November 2002
Nov. 28, 2002
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 25, 2002)Top job
The public elections are over and the 80 Republicans in the Kansas House of Representatives are set to elect next week the most powerful single legislator in the state--the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Why is the Speaker the top job of the Legislature? It's because the Speaker alone selects every committee chairman of the House and the members of those committees. It's fantasy football on a grand scale, and those committee chairs and the stacking of members will to a large degree define just what the 2003 and 2004 sessions of the Legislature are going to accomplish.
Put a small company real estate agent in charge of the House Insurance Committee, for example, and chances are very slim that it will approve a bill that would allow real estate companies to sell title insurance. Put a pro-choicer at the head of the House Federal and State Affairs Committee and chances dwindle that new abortion restrictions are going to make it to the House floor for debate.
That's the sort of effect that a Speaker can create with his selections of committee chairs.
Who's in the running? Three veteran House members: Reps. Doug Mays, R-Topeka, who ran unsuccessfully two years ago for Speaker; House Judiciary Committee Chairman Mike O'Neal, R-Hutchinson, and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Kenny Wilk, R-Lansing.
All are Republicans, of course, because the party controls the House by an 80-45 split.
Count on Mays being the most partisan, O'Neal No. 2 and Wilk No. 3. They bring different backgrounds to the election which will take place Dec. 2.
Isn't partisan good? After all, Republicans worked hard to win a majority of House seats and they probably ought to get the chance to run the chamber the way they see fit. Well, yes and no. The degree of partisanship of the House has an effect on not just the House, but the Senate and Democratic Gov.-elect Kathleen Sebelius. Sebelius needs to have the Legislature on board when she battles her way out of the fiscally tight current fiscal year (FY 2003) and into the first budget year for which she has clear
ownership: Fiscal Year 2004 which starts July 1.If the House is helpful, and the Senate joins in, it's going to make solving the state's financial problems a lot easier as a shared effort. But there's no reason that a Republican-dominated Legislature should share the vision of a Democratic governor. The real theme is go along when you can, and fight when you can't.
So, do House Democrats just sit on their hands during the session? Not by a longshot. See, the Speaker's demeanor has a lot to do with the success of House Democrats. Elect a too-conservative House Speaker, and Democrats will form alliances with Republican liberals and moderates in the House and they can actually run the House from the cheap seats. Elect a too-moderate or liberal Republican, and Democrats will find fewer chances to form alliances with conservative Republicans who don't like their chamber's leadership.
Elect a wildly popular Speaker with support from both the conservative and liberal-to-moderate wings of the House's 80-member Republican army, and Democrats might find themselves with no one to make deals with. Railsters, who spend most of their lives in the Statehouse, don't believe there is a candidate like that in the race.
Fighting, deal-making and instability in the House make the Senate, which has its leadership in place due to its four-year terms, the more orderly and predictable chamber. With a disorganized or combative House, the best place for Sebelius to try to win support for her take on governance is the Senate. It can mean an unlikely but potentially workable alliance between the Senate and the Governor's office. Figure that!
So, while you've made your votes, elected your State Representatives, those legislators now are warming up for what will be their biggest vote of the two-year House term. Is there campaigning? There sure is. Candidates have already criss-crossed the state talking individually to representatives and representatives-elect, lining up support for their candidacies on the first ballot, or a likely second ballot, and maybe even a third ballot in the House chambers next Monday. There will even be a bunch of receptions on Sunday night in Topeka, just before the big leadership election day.
Democrats? Sure, they'll have their leadership elections Monday, too. But there's just one candidate for the top job, House Minority Leader, and it's Dennis McKinney, D-Greensburg. The real fight on the Democratic side is for assistant minority leader, between Reps. R. J. Wilson, D-Pittsburg, and Annie Kuether, D-Topeka.
That's the nice thing about the Statehouse...once you think the elections are over, there are still elections to be had.
Nov. 21, 2002
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 18, 2002)Going to college? Maybe...
Something that doesn't feel quite right is happening in some of the state's small school districts--primarily in rural areas where money is tight and where the future probably depends both on the number of college graduates who return home to earn their livings and raise their families, and those who never left.
Now, this is stuff that at the Statehouse tends to be buried in the discussion of millions of dollars of shortfall and "holding K-12 education harmless" and a bunch of rhetoric that sounds laudable but is just hot air until we actually see it happen.
What's going on is that the Kansas Legislature, which grew tired in the mid-1990s of hearing college presidents gripe that Kansas high school graduates who couldn't stay within the lines in their coloring books were going to their universities because they were Kansans and had to be admitted. Basically, if you had a high school diploma and tuition money, you, too, could be a college student.
Those were the days of remedial classes that the college presidents lamented having to offer on their campuses. (Although, there was a large school of thought that the state colleges were actually turning a profit on those classes of 150 students who were being taught English as a primary language by graduate teaching assistants who were essentially working for drinks and tips...and health insurance.)
Well, the college presidents created enough of an uproar that finally in the late 1990s, the Legislature passed "qualified admissions" which included a list of must-have courses that high school graduates had to pass to win admission to the state colleges and universities that their parents' taxes supported. That struck some of us Railsters as a little odd--like paying taxes to build bowling alleys that citizens can't bowl on unless they can roll at least a 200-point game. But that was then.
Now, with shrinking elementary and secondary school budgets, something unexpected is happening. There are still enough students to keep the colleges humming...but there are some school districts that are in a frantic juggling act to provide the list of courses that high schoolers need to pass to get into the colleges that their parents are supporting.
Hmmm... Something's not right here. School district administrators are starting to tell legislators that they face the real possibility in a year or so of having very smart pupils who may not get to enter state-supported colleges because their home districts can't offer the courses that are needed to get into those colleges.
Oh, and remember that while K-12 education hopefully leads to college for a large percentage of pupils, the real job description of school districts is to turn out graduates who, even if they don't seek another hour's formal education, make bright and intelligent employees in businesses that don't require college degrees. Don't doubt for a minute that there are plumbers and electricians and discount store department managers and dealers at casinos who are making more take-home money than your average college graduate with a political science degree. Or teachers, for that matter. When is the last time you called for an emergency visit from a political science major?
Some smaller school districts already are making choices that they didn't used to have to make: Do they become state college-prep schools, or do they tilt toward a K-12 education that is booming with vocational and technical and what we used to call "homemaker" tracks with consumer and family finance classes and basic understandings of the workaday stuff needed to finance cars and figure whether "giant sized" is a better deal than "titanic sized" bottles of dishwasher soap.
Do districts ditch courses that address the needs of non-college bound students in order to keep the regents-track curriculum in place? Is there any logical reason that because some pupils are college-bound, that a school district shouldn't teach non-college bound pupils how to play the clarinet?
This isn't the stuff that we talk about much at the Statehouse... where high concepts like qualified admissions were passed and nobody much thought of what happens a few years down the road when times are tight and the fields from which the college-bound Kansans are grown start playing out.
Is there an answer? Well, probably several. Nobody knows whether the little school districts are being run tightly and economically, or whether there's waste out there. Or whether there are little school districts that ought to merge, get rid of one superintendent and load up on French teachers. Or whether this is the time for community colleges to do a little prospecting for students.
There's a lot out there that isn't known, but right now, it doesn't feel right, does it?
Nov. 14, 2002
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 11, 2002)Who makes the cuts?
It might sound like just more "transition" claptrap, this fight over what is going to be called about a $300 million shortfall in the state budget between now and June 30, when the current fiscal year ends. But Statehouse insiders who revel in imagined slights and infighting see something more here.
The real stuff is that the roughly $300 million gap--between what the 2002 Legislature passed, tax increase and all--is actually more like $200 million. That's because almost $100 million of that figure is money that the state borrowed from the Kansas Department of Transportation that just flatly isn't going to be paid back.
There's going to be some whining and wailing, but KDOT has financed $100 million worth of revenue shortfall relief. Count on it.
But even the $200 million shortfall is going to be brutal for someone to cut out of the current year's spending. Half the fiscal year is gone, so what could have been, say, an $18 million-a-month reduction in spending becomes a $36 million-a-month reduction in spending.
Gov.-elect Kathleen Sebelius is expecting outgoing Gov. Bill Graves to make that $200 million cut before he leaves office at noon, Jan. 13. That would leave her with a clean start on July 1, the first budget year that will be entirely her own.
Now, on one hand, you almost want to give a new governor a chance to start with no baggage from the previous governor. That seems to be the decent thing to do. This may be the reason that couples ask each other whether their cars are paid off before they propose marriage. They then know what's out there.
But Sebelius knew that there were going to be a lot of unpaid bills when she got into this campaign, knew that there would be unpaid bills on the kitchen table when she was elected, and surely knew there would be a pile of unpaid bills on the table when she takes office officially in January. People have said a lot of things about Sebelius, but nobody said she wasn't smart.
Who cuts the spending to end FY 2003 at a zero balance, so Sebelius gets that fresh start for her first all-Sebelius budget? Why would anyone--except Sebelius-- expect Graves to do it? Graves had six pretty good years as governor, two that weren't very good, and now, while he's holding a suitcase in one hand, should he do anything else that will make his management of the state look bad?
Ideally, Sebelius and Graves will get together another hour or two and come up with a list of cuts that Graves will order made at the request of Sebelius. It won't be fun. It will be politically unpopular, people will see changes in their lives. Sebelius can lament unfair treatment, that Graves didn't do his job, even that he left the seat up. But Jan. 13, the problem is hers.
There are two alternatives that Sebelius isn't going to like if she doesn't get together a list of cuts she'll take responsibility for.
One alternative is for Graves to simply type up a letter, saying that the state general fund isn't going to repay KDOT the money it borrowed last session, and that's it. Graves then can claim he's made $141 million in cuts (remember that $41 million cut in September?) which is half the shortfall and he's done his duty. That's sellable to the general public, Graves leaves about halfway through the current fiscal year, and he'll have cleaned up about half the mess--the easy half. Sebelius won't like that, because it leaves the icky, agency-by-agency cutting to her, upsetting thousands of Kansans.
The other alternative is for the Legislature to make cuts when it gets to Topeka in January. The downside to leaving cuts to the Legislature is that, like Sebelius, some of the legislators weren't here when this problem started. It also means a shorter period to make cuts, which makes them more drastic.
Oh, and chances are unlikely that any cuts can be made before Sebelius releases her budget, her State of the State address, her vision for the fiscal year that starts July 1. If there's going to be a legislative effort to mess up the first budget cake that Sebelius bakes, there is no better circumstance than having her plan in front of a panicky Legislature that wouldn't mind a chance to tumble-dry a brand new Democratic governor.
Railsters are confident that Sebelius isn't going to like the possibilities that leaving cutting up to the new Legislature presents.
We're in for a couple interesting months before the inauguration. Some serious management needs to be going on and it probably better start pretty quickly.
Nobody wants to track blood into the Inaugural ball dance floor.
Nov. 7, 2002
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 4, 2002)
Helping farmersIf you cared to rumble around the State Treasurer's office to see where for remarkably little money the state manages to help some people who actually need help, you don't have to look further than the Agricultural Loan Production Deposit program.
Huh?
Well, it's a little program that has the state giving up 2 percent of the interest that it might earn on state idle funds to provide about $55 million in loans to Kansas farmers. This isn't land-buying money, it's money for farmers to actually buy the seed and fertilizer and stuff that they need to produce a crop.
Practically, it is a subsidy and everyone hates subsidies, but the numbers pencil out pretty well for Kansas, which depends on farmers being able to make a living in order for them to stay in business.
Maybe what's remarkable about the program is that it is just about the lowest-cost subsidy program that we've seen in a while. Here's how it works: Bankers around the state have agricultural borrowers fill out the standard loan forms to determine whether they are a good risk, and if they are, the bankers make the loans with money from the state treasury. Bankers get to borrow at 2 percent below standard market rates.
Bankers for their trouble get to add up to 4 percent interest to the amount at which they get to borrow state money. That yields bargain-basement loans for farmers and it keeps the bankers interested in the program and it costs the state very little money to get those loans out the door.
For example, the state is now spending a dab over $1 million to make those $55 million in loans available. That's a pretty decent return on the state's investment. And it's not like the state was going to make big bucks on the idle funds it has sitting around now, anyway. Overall earnings are about 2 percent now on idle funds which the state would otherwise loan to banks. And, starting on Jan. 1, state money managers are expecting that they'll be receiving less than 2 percent interest, which means that banks will be receiving the money to loan farmers essentially for free.
In bad times, economists say, lending money at low interest rates encourages activity, and in this case, it means encouraging farmers to farm. That's a pretty laudable goal, and it is easier to make sure that the money is actually being used because, well, we have bankers out there across the state looking to see whether there is farming going on. They can probably tell by just looking across Main Street and seeing if farmers are hanging out at the coffee shop. If they're not, then they're probably farming.
But the question remains of whether this is something that the state ought to be doing in the first place.
Ideally, probably not. It would be great if farmers could get a better price for their crops, buy their own seed and fertilizer and basically take care of themselves. But that clearly isn't happening. In recent years, when Kansas farmers got a good crop, chances are good that everyone else in the Midwest got a good crop, too, and prices for ag products were low. Or, when as this year, prices were good, drought across the Midwest meant most farmers didn't have much to sell at those good prices.
Maybe the loans are a way to keep farmers afloat until that golden year in the future when they have good crops and prices are relatively high and they can break even or make a little profit and repay those production loans. You gotta hope it happens.
But, for now, the best thing going for the production loan program is that it manages to get quite a bit of money out to farmers and it does it at such low cost that it flies under the radar screen of every other interest group in the state that wants money. A little over $1 million just isn't enough to turn school budgets around, or hire a bunch of college professors or put even two dozen Kansas Highway Patrol troopers on the roads.
Is it a good deal? If farmers prosper, it will be. If suddenly, farmers start making enough money to buy things that carry sales taxes, and if they have to make some income tax payments, then we've worked a good deal at relatively little expense.
And, if it doesn't work? Well, then the state is out its interest money, and bankers eat the losses and, well, then we see a bunch of bankers hanging around the Statehouse next session.