Kansas legislators must make some ‘very scary, serious decisions’ to fix budget hole

It didn’t take long for the realities of the job to hit home. For the newly elected members of the Kansas Legislature, the honeymoon ended before it could really start.

Two days after the election — where moderate Republicans and Democrats made gains against the more conservative wing of the GOP — the budget gap in the state widened to nearly $350 million. That will leave the new lawmakers with the difficult task of trying to balance the budget when the Legislature convenes in January.

And that’s only for the current fiscal year. The shortfall for the next year is an even larger $582.6 million.

“We’re going to have to have some very scary, serious decisions,” said Rep. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Republican who won election to the state Senate this week. “…The new people have no idea how horrible this is. There won’t be an opportunity for things to be done. It’s more going to be about, what are we going to have to eliminate this next year?”

The size of the shortfall surprised some. And Gov. Sam Brownback’s decision to wait until January to present a plan to mend that gap also caught some of the lawmakers off guard.

Those lawmakers said Friday that this year’s shortfall can’t be immediately fixed by rolling back the governor’s often criticized tax cuts.

Sen. Jim Denning, an Overland Park Republican, said the tax policy in Kansas should have been fixed three years ago. But that ship has sailed, he said, and now the state has a severe recession with no rainy day fund to fall back on.

“I think the medicine is going to be pretty painful, initially,” he said. “But the light on the other side of the tunnel is, this is the session that we’ve got to produce legislation that fixes this thing once and for all, long-term so we can finally get out of this crisis mode.”

Denning has been a vocal critic of the nicknamed “LLC loophole.” That move took roughly 330,000 businesses off the state’s tax rolls. Denning said Friday that blame could be placed not just on the governor, but also on statehouse leadership.

“We had a lack of leadership in the House, and we had a lack of leadership in the Senate last year,” Denning said. “We really should have fixed it. We had a chance to. We had a chance three years in a row.”

Lenexa Republican Dinah Sykes, who won a Senate seat Tuesday, said she was disappointed by Brownback’s decision to wait. It’s not going to get any better by January, she said.

“That’s what he’s there for,” Sykes said of the governor. “You’ve got to make the hard decisions. Don’t just pass the buck and wait, because it’s only going to get worse.”

Sen. Laura Kelly, a Topeka Democrat, immediately called the news was a disaster. She agreed there weren’t enough one-time fixes left to help deflate the number.

“Right now, I’m not exactly sure,” Kelly said of where the cuts could be made. “...I think we may be actually looking at layoffs in various agencies, because we’ve cut as many programs as we can. I don’t see how we get away with it unless some money from heaven comes in.”

House Majority leader Jene Vickrey said he preferred the Legislature help fix the shortfall, rather than waiting on Brownback to do it himself. Vickrey, a Republican from Louisburg, has made it clear that he’s running to replace the retiring Ray Merrick as House speaker.

There’s no magic money to help the state out, Vickrey said.

“The hope was that the tax policy would work and it would create incentives for investment and jobs,” he said. “You can look at it and say that there has been some growth, but not what we needed. And now’s not a very good time for business.”

Addressing the shortfall could be one of the first things new lawmakers like Jerry Stogsdill and Brett Parker will have to talk about in the House. The pair of Johnson County Democrats were among the dozen gains their party made in the House during the general election.

Stogsdill, who won Bollier’s former House seat, said he’s coming into office with his eyes wide open.

“This is edging up into catastrophic here,” he said.

For Parker, a teacher in the Olathe School District, the shortfall number was sobering.

“That hard reality is going to hit Jan. 9 for everyone, that just to keep the lights on, so to speak, there will have to be hard decisions made to account for that budget hole,” he said. “I hope that everyone’s willing to embrace that reality and move on. The worst thing we can do is pretend that that problem doesn’t exist.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2016 at 6:51 PM with the headline "Kansas legislators must make some ‘very scary, serious decisions’ to fix budget hole."