Yes, property tax is Kansans’ No. 1 priority. Both parties’ solutions flop | Opinion
When Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly gave her final State of the State address back in January, she didn’t mention property taxes at all.
Not even once.
Which was something of a surprise, given that property taxes tend to come up — a lot — when you talk to Sunflower State voters.
Now: Folks are always grumpy about taxes. It’s the way of the world. But it sure feels like there has been a vibe shift the last couple of years, a sense that the state’s aging population of homeowners is fighting a little harder to keep up with the bills.
It’s why Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson — a GOP candidate for governor — listed property taxes as a top priority at the beginning of the Legislature’s annual 90-day session.
“That’s still No. 1,” he told Wichita’s KAKE TV in January.
It’s why Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins vowed around the same time to take on the issue in his chamber.
“We’re not done looking for ways to further address property tax issues,” he said in the GOP response to Kelly’s address, “as government spending at the local level is too often rising even faster than inflation.”
And then, for the next three months, nothing much happened.
It wasn’t until the last day of the regular session in late March that the GOP-controlled Legislature hurriedly passed a terrible bill that would make it all but impossible for local governments to ever raise taxes and thus threaten their financial stability. On Wednesday, Kelly rightly vetoed the measure.
She also put forth her own oddly timed, three-pronged proposal — but only after the end of the Legislature’s regular session, just ahead of this week’s veto session that wraps up business for the year.
Which raises a question: What the heck was everybody doing for the last three months?
A whole lot of nothing
We know what legislative Republicans led by Masterson and Hawkins were doing: culture war nonsense.
They passed a bill mandating the annual recognition of “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day” in perpetuity. Then they stomped on free speech with a measure to limit instruction on race and gender at state universities.
They passed legislation to make getting an abortion more cumbersome despite the clear preferences of Kansas voters.
And they passed a bill to police bathroom use by transgender Kansans, though apparently they lacked the will actually to enforce it in their own building.
In other words, Kansas Republicans spent a lot of time on stuff mostly designed to help Kansas Republican politicians win primary races this August.
What they didn’t do until the last second — and then only in half-baked fashion — is come up with a plan to give Kansans property tax relief.
Funny how that works.
We also know what Kelly, a Democrat, was doing during that time: vetoing a lot of those bills.
Which is good, but the extremely late arrival of her property tax proposal — when everybody in Topeka is wrapping up and ready to go home — suggests a certain lack of leadership, doesn’t it?
“Kansans deserve real property tax relief,” she said in her Wednesday veto announcement of the GOP plan.
And that might be true. If so, it was also true back in January when she was pretty much silent on the issue.
Nobody comes out of this looking good.
From time to time, I think about the 2024 poll from Midwest Newsroom which found that just 20% of Kansas voters believe elected officials have the state’s best interests in mind.
It’s a really low number.
Maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe the proposals and counter-proposal will end as something more than posturing, with an actual and workable solution for Kansas homeowners.
But for now, it sure looks like the folks in Topeka — Republican and Democrat — did very little this year to prove all those angry voters wrong.
