Reform ideas include the role of the governor, special interest budget allocations and the three-day work week

BY: TIM CARPENTER
Kansas Reflector

TOPEKA — Kansas Republicans pushing to reform the Legislature’s annual budget-making process want to remove governors from the lead role in proposing state spending changes, change a Capitol culture that embraces a three-day workweek and make it harder for lobbyists to slip special-interest earmarks into bills.

House Speaker Dan Hawkins and Senate President Ty Masterson, the Republicans who formed a legislative interim committee to work on the budget overhaul, said the plan involves forming a powerful standing committee of about a dozen lawmakers who would begin working on a version of the state budget up to three months before the legislative session begins in January. For years, lawmakers have waited for the Kansas governor to present detailed budget recommendations to begin.

Republican legislative leaders have said the new committee would develop a baseline budget that would be introduced as a bill on the first day of the legislative session. In that scenario, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s budget recommendations, released in mid-January 2025, would become an additional source rather than the starting point for budget deliberations on Capitol Hill.

Hawkins, who represents a Wichita district, said the Legislature needs to reclaim budgetary authority long ceded to the executive branch. He cautioned skeptics of the GOP’s maneuvering that it would be wrong to assume the goal was a personal attack on Kelly.

“This process has nothing to do with the governor,” Hawkins said. “If you want to focus on the governor, that’s probably not the wisest thing to do, because this process has played out over time with many, many different governors.”

“I see this as an opportunity for us to look at a process that is probably imperfect, not really imperfect, but … there are opportunities to improve it,” the House speaker said. “Just because we’ve always done something a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the best way to do it.”

Grace Hoge, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Kelly’s stewardship of the budget contributed to a state budget surplus and the implementation of lasting tax cuts.

“Like Kansas families, Governor Kelly understands what it means to manage a budget responsibly,” Hoge said. “Each year, her budget proposal is carefully crafted and presented to the Legislature at the beginning of the session, as required by law. Governor Kelly’s fiscal responsibility ended years of financial instability and led to a record budget surplus that delivered substantial and lasting tax cuts for all Kansans. The current budget process is working.”

Masterson, of Andover, said the Legislature’s early attention to the details of the state budget would allow the House and Senate to make spending decisions quickly during the regular session. He said the change would allow lawmakers to spend more time on the operations of each agency and potentially save taxpayer money.

“I feel like our state is ready for some kind of reorganization,” said Masterson, who distinguished between budget recommendations from Republican and Democratic governors. “You’ll have a Republican governor, for example, or someone you trust, and you trust the administration to set budgets, and then you rubber-stamp things. And then you change, and you have the opposition party and you have the same power.”

A 2021 report from the National Association of State Budget Officers says 36 states have introduced the governor’s budget as a bill to the Legislature, which is the standard practice in Kansas. The report says 14 states have a process in which budget development is a responsibility of the Legislature.

Carry out budget allocations

The Kansas Legislature’s interim committee charged with establishing a new process for developing the state’s annual budget met last week and is scheduled to meet again in September.

At that first meeting, the idea of ​​imposing limits to curb the influence of special-interest lobbyists who have proven adept at obtaining budget allocations outside the regular legislative process was floated. It was suggested that the six-person conference committees that negotiate the details of the budget not be allowed to independently add spending provisions proposed by lobbyists. Instead, lobbyists would be required to submit their budget allocations to a regular House or Senate budget committee and get approval from the House and Senate Republican leaders.

Rep. Troy Waymaster, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said it might anger some lawmakers to learn that the list of reform ideas included changing the culture of the workday on Capitol Hill.

He said lawmakers should expect to work Mondays and Fridays, rather than just Tuesday through Thursday. The condensed schedule became the norm during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and has not returned to the previous norm, he said.

“This just compounds the problem,” said Waymaster, a Bunker Hill lawmaker who chaired the House Appropriations Committee for eight years. “We need to get back to what the legislative session was like before COVID, where we had committee meetings on Mondays and Fridays and not ‘pro forma’ days.”

If the change were to pass before the 2025 session, it would coincide with the implementation of significant increases in annual compensation for members of the House and Senate. Total compensation for Kansas’ rank-and-file legislators would increase from $30,000 to nearly $58,000.

Sen. Jeff Pittman, a Leavenworth Democrat who serves on Waymaster’s interim budget reform committee, said developing a more efficient method of budgeting is worth discussing. He cautioned against making the reform process partisan. He said care should be taken to avoid overburdening legislative staff by duplicating budget reviews conducted by the governor’s staff.

“We have not given up our control, but rather we have asked the CEO, the governor and his staff, or his staff, to do these things for us – to get down to the details,” Pittman said.

Pittman and other lawmakers said the state’s budget documents should be redesigned to make the information more easily digestible for lawmakers and the public, especially as House and Senate negotiators hammered out dozens of budget deals late in the session. Pittman urged his colleagues in the Legislature to end their three-day workweek.

“There were many days where we could have done more, you know. We had many days where we didn’t meet as a committee,” said Pittman, who sits on the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Questions and ideas about the process

At the first meeting of the interim budget reform committee, neither Republicans nor Democrats discussed transparency in the activities of the new pre-session Legislative Budget Committee. This select group of lawmakers would reportedly have access to agencies’ preliminary budget documents and would meet with department officials to discuss spending requests. It is possible that lawmakers would observe executive branch meetings on agency budget calls that are not open to the public.

It is unclear how state lawmakers up for reelection (House members serve two-year terms, while Senate terms last four years) would participate in the extensive pre-session budget reviews in October ahead of the November general election.

Rep. Will Carpenter, a Republican from El Dorado, suggested that the Legislature move to a biennial budget format in which a spending plan for state government would be prepared and adopted for a two-year period. In 1993, a Kansas budget committee recommended that 53 state agencies move to a biennial format. The 1994 Legislature passed a bill allowing 20 fee-funded agencies to operate on a biennial basis.

Republican Gov. Sam Brownback proposed a two-year 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 125-member House of Representatives concentrates budgetary authority in the House Appropriations Committee. The House also administers six subject-matter budget committees on higher education, elementary and secondary schools, human services, transportation and safety, agriculture and natural resources, and general government operations.

The Senate has 40 members, but assigns all budget work to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. The Senate has a system of subcommittees, but they are not staffed and do not function like the House’s standing, topic-specific budget committees.

“If we’re going to seriously evaluate the budget and dig in and dive deeper, it would be helpful for us to have that discussion … about whether or not the Senate should engage in this process as well,” said Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Sedgwick Republican who chaired the Senate Budget Committee.

McGinn, who is not seeking re-election in 2024, said she is concerned the reform would speed up consideration of the state budget in a way that would limit Kansans’ ability to testify on Capitol Hill before the House or Senate.