Voice For Liberty

Category: Kansas state government

  • Nashville Shows Need for Kansas Property Tax Reform

    Using the small town of Nashville, Kansas, a KWCH Television news story shows why property tax reform is needed in Kansas.

    Specifically, reform of the appraisal process is required. In Nashville, just by cleaning up his property, a homeowner’s property taxes doubled. Proposition K would, in part, introduce predictable growth in appraisals, which would eliminate situations like this in Nashville.

    The KWCH news story by reporter Kim Wilhelm, which includes video, is Prop K Could Change Your Property Taxes.

    For more information on Proposition K, see these links:

    Proposition K Will Make Property Taxes Fairer and More Predictable, a news release at the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy.
    House committee hears call for property tax overhaul today, a news story at Kansas Liberty.

  • American Majority Candidate Training in Kansas

    Recently I attended a campaign training event produced by American Majority. This event was targeted to candidates and their supporters for city council and school board offices.

    Dennis Wilson is the Kansas Board Chairman of American Majority. He just completed service as a member of the Kansas Senate. Addressing the audience, he said that individual freedom — through limited government and the free market — is what is important. Government protects and secures our natural rights. Quoting Frederic Bastiat, he said “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

    Wilson promoted the benefit of having private industry do things rather than the government. Free markets are a great concern today, he said. We may now actually be closer to a socialist country than we’ve ever been, when the government is involved with fifty percent of our economy. He quoted Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” We cannot continue on this path of increasing spending without accountability at the local level.

    American Majority, he said, believes in individual freedom and market freedom, and will take this message to candidates, activists, and campuses.

    American Majority will have an activist training session in Wichita on Saturday February 28. Online registration will be available soon.

  • Redesigning Kansas County Government: Follow-up

    Last week I reported on a talk that Kansas Senator Kansas Senator Chris Steineger, Democrat from Kansas City, delivered to some 300 citizens at Americans For Prosperity‘s Defending the American Dream Summit in Wichita.

    One of the things Steineger believes is that Kansas has too many counties, a legacy from the days of travel to the county seat by horseback. So I got to thinking about the consolidation of two counties into one and some of the issues that would be involved.

    In a follow-up call with the senator, he mentioned that even ten to 12 counties could join together to form one new county. How would we decide how to form these new counties? Where would the county seat be? Steineger’s answer is to form new counties based around economic development engines.

    He also said that several factors are coming into play that make the redesign of the county map in Kansas more likely: First, the state is eliminating state revenue sharing with counties. Second, the state is eliminating legislative barriers to consolidation.

    There’s no central place in the legislature focused on county redesign in Kansas, Steineger added. If citizens are interested in seeing this idea proceed, they should talk to their house or senate member.

    As the senator said in his talk to the AFP summit, there is a window of time when the legislature and the people of Kansas are more receptive to these types of reform. That is during times of stress like we are experiencing now. Once times are better, people will be less responsive.

  • A Few Questions for AFP’s Derrick Sontag

    I and a few others met with Americans For Prosperity’s Kansas state director Derrick Sontag on Friday. Following are a few of the questions I asked, and Derrick’s answers.

    Q. Last year AFP had a model budget. Did that have anything to do with the relatively low increase in spending — compared to previous years — in last year’s budget? And does AFP plan to introduce a model budget this year?

    “Yes. I think AFP in general had a lot to do with that. AFP had a direct impact. We’re probably on the next-to-last draft on a model budget for this year. We’ll bring it out next month in time for the legislature to use it for the 2010 budget.”

    Q. Proposition K — the effort to reform property tax appraisals in Kansas: Who will be the opposition to this?

    “Local units of government. When you think about it, it’s been a nice hidden tax increase for years. They can just rely on the appraisal system to do their dirty work. We stress that it doesn’t take away the local’s right or authority to raise property tax rates. But, they won’t like this, because they wont have the appraisal system to lean on. So they’ll have to ask for an increase in the mill levy. They’re going to fight it, but it will be tough for them to justify it. Citizens will ask “why are you fighting this? You still have the right to raise tax rates.’”

    Q. What about transparency in Kansas government?

    “When you look at budget transparency, we want to look at local units of government as well as at the state level. We have the transparency website [Kanview], which I think is very good. It shows the state expenditures and revenues, and local units of government should have to do the same things. Cities, counties, and school districts should have to list their expenditures.”

    Q. Do you think there will be action on the Holcomb Station expansion, the coal plant, this year?

    “Yes. I’m actually optimistic that it will happen.”

    Q. What about judicial reform?

    “I think judicial reform will get attention, too. I think we need to capitalize on the Dan Biles appointment. Even if Biles turns out to be the kind of justice we all hope for, it still doesn’t change the fact that the questions that came out after the nomination should have been asked before. The kind of questions like what is your relationship with the chair of the state Democratic party? That should be asked in the senate.”

  • Kansas has the appearance, without the reality, of judicial accountability

    Friday’s Wichita Eagle contained an op-ed by a University of Kansas law professor that discussed the method of selecting supreme court justices in Kansas. (Stephen J. Ware: Open up Process of Picking Judges, January 23, 2009)

    A Kansas blogger (The Kansas Jackass) noticed this piece and attempted to take Prof. Ware to task. But it seems like the Jackass is unable to grasp the meaning of one of Prof. Ware’s central points: that in a judicial retention election, there is no opposition candidate. Equating judicial retention elections with contested races for, say, a seat in the legislature ignores political reality.

    That’s one of the things that makes the Jackass argument seem reasonable. There are, in fact, retention elections — the Jackass is correct on this. But political reality is different, and Prof. Ware provides plenty of evidence of this. It’s summarized in his assessment that the current system gives the “appearance, without the reality, of judicial accountability to the citizenry.”

    The Jackass also presses her case by alleging a subtext in Prof. Ware’s article that doesn’t exist.

    I don’t know why the Jackass is so adamant in her support of a system that is at the extreme end of the spectrum of 50 states in giving a voice to the people. Except: the Jackass is an anonymous blogger. Perhaps she has a personal connection to one of the Kansas Supreme Court Justices, or maybe to the current system that selects these justices. There’s no other reasonable explanation as to why someone would be so enamored with this system. Except for being, well, you know the name of her blog.

    To learn more about the selection of justices in Kansas and why we need to change our method of selection, see Kansas Must Change Its Judicial Selection Method.

    Here’s Prof. Ware’s expansion of his op-ed:

    I thank the Jackass for calling attention to my op-ed in the Wichita Eagle. Of course, a short op-ed cannot go into as much depth as a longer article or blog so I appreciate this chance to correct some misunderstandings.

    First, scholars routinely distinguish between judicial selection (how a judge initially gets on the court) and judicial retention (how the judge stays on the court) because selection and retention raise very different issues. My op-ed’s statement about selection is absolutely correct: “All the power in selecting the justices of the [Kansas] Supreme Court belongs to the governor and the bar (the state’s lawyers). So if the governor and bar want to push the state’s courts in a particular direction, there are no checks and balances in the judicial-selection process to stop them.”

    When it comes to retention, reasonable people can disagree about how hard it should be to remove a judge. What reasonable people cannot dispute, however, is that a system of retention elections make it extremely hard to remove a judge. As my op-ed said “these ‘elections’ lack rival candidates and thus rarely include any public debate over the direction of the courts. In fact, a retention election is nearly always a rubber stamp, and no Kansas justice has ever lost one. With these judges so entrenched once they are on the court, the process for initially selecting them is all the more decisive.”

    Retention elections are nearly always rubber stamps, not just in Kansas, but in the other states that use them as well. Professor Brian Fitzpatrick points out that, nationwide, sitting judges win retention over 98% of the time. This rubber-stamp aspect is intentional. As Professor Charles Geyh puts it, “Retention elections are designed to minimize the risk of non-retention, by stripping elections of features that might inspire voters to become interested enough to oust incumbents.”

    Professor Michael Dimino explains: “retention elections protect incumbency in multiple, related ways: They minimize the incentives for opposing forces to wage antiretention campaigns by preventing any individual from opposing the incumbent directly; they eliminate indications of partisanship that allow voters to translate their policy preferences cost-effectively into votes; and they increase voter fears of uncertainty by forcing a choice of retaining or rejecting the incumbent before the voter knows the names of potential replacements.” Prof. Dimino concludes that “retention elections seek to have the benefit of appearing to involve the public, but in actuality function as a way of blessing the appointed judge with a false aura of electoral legitimacy.”

    In other words, the lawyer groups who designed and pushed for retention elections did so to create the appearance, without the reality, of judicial accountability to the citizenry. Very sneaky of them because it fools some people into being distracted by rarely-meaningful retention elections, rather than focusing on the real action: initial selection of judges.

  • Kansas Senator Chris Steineger on Redesigning Kansas Government

    On January 10, 2009, Kansas Senator Chris Steineger, Democrat from Kansas City, spoke to some 300 citizens at Americans For Prosperity‘s Defending the American Dream Summit in Wichita.

    Steineger said that we should look at the current budget crisis in Kansas as an opportunity to redesign and reinvent Kansas government.

    He asked “why do we have 105 counties?” The answer is that made Kansas counties small enough that everyone could have a one-day horseback ride — the mode of travel in 1861 when Kansas was formed — to the county seat. But today, we have cars, highways, telephones, cell phones, airplanes — a lot of things have changed. But we still have the same administrative structure.

    Businesses change their products and management structure to adapt to the times, he said. Government should do the same thing.

    Based on his 13 years in the Kansas Senate, Steineger said he’s learned that government doesn’t change itself a whole lot. “We don’t change the underlying design structure, the underlying management structure, the underlying administrative structure. We still have 105 counties, and that was based on horseback riding.”

    Steineger told of how in his home county (Wyandotte County), the county and the city of Kansas City formed a unified government. It hasn’t saved much money, he said, but government has become much more effective. Consolidation can work.

    He went on to say that we could also downsize the Kansas legislature. Kansas has 40 senators and 125 representatives. “We really don’t need that many people to make decisions in Topeka.”

    Summing up, he said that we should consider reducing the number of counties and downsize the legislature. There is a window of opportunity of about two years to make these changes. After this, revenue will probably start flowing in again, and people won’t want to change.

  • Invisible Kansans Tell Their Stories

    It’s one of the toughest issues for advocates of limited government to address — the plight of those who truly aren’t in a position to help themselves. The website InvisibleKansans.org tells some stories of people in these situations.

    But is the solution for these people more government? As it is, these people are — at least according to this website — not receiving all the services they need. So government isn’t providing them with what they need to lead full lives.

    The problem with relying on government in these situations is that at its core, government is based on coercion. The only way government can acquire resources to help these people is to take from someone else. It would be better for everyone — both giver and recipient — if help was provided voluntarily. But with government in the way, and with government consuming so much already, many people have the attitude of “I already gave — to the tax collector.”

  • Budget reform tops AFP — Kansas legislative agenda

    Here’s a press release from AFP — Kansas announcing that organization’s legislative agenda for Kansas. I’ll be reporting more about this after a meeting with AFP representatives tomorrow.

    TOPEKA — The free-market grassroots group Americans for Prosperity — Kansas today announced its priorities for the 2009 legislative session.

    “Our legislative agenda this year focuses on ways to make our state government more accountable to its people,” said AFP-Kansas state director Derrick Sontag. “We support real and meaningful reforms of how our state manages its finances, how we select our judges, and how we track taxpayer-funded lobbyists.”

    Sontag said years of over spending at the state level have now come to a head, with a mounting budget deficit looming.

    “The state of our budget cannot be blamed solely on the current economy,” said Sontag. “It’s quite simple: we have an over spending problem in our state government.”

    Sontag said that had our state budget grown at a more moderate rate, the state’s financial situation would be vastly different today.

    “Had the Legislature approved budgets with five percent growth since 2004, rather than eight or nine percent growth, the state would have more than $2 billion in the bank,” he said.

    AFP plans to help legislators fight the temptation to raise taxes in order to balance the budget, encouraging them to make responsible cuts and to implement budget reform.

    “Our state is one of the few nationwide with no budget stabilization fund,” Sontag said. “We must do what we can to build up reserves so our state can weather tough financial times without asking taxpayers to shoulder the burden.”

    AFP’s full legislative agenda is available at www.americansforprosperity.org/kansas.

  • First Amendment Defense Thorny Issue for Kansas Ethics Commission

    The Kansas Meadowlark is covering a case before the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission that has free speech implications. The Meadowlark’s report is First Amendment Defense Thorny Issue for Ethics Commission.