(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers Feb. 23, 2015)
You grown-up guys out there are going to remember the times when, on a coat-and-tie outing, your girlfriend ordered chicken at the restaurant and you had your first notion that the outing wasn’t going to cost you a car payment.
Well, this memory so far appears to be about where Gov. Sam Brownback is this legislative session, early in the adventure of course, but so far, some little things are going his way.
He presented the Legislature with a budget for the upcoming two fiscal years, and so far, he probably has been surprised that in House Appropriations Committee subcommittees, and their counterparts in the Senate, most of the budget trimming he has proposed for dozens of state agencies has been approved.
That’s millions of dollars of trims in spending—and where there weren’t cuts, there weren’t increases, either—that he has apparently won.
Now, this is very early in the date, mind you, but at this point, those dozens of little agencies—think Real Estate Appraisal Board or Dental Board—have generally been approved in one house or the other with the governor’s spending recommendations intact.
Small stuff, sure, and maybe it is because budget committee members are conserving their energy. Or, maybe at least for the relatively nickel-and-dime spending on small specialized agencies that most Kansans have never heard of, Brownback is actually reducing the cost of government.
This isn’t going to last, but for right now with just the smaller pieces of state government budgets taking shape, Brownback is getting much of what he proposed in terms of spending.
Now, there remains elementary and higher education and highways and public safety, and social services and health programs for the poor and their children, which aren’t settled yet and which will be the real fights for the governor.
But, for now, the governor isn’t doing badly in the small world of small budgets.
Considering the responsibility of the governor to present lawmakers with a budget that on paper appears to balance, he’s done. Almost.
Brownback appears to have presented his budget and virtually disappeared.
He’s having staffers alternately laud and defend his K-12 education block grant plan and present probably what is his assessment of falling revenues, but he isn’t talking out loud much about his budget.
Maybe it’s too early, or maybe he has just presented a budget and is leaving the conservative Republican-led legislature to make it work. But he’s not publicly wading into the simmering debate that will end with either new taxes to finance it or sharp reductions in spending that at some point are going to inconvenience even his supporters.
This week, the governor can relax, and watch non-budget bills pour through the Legislature, the ones that don’t have sizable—or for some, even computed—price tags. It is the deadline week for most bills to get approved in one chamber and sent to the opposite chamber for consideration.
So, watch the fur fly over issues like immigration, teacher contract negotiations, guns and who can carry them where, and even a few bridges to get names.
It is just one week of pretty hot debates in the House and Senate over bills that will be the headline-grabbers, and then, it is budget again, and once there’s a budget the tax committees will start sifting through the options to fill what is assuredly going to be a hole in the budget.
Brownback has had a pretty good date with the Legislature—so far.
But he’s not on the front porch yet to see whether his date rewards him…or just goes indoors.