November 2006
Nov. 30, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 27, 2006)Rubber hits the road
Something very simple was announced last week that may start some interesting and potentially significant changes in the way local government makes purchases with your tax money.
The simple thing: groups of counties along with the Kansas Department of Corrections got together with drug companies and essentially hammered out a deal that sets prices—attractively low prices—on prescription drugs that convicts and prisoners receive while they are in custody of the state or counties.
Now, that doesn’t sound like a very big deal, because most of us don’t spend much time considering that while someone is in prison or a county jail, government is responsible for his/her safety and well-being. You just don’t spend much time wondering whether that diabetic prisoner or the prisoner with a heart condition or some other illness gets his/her drugs while in custody. Maybe we should, but we don’t. Other things occupy our time.
Well, the Kansas Department of Corrections worries about that, and so do local jail keepers. After decades of the sheriff or prison warden just sending someone down the street to the pharmacy to get the convict’s prescription filled, the Kansas Department of Corrections several years ago started putting those drugs out for bid and negotiating prices with pharmacists. And after a meeting last year Corrections officials, jail operators and pharmacy companies came up with what they believe is a fair price for the medicines that prisoners take.
Then, through an outfit called the Kansas Collaborative, the players worked a deal where prices are fixed and the prisoners’ drug needs are met at a common price, whether they are in a state prison or a county jail.
The deal is that either local pharmacies provide drugs at those agreed-to prices or the jails can buy them from some other pharmacy at the agreed-to price. Figure that local pharmacies aren’t making as much money as they used to when the deputies just arrived with a list and a check, but the local pharmacies presumably do enough volume that their drugs don’t go stale and they make a little profit on what they do sell.
It sounds simple, and the Collaborative announced last week that jails and prisons saved abut $7 million last year but, well, it’s just drugs for prisoners. That’s not a high-visibility item in county budgets and most people just don’t care much about it. Don’t look for it to show up on campaign brochures of county commission candidates.
There are probably dozens of those low-visibility purchases made by counties that are pretty much under the radar. Street-striping paint? Maybe weed killers for the noxious week division, or stuff like that where there is probably some tax money to be saved on things that don’t incite much public interest.
But saving money is saving money and we expect government to be thrifty so that if it doesn’t need to raise taxes, it might just hold them steady. That’s a good thing, not as good as cutting taxes of course, but overall, a good thing.
What’s going to be interesting is when this Kansas Collaborative starts working on, say, truck prices or the prices for snow plows.
Those items are sold by local businesses, owned likely by campaign contributors and they are big-dollar, higher public interest items.
Say the Collaborative figures that a basic pickup truck ought to cost $13,000 and the county has been paying the local Ford dealer more than that. Does the county decide that it will buy locally if the local dealer will meet that $13,000 price? Or wind up with trucks from some faraway dealer? Or, heavens, maybe Toyota trucks?
That’s going to be when the rubber literally hits the road.
And if that Collaborative price hits the local newspaper, commissioners suddenly see the routine truck purchase become a highly publicized choice between the local Ford dealer and the Chevy dealer and the Dodge dealer and maybe the Toyota dealer. And this time, their prices are weighed against the Collaborative price. things get complicated, talked-about and politically charged.
Or it could be as simple as buying tires for those trucks when there’s a local tire factory strike going on. How do the Democrats on the county commission vote?
This all gets a little more complicated as the Collaborative expands its efforts to drive down prices for local units of government and the state government, as well.
We’ll be watching…
Nov. 23, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 20, 2006)At-risk information
Interesting and sometimes absurd things can happen when you use information for the wrong purposes.
We may see just that happen in the upcoming legislative session with the results of a recently released Legislative Post Audit study of pupils in Kansas public schools who receive federally financed free lunches at schools because their parents are poor.
The audit is a pretty straight-forward analysis of the federal program which provides free lunches at schools to about 135,000 Kansas children. The system that awards those free lunches is probably a little loose. There are kids who aren’t getting free lunches who should, and there are kids who are getting free lunches who shouldn’t.
That’s marginally interesting, we suppose. After all, a program with 135,000 kids involved is bound to have some irregularities, some mistakes.
The absurd part comes in when the state uses that federal lunch program to distribute at-risk (additional) funding to school districts so that the districts can have extra money to provide programs for pupils who are at risk of not performing well academically.
You see the problem. There are plenty of poor kids who are whiz-bang students and there are plenty of rich or at least well-off kids who need special attention at school to make good grades.
But, the majority of pupils who are at risk to excel are from poor families for a bunch of reasons including parents who have to work multiple jobs, broken-up families and problems within the family that just make it difficult for a child to attend to school business.
Because the lunch program covers a majority of pupils with school problems and is the best available basis for the state to use to distribute at-risk funds to schools the accuracy of the lunch program serves as a guidepost for how much additional funding school districts receive from the state as “at-risk” funding.
That “at-risk” funding totaled $111 million last year, and about $19 million of that went to districts based on free lunches for pupils who don’t qualify for free lunches. That doesn’t mean that they don’t need academic help, after school programs or special tutoring, just that they weren’t legally eligible for the free lunches. Estimates are that the current year will see about $27 million distributed to districts for at-risk programs based on the flawed lunch program, $37 million next year and $46 million the year after.
The easiest and most absurd result, of course, is to reduce the money going to schools for at-risk educational programs based on flaws on the unrelated but used-as-a-benchmark lunch program.
That’s likely to sound like a good idea to legislators who want to save money but logically, it just doesn’t pencil out, does it?
The best solution, of course, is to give kids who need free lunches free lunches and kids who need additional help to thrive academically more help so they do thrive academically.
But the issue now is that a yardstick that was created for nutrition programs comes close but isn’t a perfect fit for a program for kids who need additional attention in school.
Is there a better yardstick? Probably somewhere, but the Kansas Legislature hasn’t found it yet. It could be that all those tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind program would yield some more relevant information on which to base additional state aid to pupils who are at risk.
And, don’t forget, that there are school districts which might lose state aid if there was a better way to distribute at-risk funds. That’s the “if it’s broke, don’t fix it” crowd, and their motivations—and those of the legislators representing those districts—are understandable, if not very defensible.
We’ll see what happens…
Nov. 16, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 13, 2006)A question of timing
We’ll never know, for sure, whether the state’s conservative ministers who made the anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment their battle cry in the 2004 elections denied Kansas Republicans in the House their chance to essentially run the Kansas Legislature in the term upcoming.
If you remember back two years ago, it was gay marriage or bust for Republicans, and just after House members were sworn in, they made passing the proposal to prohibit gay marriages Job 1 in the 2005 Legislature.
They got the amendment through the Legislature and then, under strong pressure from conservative ministers across they state, lawmakers put the issue on the spring municipal election ballots in 2005.
The amendment passed handily, more than 70% of Kansans voting for it in a big turnout for what are generally low-key municipal and school board elections.
But the election that spring didn’t have a thing to do with the Kansas Legislature, or the House which stood for election last week. The House and its Republicans denied themselves a place on the ballot with the single most emotional issue that Kansans have seen since…well, we guess pari-mutuel wagering or maybe, but not likely, property reappraisal.
The result? There was a lot of other political dust in the air on Election Day in Kansas, but it was largely confined to the 2nd Congressional District (Democrat Nancy Boyda beats U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun, R-Kan.) and the attorney general race (Democrat Paul Morrison defeats Republican Attorney General Phill Kline).
Oh, and Republicans lost seats in the Kansas House when they were within one single seat of essentially running state government—by being able to override a gubernatorial veto. Once a chamber has enough votes from one party to override vetoes, well, does it really matter who is governor?
Nope, you can’t put a pencil to it, but it would have been a lot simpler race for Republicans if gay marriage had been on this year’s November ballot. The same out-sized majority of the House that voted to put gay marriage on the spring 2005 ballot likely would have been returned to office handily, and those who voted against the proposition likely would have been at loose ends by about noon of Inauguration Day 2007.
And, coincidentally, it would have saved Kansas business, at least as it was represented by the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, what is likely to be an upcoming licking over the issue of businesses hiring illegal aliens. Look for next session to be awash in bills finding ways to punish businesses that hire undocumented aliens, because without gay marriage on the ballot, immigration became the predominant theme in many House races.
Gay marriage on the ballot might even have sweetened the chances for Kline’s reelection and might have produced a more rigorous race for governor.
Do Republicans blame the conservative ministers who threatened retribution to legislators if they didn’t put gay marriage on the first available ballot after it passed the Legislature? Not entirely, but there are some who believe it was a definite factor in this year’s House losses.
Now, the pastors were probably doing their jobs and if they really believed that gay marriage was the biggest issue facing people of religious faith then it made sense to get it before voters as quickly as possible.
But there’s this subtle feeling around the Statehouse that the next time a religious-themed piece of legislation comes around, legislators are going to listen to the issue but reserve the timing of its resolution to their best political judgment. Gays weren’t getting married here anyway, and the delay might just have kept them dating for another year…
Nov. 9, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 6, 2006)Good news? Sorta...
Something extremely important happened last week in the little town that we call the Statehouse.
A group of economic and revenue experts met as the “Kansas Consensus Revenue Estimating Group” and by some secret, and we like to imagine mysterious, process came up unanimously with an estimate of the amount of state tax revenue Kansas will receive in the future.
The estimate: For the remainder of this state fiscal year—that’s through June 30, 2007—Kansas will receive from taxes and such $299 million more than it expected at the end of the last legislative session. Oh, and the state will receive about $108 million more in the next fiscal year than it is reckoned the state will get this year.
The news for state government is at once both good and destabilizing. It’s good, because it means that without any changes in tax rates, the state is taking in more money and that means that as a whole, Kansans are making more money. But the state having more money becomes a political hot potato because of the choices that it presents.
The money means that it looks likely that the state can afford to finance the three-year school finance plan it approved last year–much has been made about the state agreeing to spend more money than it has, leading to either whittling down the school plan or raising taxes. The new money means the state likely will be able to afford to make good on its promise to schools.
That does seem like good news, current-level taxes covering the bills, but in the Statehouse where everything is political and there are under-the-covers maneuvers on all things political, the news does break good and bad.
Yes, it is good news for schools which are the beneficiaries of that massive school finance bill passed last session. But look a little deeper. The school plan was front-loaded with money so that every House candidate could point to more money for the local schools. However, that also was a political liability for those seeking re-election in 2008, the last year of the plan, because without the new projected revenues, they would have to either raise taxes or cut back on the plan in the legislative session before they run for reelection.
So, the money solves that next-election problem, but also means that those who want to cut spending on schools or shuffle the money around to benefit their own districts don’t have the tax-raising or program-cutting hubris as cover for their own maneuvering. While that end-of-school-plan money now seems to be available, it means that there is good reason for locking down spending increases so the money isn’t spent next session to undermine the program. That means the nice things that the extra money being projected could provide—either tax cuts or maybe expanding all-day kindergarten to all districts or maybe even new social spending on health care—may be a tougher sale because of the shadow of the school finance spending plan.
And count on interest groups and lobbyists figuring that the extra $300 million in revenue should be used next session for just those nice things. It sets up a battle between schools and social programs that is going to make both sides sound petty, craven and selfish. But remember, believers in those social programs vote. They don’t generally have significant political action committee money to spend on candidates in 2008, but they’ll be making noise in the next campaign cycle.
Funny, isn’t it, how the specter of more money being available can cause political problems for the Legislature. Who’d have thought about that aspect of what ought to be good news? Well, thinking about that sort of stuff is what we do in the Statehouse…
Nov. 2, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Oct. 30, 2006)Parsing, Statehouse-style
What is simple on the doorsteps as candidates are campaigning for the Kansas House is going to turn out to be complicated and abrasive once the issue hits the Statehouse, where everything is more complicated than it appears.
The simple doorstep promise: to do something about rising property taxes. On doorsteps this campaign season, the mantra appears to be that almost every candidate wants to do something for the “elderly on a fixed income.” The concept is that rising property taxes are gobbling up an increasing amount of retirees’ pension or Social Security checks and at some point, the old will be taxed out of their homes.
Now, that’s pretty simple, unless the issue gets parsed out Statehouse-style.
The first hurdle is, of course, the Kansas Constitution. It requires property of different types (homes, utilities, railroads, vehicles) to be taxed on a uniform and equal basis. That’s just fair. Your house should be taxed according to its value in the same manner and rate as your neighbor’s house. Doesn’t matter what color it is painted, whether you had the right yard sign last election cycle, a home is a home and it should be appraised at its fair market value, and the property tax should be assessed against the percentage of that fair market value (11.5%) just like every house in the state.
So, there are a couple ways to go. One is just to write into the Constitution that owner-occupied homes of people 65 or older should have their values frozen. That means whatever the tax levy is, it is applied against the frozen valuation which would take those 65 and older out of the business of having the value of their home increase (as its actual value increases) and so one part of the equation that raises property taxes is just frozen.
That works out well, if you don’t mind rich people having their home values frozen too, just because they are 65. You wind up wasting a little of the social good by helping the rich, but they’ll like you for it. It’s tough to put income limits or such into the Constitution because it’s hard to adjust fine points once they are constitutionalized and it takes another statewide vote to change them.
Another way is to allow those 65 or older to have increases in their home’s property taxes “deferred” until they die or the house is sold. That can be done with just a regular statute, but it is a little trickier.
For one thing, the Legislature could create a program of deferred taxes. There are a few more knobs and levers on this one. It would be possible to create a revolving fund from which the state would rebate to local units of government (which generally live and die by property taxes) the value of old people’s taxes which are deferred until the property is sold or transferred. It would be the difference between what a valuation-frozen or tax-frozen property actually pays and what it would pay if it was owned by anyone who isn’t over age 65. That keeps cities and counties from yelping about losing money, and it probably shortstops owners of every other sort of property from hollering that the less money local governments get from the old, the higher the tax rate will be on everything else, creating a subsidy of the old. Oh, and on a tax deferral basis, the state could put in some income limits, so the old-rich, or at least old who can afford it, get no deferral.
And then comes the big question: the deferred taxes. Does the state get its money forwarded to local units of government back when the frozen property is sold? Sounds fair, actually, but just watch the heirs of those seniors, who are likely to be voters, yelp about their inheritance being diminished.
So, what sounded pretty simple draws fire from the state treasury—which would have another demand for money atop of its school finance obligation—or cities and counties which don’t want to lose any property tax revenue to finance local government or heirs of the seniors who got tax deferrals.
It isn’t as simple as it sounds, is it? We’ll see how, or whether, something gets done next session.