Dear Manhattan & Riley County constituents:
The 2018 session has started and we are off and running. I’m looking forward to a new year with new challenges. I think I’ve been saying that for the past five years. This year the big issue is finding a solution to comply with the Kansas Supreme Court’s concerns with last year’s bill creating a new school finance plan.
The key points to finding a solution can be summarized as below:
- The court identified concerns over the equitable funding of K-12 schools across the state.
- The court believes more money needs to be provided to schools to address inadequate funding.
- The legislature needs to document how they reach their conclusions or plan of action.
Our work this year is being compressed because the Court set an April 30th deadline to submit our plan to address their concerns. The attorneys for the state are asking to have the legislature’s plan by March 2018 to afford them time to review and evaluate before filing the plan with the Court.
Another factor affecting the timeline is the Senate’s hiring of an expert from Texas A&M to conduct a new study of the cost of providing constitutionally adequate school funding in Kansas. The Senate also hired a second expert from the American Institute for Research to conduct a peer review to look at current and previous studies regarding school finance. This work is underway and should be finished by the March timeframe.
Here is one more influencing factor. Most citizens and businesses wait until the April 15th deadline to pay their 2017 federal taxes. What that means for the legislature is that April revenues are historically when the state shows the biggest tax receipts. This is critical to determining the ending cash balance, which shows how much additional funding could be allocated to public schools.
I remain confident the Legislature will find a solution to address the Court. We will need to make tweaks to the school finance plan to address concerns over equity. Adding more money to schools this year is dependent on final revenue numbers, strength of the state economy, impact of the federal tax codes changes on state revenues, and balancing the interests of K-12 public education with the interests of prisons, courts, cyber-security, higher education, foster care, highway infrastructure, KPERS, and creating a healthy rainy day fund.
I said this will be a challenging year, and it will be. Last year we made tremendous strides to stabilize the finances of the state. The challenges we face as a state will not be solved in one or two years. It will take time and require vision, commitment, and willingness to prioritize the needs of the state.
