(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers June 8, 2015)
Now, let’s think…you are in front of a burning house with a child inside…
Do you rush in to save the child, or do you wait until the local TV crew shows up, unloads the cameras, positions them for the best view, and then, once you’ve gotten the OK that film is rolling, storm into the house to rescue the child?
Probably depends on whether you are a politician.
What?
Well, that’s about how the furlough threat for some 24,000 Kansas employees played out over the weekend.
Kansas Budget Director Shawn Sullivan a couple weeks ago warned lawmakers that they need to pass a budget relatively quickly and nothing happened. That may have been the spark in the house that fell onto the carpet.
Yes, lawmakers often are told that they need to be expeditious in dealing with the state’s financial problems, taxes and budgets and such. But they hear that a lot.
So, it was early last week that Sullivan—who works for Gov. Sam Brownback—said that without a budget in place and signed into law, there was no formally appropriated money in agency accounts ranging from the Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism to the Regent universities to pay wages starting on Sunday.
It’s a deal where the start of this week’s pay period is actually paid after July 1, which is a new fiscal year that until a budget passes gives no direction on how or whether state agencies can spend money on salaries of workers.
So those agencies and universities dutifully started notifying employees they rather distastefully refer to as “non-essential” that because there was no specifically authorized appropriation for their salaries, they would be furloughed, without pay.
As the realization of the size of the furloughs circulated—we didn’t know until Friday just how many jobs were affected—the politics heated up. And, the politics got sharper because there wasn’t a budget approved for the upcoming fiscal year, and legislators started trying to figure out how to save their state employee constituents—and presumably their registered voter friends and family—from those layoffs.
At about this time, the administration was saying it had no choice but to start furloughs, as another spur to quick budget action. It didn’t work.
So, by Friday and Saturday, everyone was ready for the furloughs; thousands of notices had been printed and sent to workers who bore that unfortunate “non-essential” title.
And then, lawmakers worked to pull that child from the burning building, passing a bill that puts the crown “essential” on every state employee’s head. That’s literally pulling the child from the burning house. All were saved, and not a single legislator in the House and Senate voted against that rescue.
Gov. Sam Brownback drove to the office to read the bill, signed it into law and the Secretary of State’s office published an “extra, extra, read all about it” online edition of the official state publication, the Kansas Register.
So, we had the Legislature rushing into the house to save the child, we had the governor speeding to work to pronounce the child officially saved…and it was only winners. Oh, and of course, those state employees stayed on the job and didn’t have to worry about their early July car payments.
Oh, but just a day later, the Legislature approved the budget that fixed the payroll accounting problem. Would furloughs have happened if that high-publicity rescue hadn’t occurred?
Probably, but just for some who work on Sundays…but where’s the headline in that?