May 2007

May 31, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 28, 2007)

Writing the budget

There is a chance—a slim chance but a chance—that the Kansas Legislature, or at least the House of Representatives’ Republican majority, might try this fall to come up with a “legislative budget” to consider at the 2008 election-year session.

Legislators have talked about that legislative budget for years and never found the time or figured out how to assemble one.

What’s that about?  Well, every January the governor presents the Legislature with her budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts on July 1. The governor has had months to work with agencies—her agencies—to figure out how much money they need to do their assigned tasks, what the minimum pay-the-light-bill, pay-the-staff costs are and so on.

And, every year the governor presents the Legislature with a thick budget book, showing where she wants every dollar spent. It invariably includes some nice headline-grabbing stuff that generates buzz and makes the governor appear progressive.

The legislative budget? Well, that would be a companion to the governor’s tome. It would be the Legislature’s take on the amount of baseline funds needed for the state, a chance for legislators to decide what needs to be done and what doesn’t need to be done with taxpayer money, and just what minimum spending is needed to operate government with legislatively blessed programs.

Instead of the Legislature working from the governor’s budget document, it would have its own, and the governor’s would be, well, a spare.

The Legislature would be running this show, and the presumption is that it would run a more frugal state, spend less money, maybe bank a little reserve fund for emergencies and eventually cut taxes. Legislators love to cut taxes: It’s good for brochures and it’s good for reelection chances.

So why isn’t there a legislative budget? It takes time, it takes information—remember, the state agencies that turn in their proposed budgets work for the administration which is headed by the governor—and it takes a broad view of what state government does. That is difficult for a four-month-a-year legislature to bring into focus. City folks don’t know what the Department of Agriculture does, the country folks aren’t sure what the Department of Administration does, and there are agencies out there that no legislators are very familiar with. Bringing those agency needs into one legislative budget would be a chore.

Assembling a from-the-ground-up budget would likely turn out to be beyond the capabilities of a part-time legislature.

But…there is also talk of taking another route in the House of Representatives. It’s taking last year’s budget, adding inflation and must-do’s such as financing schools and welfare caseloads, and passing just that, quickly and early in the session. Then, separately, considering additional programs, expansions, and just nice things that government could do, and making that non-baseline spending the real budget for legislative consideration. It would add focus, and after the base spending bill is passed, the Legislature would have a better idea of just what money the state left and whether to spend it…or not.

It would shift the focus from the “governor’s budget” to the “legislative budget” and just might shift the perception that the Legislature is a spendthrift or a miser and turn it into a deliberative spending approval body.

It doesn’t  eliminate the budget battles, the spend or save decisions, but it keeps the normal operation of government out of the equation, and reduces the budget to a manageable field of fire for lawmakers to debate and for the governor to weigh in on.

Not quite an “invented by the Legislature” budget, but it’s a step closer to evening up the playing field between the administration and the Legislature…

May 24, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 21, 2007)

Tackling health care

This is going to be the summer when we find out if one seemingly complicated social/governmental experiment dealing with health care for the poor actually turns out to be any better for the poor or whether it’s better for state government.

The angle here is that probably 300,000 Kansans don’t have health insurance, and it is surely cheaper to treat those uninsured at the lowest-cost venues available.

The 2007 Kansas Legislature authorized the Kansas Health Policy Authority and a slew of legislators to start figuring out a way to supplement the perceived income of the poor by using state and federal government welfare funds to help them afford health insurance.

That’s going to be tricky.

One reason is that in Kansas, as with the nation, everyone who has serious health problems gets health care. It is often done through welfare programs and through hospitals—mostly their emergency rooms—to provide health care to the very sick, the injured, basically anyone who comes through the door.

That’s the baseline. Everyone gets health care, but it’s one of those situations where everyone gets emergency health care when the injuries or illnesses are very serious.

The concept with providing health insurance for the poor is that with a little luck, plus a little education and some basic shifting of resources, those sick and injured poor could be treated at a doctor’s office or a clinic or basically anywhere except a hospital emergency room where costs are the highest in the entire health-care industry.

If the state can figure out a way to get insurance at low cost to the poor—and there is generally going to have to be some sort of buy-in from the poor—they can get illnesses treated at those lower-cost facilities, and even if the state winds up paying the bill, it will be a smaller bill. That’s a win for the state, of course, but it’s also a win for the injured or sick poor people because they won’t be forced to wander around in pain or sick until they figure they are in bad enough shape that they feel that an emergency room visit is the only reasonable place to get health care.

Now, nobody doesn’t want the poor to have health care, but it should logically be provided in the least expensive way. And that is almost always in what policymakers call a “medical home” which is generally a physician or a physician group or a clinic where early care can be most effective and cheapest: That way, we don’t have very sick people or very seriously injured people being uncomfortable or suffering lingering effects of injury or illness.

Many players are necessary for this summer of health care reform to work. Employers, for example, will have to find a way to make some contribution toward health care for their employees. Insurance companies need to find ways to integrate unconventional clients into their book of policies. Health-care providers must find a way to be paid some amount of money for providing less-than-emergency care,
But probably the biggest challenge will be persuading the poor: If they are getting health care now, for no cost and with no real procedural hassle, why would they want to tie up with a welfare/government health-care system?

If you’re getting the idea that this isn’t going to be a simple fix for a problem then you’re catching on quickly.

It’s a noble effort, of course, and one that might save the state some money which sounds good to nearly everyone. But besides the massive information campaign for the poor, a comfort level must be created for insurance companies—and for those of us who write checks every month for private health insurance and wonder whether the sudden influx of the poor is going to raise the policy rates that we are paying. And the effort must yield enough resources so that we’re not essentially drafting doctors and hospitals to volunteer services for which they won’t get paid.

It’s going to be an interesting summer in which we learn just what’s possible and affordable for the state and for taxpayers and for those with insurance as efforts are made to cover everyone with health care.

May 17, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 14, 2007)

Splitting the difference

There’s this old, not-often-verbalized concept at the Statehouse—and actually in life generally—about “splitting the difference.”

It happens when you’re negotiating for a car, when you’re negotiating for a house or for just about anything else. It happens with bills in the Kansas Legislature dealing with political campaigning.
Now, sometimes you hear about it, mostly you don’t, but this session’s Legislature did a classic “split the difference” on a section of law dealing with political campaigning.

The issue: the state’s failure to move campaign finance laws into the new technologies that are key to fundraising for campaigns in the Internet and e-mail world most of us live in.

The campaign finance law problem is that nearly everyone running for the Legislature, or a statewide office, communicates and tries to raise money with e-mail solicitations. It’s quick, it’s cheap, and for many campaigns, it’s efficient and can be dangerous.

Dangerous because the one rule that gets some legislators and statewide officeholders in trouble is soliciting campaign contributions from registered lobbyists during the legislative session. That prohibition probably makes a lot of sense.

You’d hate to see a legislator accepting money from a lobbyist before he/she goes into the House or Senate to cast a vote on an issue that is important to the lobbyist or the lobbyist’s clients. It just looks like vote-selling. That’s why candidates can’t solicit contributions from lobbyists during the legislative session.

But what’s happened is that legislators send out e-mails to hundreds, thousands, and in a statewide race, hundreds of thousands of people, nearly year-around and that includes the legislative session.
So the problem becomes fly-specking that list to make sure that no e-mails seeking campaign money winds up going to a lobbyist during a legislative session.  Look at your own list of friends you e-mail and you’ll quickly decide that the e-mail addresses are pretty much gobbledygook. In the case of a legislator who has looked at hundreds of them, trying to sort out all the lobbyists, it’s nearly impossible to make sure that there’s not a lobbyist on the list.

The simple solution would be to allow politicians to send out e-mails to everyone they think they might get money from, and to put somewhere prominently on that e-mail a note that says something like: If you are a lobbyist who gets this message, please disregard it. Maybe it could add a “click on this box” and be sent to an explanation of why lobbyists can’t make contributions during the legislative session, and legislators can’t solicit or accept contributions from lobbyists during the session, and if a lobbyist gets the e-mail, just ignore it and don’t dare send the officeholder a check—until after the legislative session.

But that’s a little too straightforward. So the new wrinkle in campaign finance law is to require legislators and candidates for office to vow that they did not “knowingly” solicit a contribution from a lobbyist during the legislative session.

What’ll happen? Well, a lobbyist or someone close to the lobbyist will tell the campaign law watchdog Governmental Ethics Commission he/she received a campaign contribution solicitation during the legislative session, and the candidate is going to have to tell Ethics that he/she didn’t have any idea that the lobbyist’s e-mail address was among the hundreds or thousands of solicitations sent out.

It’ll be a little embarrassing for the candidate, and probably cause a formal public hearing at which the officeholder will have to publicly admit that he/she didn’t have a clue who all was on the list, and the solicitation was made un-knowingly.

It’s not an elegant solution, or a 21st Century solution, but it splits the difference between a possible fine from Ethics and attendant bad publicity and just admitting you don’t know who is behind every e-mail address in your campaign list.

Not all good, not all bad, but a subtle change that splits the difference for candidates.

We’ll just have to see how it works next year, an election year…

May 10, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers May 7, 2007)

State spending: High, or not…

The Legislature has disbanded safely after an exactly 90-day long session, and the good news for some is that the lawmakers have left the Statehouse and can’t spend any more money this year.

Now, there are always going to be complaints about state government spending. It’s almost a spring tradition in the state.

The arguments about spending take two traditional paths. One is that the Legislature spent too much money and the other is that it spent a lot of money, but on the wrong things.

At some level of examination, both are probably right.

But it’s spending that yields the percentages that tends to be the attention-getter.

The big number there: spending from the State General Fund, which is the pot into which almost all income, sales and other tax revenues flow, grew by about 8.1 percent from last year. That’s a pretty big number, and anyone who has lived through several years of 3 percent or 4 percent or even 5 percent raises is probably thinking, well, 8.1 percent increase in spending is pretty shocking.

Well, it is and, in some respects, it isn’t. Huh?

Take a look at the increases in State General Fund spending approved by the Legislature this session. Some are unavoidable and some, well, seem pretty justifiable.

Of that $450 million increase in spending, here’s where some of it went:

The big one, of course, is $149 million in aid to elementary and secondary schools. That’s the amount the Legislature agreed to last year, under Kansas Supreme Court scrutiny, to settle a lawsuit that the state lost: that the state wasn’t fairly and adequately financing public education in Kansas. That was a must-do, and more than a few are surprised that the Legislature, once the court was looking the other way, actually did.

Another $66 million went out the door to replace lost federal funding because the federal government sifted through several social programs (Medicaid, mostly) and found that Kansas had violated rules either stated or implied on how those federal monies could be used. Consider it a penalty, but when the federal government cuts funding for ongoing programs, well, the state has to pick up the cost—in this case, the cost of already-spent money.

And there was another $65 million spent because more Kansans needed help, ranging from health care to nursing home payments to providing for children who are in foster care or are mentally ill. That’s a lot of money, but do you not want the sick, the old, the infirm or children taken care of?

There are some other sizable chunks of the State General Fund for which the Legislature appropriated money. Consider about $30 million for the state’s share of thousands of state and school employees’ pension funds. It’s money that by contract with those employees the state owes, and just has to pay. And, there’s another $23 million in payments on bonds issued for purposes as diverse as building highways, renovating the Statehouse and repaying bonds issued to generate interest income for pensions.

More kids are predicted to show up at schools next year, and that’s another $16 million. For folks who have lost track, but remember your own 3 percent or 4 percent or 5 percent raises, well, there’s $44 million for 2 percent raises for state employees, plus an $860 bonus to be paid workers in December.

That is a lot of money spent by the Legislature. Most of that 8.1 percent increase is on “must do’s” and frankly, it’s hard to glance through the list and figure which “must do’s” you’d drop out if it was your decision.

Lots of money? Sure. Just pick out the ones that you didn’t want done.

May 3, 2007
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers April 30, 2007)

Interesting critters, those vetoes…

Gubernatorial vetoes are interesting critters in the Kansas Statehouse.

Some are highly controversial and wind up being written-up in the newspapers as fights between the Legislature and the governor. Some are just workmanlike assessments of the Legislature’s work product.

One of each just occurred.

If you consider that it takes a majority of the House and Senate, and the attendant wrangling between the two bodies, to pass a bill to the governor’s consideration, well, you’d expect that the work product that the Legislature sends to the governor is probably a pretty well thought-out piece of important public policy. Or, sometimes, not…

The headline-making veto, of course, was the governor rejecting a bill that pretty much shuts local units of government out of the business of further regulating just where card-(and pistol-) carrying Kansans can take their concealed weapons.

The fight there, worth lots of ink, was whether local units of government should be able to further constrain by local ordinance or resolution just where concealed-carry permit holders can take their pistols. Some cities didn’t want them in public parks, some apparently didn’t mind, but the possibility that a picnicker from, say, Stanton County could run afoul of the local regulations in Sedgwick County or one of the cities in Johnson County for carrying a pistol didn’t seem right to gun-rights advocates, who believe you ought to be able to carry a concealed pistol just about anywhere in Kansas you care to go.

The governor’s veto of that law was overridden by the Legislature, so local units of government can’t further regulate where concealed-carry licensees can take their guns. It was a major win for gun-rights folks and a blow to the authority of local units of government. Whether that’s a good thing or not, well, it’s really up in the air.

The governor, who is not a fan of people carrying guns under their coats, thinks local units should be able to do whatever they want in the way of regulating concealed-carry. After all, if the cities or counties go too far, it’s not all that inconvenient to vote against a city councilman or county commissioner and throw ‘em out. That’s the real deal, and for gun rights advocates, it’s just an inconvenience but requires them to figure out who their friends are on the city or county government and who their enemies are and just settle it out with a shootout at the ballot box.

That’s the big veto everyone’s talking about. Essentially, it saves gun rights folks the trouble of voting in local elections.

There was a “littler” veto this session that the Legislature didn’t make a lot of noise about, just fixed.
Sebelius vetoed a bill dealing with liquor, allowing nonprofits (and we’re thinking patrons of the arts holding a white wine-fueled cocktail party to raise funds for the next performance of the Vagina Monologues at the civic theater) and political fund-raisers to offer liquor to guests without having to secure a special permit from the state.

Sebelius vetoed the bill because the entire Legislature missed the language that would prohibit liquor wholesalers from selling liquor to liquor retailers or anyone else. It was a bill with a tragic flaw for those who figured that once the bill became effective, and the local bar or liquor store had run out of stock, there would be no legal way for them to purchase new supplies.

That veto? It got the Legislature’s attention and the bill was repaired, quickly, quietly, and probably to the satisfaction of Kansans who could get all the Coke they wanted but would have had to travel out of state to get the rum to put into it.

Two vetoes: One high-profile, worth some legislative breast-beating; the other low-profile, just a gubernatorially required fix in the Legislature’s work product.

For the gun bill, well, it’s all in the headlines. The liquor fix? Well, it gives some a reason to purchase more Coke…