Property tax, budget clashes loom ahead of Kansas Legislature’s 2025 session
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly describes herself as a chronic optimist.
“You almost have to be in this job,” the two-term Democratic governor said in an interview late last year. The Kansas Legislature’s 2025 session could test the limits of her sunny disposition.
Republicans expanded supermajorities in the House and Senate — despite Kelly’s PAC raising $2 million in service of electing Democrats — and GOP leadership is well-positioned to pursue its own priorities while exacting political revenge.
Emboldened Republicans have vowed to slash property taxes, setting up a clash with the governor over whether Kansas can afford another round of cuts.
“Kansans made it crystal clear in the election they want property tax relief as soon as possible, and we certainly have the revenue we need to eliminate the state’s mill levy,” said Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican.
Most property taxes collected go to city and county governments and school districts, but Kansas does have a statewide levy of 20 mills dedicated to public education that generates roughly $800 million annually.
“However, our primary objective is to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot so Kansans can vote to cap the unreasonable (property valuation) increases and provide certainty for Kansas homeowners and businesses in the future,” Masterson said. “There is zero reason to delay doing so.”
Kelly says it’s still too early to know how last year’s special session tax cut package, which modestly lowered income taxes, will affect state coffers. She believes promising new tax relief measures in 2025 is irresponsible.
“If by some chance our revenues just start gushing in and are way over estimates and that goes on for some months and we then know that we’ve got the revenue to handle more tax relief, we can address the issue then,” Kelly said.
“But I think doing anything without knowing that we’ve got the money to pay for it without defunding our schools again, defunding our transportation program — all of the things that happened the last time we went overboard.”
Dueling budget proposals
One new wrinkle in the 2025 session is Republicans lawmakers’ plan to assert control over the state budget process by building a budget from scratch instead of using the governor’s statutorily required budget proposal as the starting point as has always been the case.
“Property tax relief and more responsible spending go hand-in-hand and both will be job one when we return for session next week,” said Payton Lacey, a spokesperson for Speaker of the House Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican.
In the months before the start of session, lawmakers held four special budget meetings and heard initial proposals from all of the roughly 100 state departments and agencies.
“The base budget bill for what was discussed with the special legislative budget committee is almost complete. In fact, it seems like it’s going to be ready on Monday after our swearing in,” said Rep. Troy Waymaster, a Bunker Hill Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee.
Kelly has expressed skepticism about Republicans’ intentions in creating parallel budget proposals, and fellow Democrats have called the effort wasteful and duplicative.
“If what the Legislature wanted was to begin the budgeting process earlier, we probably should have just had a conversation about it,” Kelly said. “Because there are ways that we could do what we do and are statutorily required to do and have the data and information to do properly — we could have likely worked out some rearrangement of the calendar.”
Waymaster said the goal is not to cut Kelly out of the process but to make it move quicker and prevent a frantic race to the finish line.
“Once the governor’s budget is introduced, we’ll have the budget committees go back and analyze any differences that are in the governor’s budget as opposed to the budget that the Legislature has,” Waymaster said. “We’re not going to just completely discard the governor’s budget.”
Bob Beatty, a political science professor at Washburn University, said in some ways, it’s not surprising that lawmakers are starting to put in more hours outside of the roughly five-month legislative session. At the beginning of the new year, lawmakers gave themselves a 93% pay increase, which Beatty said is a step towards becoming “much more full-time professionals.”
“It’s not just Laura Kelly. It will be the next governor, very well a Republican, who has to accept that the budget process is much more a shared endeavor,” Beatty said. “That’s one of the things we’re going to watch. How does this work? Is it a naturally contentious process or is this just a change in Kansas government that is inevitable in some ways?”
Kelly has vetoed individual line items lawmakers added to the budget in the past but has never vetoed an entire budget bill put forward by the Legislature.
In Kansas, overriding the governor’s veto requires two-thirds support of members in both chambers. On top of expanded GOP supermajorities, Kelly lost several of her Republican allies in the Senate, namely Robert Olsen and Dennis Pyle, to retirement. But true to form, she remains optimistic about the potential for bipartisan relationship building that has allowed her to sustain vetoes on key bills in the past.
“We don’t know all these new legislators,” Kelly said. “The only thing we know about them is what party they’re in. But we don’t know what they think, what they value, how they feel about representing their constituents rather than leadership. We don’t know any of that stuff at this point, so I’m optimistic that we can continue to move forward with progress.”
Kelly will deliver her State of the State address at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
