a dab, and another dab until the Legislature passed to the governor for his inevitable signature a tripling of most fines having to do with operating a motor vehicle.
That means, for example, that the good old "improper hand signal" while driving -- and we'll let your imagination run wild here on just what that is -- which used to draw a $10 fine if prosecuted in district court, now is good for $30, plus fees and court costs, of course.
There are nearly five pages of little-known specific traffic infractions, ranging from improper passing to failure to yield to improper air conditioning, even hitchhiking, that all are being tripled. Glancing through the list, there's no fine for driving while wearing bowling shoes, which some Railsters thought was a crime, but then, it was probably just some rumor spread by bowling alley owners. Good thing to know.
But the point is that this state fine list that is being tripled is almost uniformly adopted by cities across the state so city council members don't have to think up their own traffic violations and debate endlessly whether an improper hand signal should be a $10 offense or $15 or $30 or whatever, depending on which city council member most recently was the recipient of what he or she might have considered an improper hand signal.
It usually takes city councils about 15 seconds to routinely "adopt by reference the uniform fine schedule for traffic infractions," as those motions typically are read at sparsely attended city council meetings. If a city adopts the new uniform fine schedule, it has just tripled the profitability of its municipal court.
If the violation is a ticket that requires your attendance at district court, well, you pay the higher fines and the state pockets the increase in revenue. If the violation is prosecuted in municipal court, the city gets to keep the increase in fines, if the city has adopted the new, improved, more lucrative fine schedule.
Is anyone out there betting that city councils, given the chance to raise money without obviously raising taxes, aren't going to go for this in a heartbeat? We thought so.
Now, there are bigger issues, of course, that the Legislature is considering, but there aren't many that are going to be easier for you to follow through your local city council to see whether the council decided to just take the money and run. After all, council members can say the Legislature obviously studied the fine schedule carefully, heard expert witnesses, debated back and forth the merits and demerits of the change in public policy and after all, it's just violators who pay the additional fines, not honest upright citizens who might, say, have had a rake fall off the nail on the garage wall and knock out the brake light on their car.
Well, there wasn't a whisper of a committee hearing in the Statehouse, not much debate on the House or Senate floors, and the reason that the amounts of all the violations were tripled is because that's how much money the Legislature needed.
So much for the typical city council explanation of "we don't have the expertise or staff to independently study every aspect of this proposal."
This bill was so narrowly popular, not for its chastening effect on irresponsible motorists, that the Senate noticed that the fine for the infraction of driving without lights when needed was increased just $10, to $30 from $20, probably through a drafting error. By that time, though, the bill had already been voted on in the House and was in the Senate where it was decided just to approve the bill rather than amend it and run the risk of it not passing the House again.
Well, that's all that is worth knowing about a bill that raises an additional $16 million for the state, and which will raise probably less, but still, not an insignificant amount of money for cities smart enough to latch onto it.
Watch your city council.
May 3, 2001
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 30, 2001)Feel-good at the Statehouse?
Well, it appears that one of those touchy-feely negotiations formats that we keep reading about but never really understood has struck the Statehouse, and it appears it might have worked.
The format? One of those "win-win-win" deals that sounds like a mechanism for getting a child to pick up his or her own room. It's a plan where everyone involved sits around a table and says what they really want out of a negotiation and agree to work toward that common goal.
Surprisingly, it appears to have worked under the toughest conditions possible, the pressure-cooker crucible where the House and Senate attempt to take their widely different version of the Legislature's annual omnibus/cuts bill and reduce it into one single bill that passes each chamber with identical provisions and language, right down to the commas.
The omnibus/cuts bill is the capstone to the legislative session, the one that not only finances all the programs passed by the Legislature, but this year fills a $205 million hole in the budget for the next 14 months. Without the omnibus/cuts bill, the Legislature can't go home, the governor can't close out the budget, and chaos continues.
This "win-win-win" stuff includes a third "win" and that was the surprise last weekend when the omnibus/cuts bill was partially assembled.
The third "win" was Gov. Bill Graves, who through his director of the budget, Duane Goossen, managed to insinuate himself into what has been for decades a legislators-only process that ginned up a bill and sent it to the governor in the hopes that the governor would sign it into law.
Now, the House and Senate win when they get the bill passed. But the governor, well, governors never win unless they have a workmanlike budget put together, and that happens often enough. The new ground here is that not only did the governor's office manage to get the FY 2002 budget (starts July 1) put into some semblance of good shape, but the House and Senate negotiators on the omnibus/cuts bill also built in a cushion of about $185 million for Graves to use to write his Fiscal Year 2003, and, coincidentally, the last budget of his eight-year run in the state's top job.
Getting into this negotiation was a major coup, and Railsters were shocked when they saw Goossen, portraying the role of the Biblical burning bush, right at the table, telling legislators just what the governor wanted in the way of money for programs for his last budget.
And, it appears that the governor's going to get what he wants.
But, governors come and governors go, and the real winner from the groundbreaking and logical procedure is the State Board of Regents and its colleges, community colleges and technical colleges.
(Excuse us if the term "logical" seems out of place. See, for the last quarter century, logic has had very little to do with the budgeting process as it is carried out by the Legislature.)
What did the regents win? Well, the House and Senate conferees who were already struggling to fill a big hole in the budget, agreed, among other things, to fully finance the next year's installment of the higher education reorganization act. That act is supposed to coordinate all education offerings financed by the state past 12th grade, phase out property tax support for community colleges and raise salaries to the level where other states aren't going to find Kansas fertile ground for picking off our best professors, instructors and such.
Consider that for the FY 2002 fiscal year, regents were facing the real possibility of taking money designated for pay raises for faculty and spending it on the winter's gas bills, and you get an idea just how significant socking away $33 million for the next budget for the higher education reorganization act really is.
Win-win-win? Well, it isn't done yet--this is a snapshot from the weekend and at this point 159 other legislators haven't weighed in with their take on this win-win-win business--but the governor and the regents so far are the biggest winners from the process.