When Gov. Sam Brownback and his conservative backers ousted most of the moderates from the Kansas Senate, so that conservatives had control of both chambers, this year’s legislative session was supposed to be a breeze. In fact, House and Senate leaders said it would take only 80 days, instead of the allotted 90. But 90 days ended Thursday, and today the House overwhelmingly rejected the Senate tax plan and then adjourned until Tuesday. They can’t blame this dysfunction on moderates.
A promotional video for the Kansas Chamber of Commerce includes endorsements by top political leaders in the state. “I don’t know where we would be without the chamber,” Gov. Sam Brownback (in photo) says in the video. Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, notes that the chamber “was involved in the elections for both House and Senate members” and that it “helped change the environment in the Capitol.” The chamber’s political action committee spent more than $1 million during the 2012 legislative election, much of it directed at defeating moderate Republicans. One of those purged lawmakers, former Sen. Ruth Teichman of Stafford, wondered if the chamber is now trying to convince Kansas that “getting rid of us” was a good thing, the Hutchinson News reported. Also of note in the video is Neeli Bendapudi, the dean of the University of Kansas School of Business. She says that “the Kansas Chamber and the University of Kansas are united for business.” When contacted by the Hutchinson News, Bendapudi said she did not intend to speak for the entire university. “I honestly did not think it through,” she said.
However the sales-tax debate turns out, state lawmakers and Gov. Sam Brownback can say they lowered one tax by a whopping 30 percent this year – the property tax on boats and other watercraft. That tax had been so high in Kansas that many residents unlawfully registered and kept their boats in neighboring states. Voters finally passed a constitutional amendment last November authorizing lawmakers to classify and tax watercraft on a different basis from other personal property, and Brownback signed the resulting measure April 16 as part of a larger tax-related bill. Now, boats will be taxed at 11.5 percent of appraised value next year and 5 percent as of 2015. The new tax rate should benefit Kansas boat owners and dealers as well as the state’s lakes, parks and budget.
It’s up to state lawmakers to keep long-term care services for intellectually and developmentally disabled Kansas out of KanCare – because the Brownback administration won’t listen. Parents and advocates rallied in Topeka Wednesday and signed a giant banner asking Gov. Sam Brownback to “carve out long-term I/DD services from KanCare.” But when asked about it by the Lawrence Journal World, Brownback said: “We’re putting forward our proposal as we have.” Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services Secretary Shawn Sullivan criticized the service providers who organized the rally for trying “to create more fear for those they serve.” But it’s the administration insistence on entrusting the daily care of these vulnerable citizens to for-profit insurance companies that has families scared and upset.
When Aaron Jack – a former state representative from Andover – resigned on Feb. 12 from the top job at the Kansas Securities Commission, the announcement said he wanted to return to private industry. But the Topeka Capital-Journal reported this week that he was told to resign or be fired by Gov. Sam Brownback’s chief of staff. And with good reason. During his two-year tenure, Jack pushed out nearly three-fourths of the commission’s staff, replacing many of them with GOP operatives. Not surprisingly, the commission’s enforcement record dropped. Jack also authorized more than $500,000 to be spent on a “public education” media campaign that seemed mostly aimed at aiding his planned run for Kansas insurance commissioner. “They’ve turned the agency into a dysfunctional pro-industry political bastion,” a former securities examiner told the Capital-Journal. “One of the best securities agencies in the country has been wiped out.” So has Jack’s political career.
Keeping long-term care services for intellectually and developmentally disabled Kansans out of KanCare would cost the state nearly $100 million, Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer said last week. But where exactly would those savings come from? The Brownback administration has promised that services and reimbursement rates wouldn’t be cut, and it’s not as if the current system is flush with funding. “It’s a grossly underfunded system at this time,” Colin McKenney, CEO of Starkey Inc., told The Eagle editorial board earlier this year, calling the notion of the state squeezing $100 million out of the I/DD system “very alarming.” Are these more made-up savings, like the $30 million that the administration claimed it would saved by the turnpike merger but could never explain? Or would the savings come from making it such as fight to get approval for services that people give up?
The overcast weather didn’t dampen the passion of more than 100 people who rallied at the Statehouse last Saturday against the polices of Gov. Sam Brownback and the conservative Legislature. “We’re not going to stand for this foolishness,” said Lisa Ochs, president of the American Federation of Teachers-Kansas. House Minority Leader Paul Davis, D-Lawrence, was more strident. “I’ve had enough of Sam Brownback and right-wing Republicans that want to impose more and more laws to tear down the working man and woman,” Davis said. But with so few people attending the rally, the protestors have their work cut out for them.
Gov. Sam Brownback is reluctant to allow an expansion of Medicaid because he thinks the federal government is broke and may not honor its funding commitment. But he is also pushing the Legislature to authorize an additional $200 million in state bonds to help ensure the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility is built in Manhattan, without any worries that the government will honor its funding commitment. Brownback wants NBAF because it is expected to create about 750 construction jobs and more than 300 permanent jobs. But the Medicaid expansion is projected to create about 4,000 jobs. “I think we can say with some certainty,” wrote Kansas City Star columnist Barbara Shelly, “that a pathogen lab is more attractive to him as an economic stimulus than an expansion of health care to low-income Kansans.”
At an April Wichita Downtown Rotary luncheon meeting featuring Gov. Sam Brownback, the questioners included Jill Docking, the Democrat and financial adviser who lost to Brownback in his first U.S. Senate race in 1996. Docking, a member of the Kansas Board of Regents from 2007 to 2010, wrote on her policy site, the Docking Blog, about Brownback’s recent lobbying to keep higher-education funding flat by extending the higher sales-tax rate. “Taken on its face, the governor’s endorsement of ‘no cuts’ sounds like support, even the work of a savior. But when you take a look at the history of funding for the regent institutions in Kansas, it becomes apparent that the governor is advocating for maintaining not adequate funding but recession-level funding,” Docking wrote, citing an 11 percent decline in state funding for higher ed from 2008 through 2012. Now that Brownback wants to “lock education funding into recession levels” to help fund his “experimental” business and personal income-tax cuts, she continued, one “danger is that those states reinvesting in higher education after the recession will prey on our talent pool – at the cost of Kansas’ future economic competitiveness. When you understand this context, you come to realize that the governor is not solving the problem of adequate funding of higher education – he is exacerbating it.”
That didn’t take long. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (in photo) informed Gov. Sam Brownback that part of a new state gun law is unconstitutional — the provisions saying guns made in Kansas are immune from federal regulation and prohibiting federal officials from enforcing those regulations. “In purporting to override federal law and to criminalize the official acts of federal officers, (the law) directly conflicts with federal law and is therefore unconstitutional,” Holder wrote. State lawmakers were told by the Kansas Attorney General’s Office that the law was unenforceable, yet they passed it anyway, and Brownback signed it into law. Now taxpayers will get stuck paying the legal bills in a losing attempt to defend the law.
The Kansas Bioscience Authority was set up with a separate governing board in an attempt to minimize political influence on funding decisions. But those walls have been crumbling in recent years. Wichita lawmakers intervened to get funding for a local project, and now Gov. Sam Brownback wants to use KBA’s funding to help pay for an adult stem cell research center. The Midwest Stem Cell Therapy Center was an idea hatched this year by some state senators and will be part of the University of Kansas Medical Center. KU never asked for the center, and the project’s medical and commercial merit was never vetted. As part of the spending adjustments that he released this week, Brownback proposed diverting almost $1.2 million from KBA next year to create the center and about $750,000 annually to help pay for its operation.
“This 1-cent sales tax will only last for three years, then drop to 0.4 cents to pay for the ongoing transportation plan,” wrote Democratic Gov. Mark Parkinson (in photo) in July 2010, arguing the statewide sales-tax increase would avert a sixth round of budget cuts and help fund schools, public safety and social services. But now Republican Gov. Sam Brownback is lobbying the House to join the Senate and extend the full 6.3 percent sales-tax rate – to avoid cuts to higher education and other items in a budget under pressure from last year’s deep income-tax cuts. How does Parkinson feel about the likelihood of his temporary tax hike being made permanent? When The Eagle editorial board e-mailed Parkinson, now president and chief executive officer of the American Health Care Association in Washington, D.C., he said: “I believe that interjecting myself in current issues would just be noise and not helpful. Running a state is not easy. The current governor and Legislature don’t need me second-guessing their actions.”
Gov. Sam Brownback’s effort to turn Kansas into a “red-state model” was featured in a long report on National Public Radio last weekend. Brownback explained how he wants to put Kansas on a “glide path” to zero income taxes as a way to create growth and attract investment. But economist Brad DeLong warned that Brownback’s approach likely will produce “a relatively low-wage form of economic development” and result in social services that are “quite lousy.” Former Gov. Bill Graves also was interviewed and blamed Kansas’ sharp shift to the right on a well-funded effort to “suggest that less government is gonna be better for everyone.”
The state’s new revenue estimates released last week show the stark budget challenge facing the state – how to cover the loss of nearly $1 billion of revenue over two years, mostly due to the tax cuts signed by Gov. Sam Brownback and the scheduled reduction in the statewide sales-tax rate. Actual revenue receipts in fiscal year 2012 were $6.4 billion. The new revenue estimate for next fiscal year is $5.45 billion. That drop is considerably more than what occurred during the Great Recession, when revenue dropped by $618 million over a three-year period, according to former state budget director Duane Goossen. Federal stimulus money helped offset a significant amount of that drop. Another big difference between then and now: The previous budget problems were triggered by a global economic crisis that was beyond our control; the current shortfall is self-inflicted.
Law enforcement authorities in Wichita can take pride in having helped pass the state’s new anti-human trafficking law, which Gov. Sam Brownback signed Monday. Because of local officials’ good work investigating and prosecuting such cases in recent years, traffickers now will face tougher justice statewide, as vulnerable victims and survivors are handled with more care and compassion. “Kansas has made great strides forward in the fight against modern-day slavery with this new law,” said Brownback, who was a leader in the global fight during his time in the U.S. Senate. As the bill passed the Legislature unanimously, though, one concern got too little attention: its resulting costs to local governments. In February, Sedgwick County commissioners were told by county staff that such legislation would cost the county about $255,000 more a year.
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An Associated Press photo showing “JESUS + Mary” written at the top of Gov. Sam Brownback’s notes about the abortion bill he signed Friday has received some national media notice. The sweeping bill blocks tax deductions for abortion providers and those who receive abortions, requires abortion clinics to provide information about how abortion may cause an increase in breast cancer, and declares that life begins “at fertilization.” The typewritten portion of Brownback’s notes stated that the bill would create “a culture of life” in Kansas.
Proponents of the Second Amendment Protection Act, which Gov. Sam Brownback signed last week, see no legal problem with its wording exempting Kansas-made guns from federal laws. But Robert Cottrol, a law professor at George Washington University, told the Huffington Post that the Constitution’s commerce clause generally covers trade within a single state that affects trade in a given industry nationwide. He suggested another way to exempt Kansas gun owners from federal gun laws: “Declare a large number of citizens deputies. That would be in the power of state government.”
Is Gov. Sam Brownback sure that Kansas should be like Texas? An annual report by the Texas Legislative Study Group lists some of that state’s poor performance measures, including that it’s first among states in the percentage of population uninsured, 50th in percentage of pregnant women receiving prenatal care in first trimester, first in amount of hazardous waste generated, 50th in percentage of population who graduated from high school, 47th in average SAT combined scores, seventh in percentage of children living in poverty, third in percentage of population with food insecurity, 44th in median net worth of households, and 50th in per capita state spending on mental health.
Duane Goossen, former longtime state budget director, warned that the state’s “current spending levels dramatically exceed expected income.” On his blog for the Kansas Health Institute, Goossen noted that state general fund spending approved for fiscal year 2013 is nearly $6.2 billion, while the estimated revenue for fiscal 2014 is only $5.4 billion. He also said the fiscal 2014 budgets proposed by the governor, Senate and House variously rob highway money and cut higher education and courts but still don’t get to even $6.1 billion. “The inability to close the gap with spending cuts suggests the solution must be increased revenue,” Goossen wrote, saying the governor and lawmakers could “transfer money from other funds,” “use up the available bank balance” and “add tax revenue.” They also can hope Friday’s updated revenue estimates will narrow the budget gap, he wrote.
Kansas’ new law to drug test some recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash assistance or unemployment benefits is narrower than the one that sparked a long court case in Florida, so it should lead to fewer tests and legal problems. But it requires that welfare applicants or recipients be screened “when reasonable suspicion exists” that they are using a controlled substance, which seems a subjective standard at best. It will cost the state an estimated $1 million next year and require four additional state employees. And as Gov. Sam Brownback signed the bill Tuesday, it was disappointing to see him join those claiming the law’s main purpose is to help people by providing treatment. Who doubts that for many of the 29 senators and 106 representatives who voted for the bill, the motivation was more punitive than beneficent, and based on the myth that drug abuse is rampant among welfare recipients?
“Republican Sen. Pat Roberts is on a glide path toward re-election, having won endorsements from each of the state’s four members of Congress as well as five statewide officeholders,” wrote Kansas City Star columnist Steve Kraske. “Oh, did I mention he’s got $1.1 million in the bank, too?” Kraske also credited Gov. Sam Brownback and his political operative, David Kensinger, with “the solidarity the Kansas GOP is maintaining in the wake of its historic clean-sweep election of 2010. The temptation to break rank and run for Senate or governor, and trigger a primary, is extraordinary given the number of down-ballot officeholders with oversized ambitions,” he wrote. “But so far, the dam is holding.” Of course, the newly powerless moderate Republicans are angry and restless, and will see their only statewide officeholder, Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, retire after 2014. The GOP primary for that job will feature at least three conservatives, including repeat candidate David Powell of El Dorado.
“We should swallow hard and extend the sales tax,” concluded Kansas City Star columnist Steve Rose, urging the House to go along with the Senate and Gov. Sam Brownback. The 2012 tax plan won’t be repealed, Rose wrote, and extending the sales-tax hike beyond its June 30 sunset date is the only way to avoid draconian budget cuts to K-12 schools, higher education and social programs as state revenue ebbs. “It is appropriate to feel sympathy for those who would like to see the governor pay the price for his irresponsible income tax cuts. And sympathies abound for those who were viciously attacked for supporting the sales-tax hike in the first place,” Rose wrote. “But let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot while aiming at Brownback.”
Good for Gov. Sam Brownback for participating in a recent event on the state Capitol lawn that drew attention to child-abuse prevention. The state received 64,000 calls last year reporting child abuse, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. “One child being abused is too many,” Brownback said. “We simply can’t afford to ignore this problem in our homes, offices, schools and neighborhood.”
According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight political numbers blog, Gov. Sam Brownback is among 10 governors up for re-election next year whose job-approval numbers are “underwater” – with more constituents disapproving than approving of their job performance. For Brownback, the numbers are 36 percent approval and 51 percent disapproval. At least Brownback’s net negative job approval number (minus 16) is lower than those of Rhode Island’s independent Gov. Lincoln Chafee (minus 40), Illinois’ Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn (minus 24) and Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott (minus 20). And as the blog noted, “being unpopular does not necessarily make an incumbent vulnerable to defeat.”
Gov. Sam Brownback’s Republican weekly address on Saturday painted an unrecognizable picture of the state after two years of his leadership. He bragged about how Kansas had turned around its finances without tax increases or cuts to education or other programs. But as our Tuesday editorial notes, he left out how the state budget benefited from the 1 percent sales-tax increase passed in 2010 – or how he now wants to make that temporary tax increase permanent. Or how districts, including Wichita, have been forced to close schools and cut programs because of state reductions in base per-pupil funding and capital outlay equalization dollars. Or how his 2012 tax cuts have created large budget shortfalls. It’s hard for those who know the whole story not to hear such an address and wonder which Kansas Brownback is talking about – the one he’s actually governing or one made of political spin and presidential ambitions.
