Reform ideas touch on governor’s role, special-interest earmarks, 3-day workweek
BY: TIM CARPENTER
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Kansas Republicans pressing to reform the Legislature’s annual budget-writing process want to displace governors from the lead role in proposing state spending changes, alter a Statehouse culture that embraced the three-day workweek, and make it difficult for lobbyists to slip special-interest earmarks into bills.
House Speaker Dan Hawkins and Senate President Ty Masterson, the Republicans who formed an interim legislative committee to work on the budgeting overhaul, said the plan involved formation of a powerful permanent committee of a dozen or so legislators who would start work on a version of the state budget as much as three months before the legislative session began in January. For years, legislators have waited to start until the Kansas governor presented detailed budget recommendations.
The GOP legislative leaders said this newly empowered committee would produce a baseline budget that would be introduced in bill form on the first day of the legislative session. Under this scenario, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s budget recommendations released in mid-January 2025 would become a supplemental source rather than the starting point for budget deliberations at the Capitol.
Hawkins, who represents a Wichita district, said the Legislature had to reclaim budget authority ceded long ago to the executive branch. He cautioned skeptics of GOP maneuvering that it would be wrong to assume the objective was a personal attack on Kelly.
“This process has nothing to do with the governor,” Hawkins said. “If you’re going to focus on the governor, probably not the wisest thing to do, because this process has happened over time with many, many different governors.”
“I look at this as an opportunity for us to examine a process that probably is flawed, not badly flawed, but … there’s opportunities to make it better,” the House speaker said. “Just because we’ve always done something some way doesn’t mean that that’s the best way to do it.”
Grace Hoge, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Kelly’s handling of budget duties contributed to a state budget surplus and implementation of sustainable tax reductions.
“Just like Kansas families, Governor Kelly understands responsible budgeting,” Hoge said. “Every year her budget proposal is meticulously crafted and presented to the Legislature at the beginning of the session, as is required by law. Governor Kelly’s fiscal responsibility reversed years of financial instability and led to a record budget surplus that has resulted in substantial, sustainable tax cuts for all Kansans. The current budgeting process works.”
Masterson, of Andover, said the Legislature’s early attention to details of the state budget would allow the House and Senate to move quickly on spending decisions during the regular session. He said the shift would enable legislators to dedicate more time to individual agency operations and, potentially, save tax dollars.
“I feel like our state is ready for some kind of reorganization,” said Masterson, who made a distinction between budget recommendations of Republican and Democratic governors. “You’ll have a Republican governor, for example, or somebody you trust, and you trust the administration to build the budgets, and then you kind of rubber stamp stuff. And, then, you switch, and you have (the) opposition party and then there’s all that same power.”
A 2021 report by the National Association of State Budget Officers indicated 36 states introduced the governor’s budget as a bill in the Legislature, which has been the practice in Kansas. The report said 14 states had a process in which drafting the budget was a responsibility of the legislature.
Nailing budget earmarks
The Kansas Legislature’s interim committee assigned the task of piecing together a new process for shaping the annual state budget met last week and was expected to convene again in September.
In this initial meeting, there was enthusiasm for imposition of boundaries to curtail influence of special-interest lobbyists who have proven adept at winning budget earmarks by evading the regular legislative process. It was suggested the six-person conference committees that negotiate finer points of the budget be forbidden from independently adding expenditure provisos pitched by lobbyists. Instead, lobbyists would be compelled to run their earmarks through a regular House or Senate budget committee and to secure endorsement of House and Senate Republican leaders.
Rep. Troy Waymaster, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said it might irritate some legislators to learn the list of reform ideas included a change in the workday culture at the statehouse.
He indicated legislators should expect to work on Mondays and Fridays, rather than just Tuesday through Thursday. The condensed schedule became the standard during height of the COVID-19 pandemic and didn’t revert to the previous norm, he said.
“That is just exacerbating the problem,” said Waymaster, a Bunker Hill lawmaker who has chaired the House Appropriations Committee for eight years. “We need to go back to what the legislative session was like before COVID, where we have committee meetings on Mondays and Fridays and not ‘pro forma’ days.”
If that change were adopted ahead of the 2025 session, it would coincide with implementation of significant increases in annual compensation of House and Senate members. Total compensation of rank-and-file legislators in Kansas will increase from $30,000 to nearly $58,000.
Sen. Jeff Pittman, a Leavenworth Democrat on the interim budget reform committee with Waymaster, said developing a more efficient method of crafting the budget was worthy of debate. He cautioned against making the reform process partisan. He said attention should be given to avoid overwhelming legislative staff by duplicating budget reviews done by the governor’s staff.
“We have not ceded our control, but rather we have directed the CEO, the governor, and her staff or his staff, to do these things for us — to get down into the weeds,” Pittman said.
Pittman and other legislators said state budget documents should be remodeled to make information more easily consumed by legislators and the public, especially as House and Senate negotiators made dozens of budget deals late in the session. Pittman urged colleagues in the Legislature to end their three-day workweek.
“There were a lot of days we could have been doing more, you know. We had a lot of days were we did not meet as a committee,” said Pittman, who sits on the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Process questions, ideas
During the initial meeting of the interim budget reform committee, there was no discussion by Republicans or Democrats about how activities of the new pre-session legislative budget panel would be transparent. This select group of legislators would apparently gain access to preliminary agency budget documents and meet with department officials to discuss spending requests. It’s possible legislators would observe executive branch meetings on agency budget appeals not open to the public.
It wasn’t clear how state legislators running for reelection — House members have two-year terms, while Senate terms last four years — would participate in robust pre-session budget examinations during October before the general election in November.
Rep. Will Carpenter, an El Dorado Republican, did suggest the Legislature move to a biennial budget format in which an expenditure plan for state government would be prepared and adopted for a two-year period. In 1993, a Kansas budget committee recommended 53 state agencies be moved to a biennial format. The 1994 Legislature passed a bill allowing 20 fee-funded agencies to work on a biennial basis.
GOP Gov. Sam Brownback proposed a biennial budget for all state agencies for fiscal years 2016 and 2017. Kelly eliminated that approach for all agencies except those required to operate on two-year cycles under state law.
The House, with 125 members, concentrates budgeting authority in the House Appropriations Committee. The House also runs six subject-based budget committees on higher education, K-12 schools, social services, transportation and safety, agriculture and natural resources and general government operations.
The Senate has 40 members, but directs all budget work to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. The Senate has a system of subcommittees, but they’re not staffed and don’t operate like the subject-oriented standing House budget committees.
“If we’re going to seriously evaluate the budget and dig and take a dive deeper, it would be helpful for us to have that discussion … about whether or not the Senate should go to that process as well,” said Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Sedgwick Republican who has chaired the Senate budget committee.
McGinn, who didn’t seek reelection in 2024, said she was concerned reform could speed consideration of the state budget in ways that limited the ability of Kansas to testify at the Capitol before the House or Senate.