With the state facing a budget shortfall of enormous proportions, the Kansas Legislature will be faced with some bleak choices when it convenes in January.

State budget director Duane Goossen is projecting a $188 million budget shortfall in FY 2010, and a $400 million shortfall the following year, leaving the Legislature no choice but to make the budget a top priority.

It’s also possible that if it appeared Kansas was approaching a point at which its ending balance would be less than $100 million, Gov. Sebelius could step in and order reductions in spending in the current fiscal year budget, as Gov. Bill Graves did in the late 1990s.

Sebelius has not commented on any possible spending cuts.

Some legislators, including Sen. John Vratl, an Overland Park Republican, lay the blame for the fiscal crisis on tax cuts and tax exemptions and incentives granted by the state.

Others, including House Majority Leader Ray Merrick, also an Overland Park Republican, say the blame lies with legislators who have been unable to restrain their impulse to spend, with a governor who also refuses to cut spending, and with a state Supreme Court that forces spending increases when the legislature does manage to try to contain costs.

The state’s general fund, Merrick said, had grown by about $2 billion since 2004, partly because of a Kansas Supreme Court order that forced legislators to drastically increase education spending.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains – the gap between expected revenues and expenditures must be closed if Kansas is to balance its budget as required by law. And the only options that could close the gap quickly are tax increases or spending cuts.

Lawmakers from both political parties, as well as the Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, say tax hikes aren’t the solution.

“You don’t want to take more from people who are already hurting – that’s the wrong policy when the economy is struggling,” said Dr. Jeff Colyer, a state representative from Overland Park who is now seeking election to the Kansas Senate.

Merrick agreed. “We aren’t going to tax our way out of this,” he said. “The only way out of this is to cut spending."

According to Merrick, the state government has developed a bad habit of spending more than it takes in. "We’ve spent like crazy the past five years," he said, "with increases of eight or nine percent in spending every year until this year, and we need to review new programs that have been created to see if they’re still viable, and if they’re not we need to take the appropriate action.”

Merrick said he believed the state had taken a step in the right direction during the session that concluded in May.

“We in the House demanded that spending be held at 5 percent and in the final budget, we managed to keep it to 5.2 so that was a pretty fantastic drop,” he said.

Sen. Chris Steineger, a Kansas City Democrat, said he would not support a tax increase, and that he believed there would not be sufficient “political will” in the Legislature for such an unpopular move.

He said it was more likely lawmakers would find some ways to cut spending, and he cited two targets that he said had been “fat and sloppy - and you can quote me on that.”

Target one, Steineger said, would be the method the state employs to build and repair roads and bridges, a method he described as “top heavy, slow and expensive.”

Road construction and repair project schedules should be “compressed,” he said, so expensive cranes and other heavy equipment that’s typically rented by the day doesn’t sit unused at a job site for week after week

He said Missouri had recently managed to replace a Noland Road bridge over I-70 in two months.

“This was a high traffic area and they had to get it done so they compressed the construction schedule,” Steineger said. “Contractors will grump and complain, but they’ll get it done if they have to.”

A second target, Steineger said, is the Kansas Board of Regents, a board he described as “top heavy with administrators” that oversees state colleges.

“During my 12 years in Topeka, they’ve been a sacred cow, and you’re just never supposed to question them,” he said.

Steineger said he also believed that, despite the Supreme Court order on K-12 education, the Legislature still had some “wiggle room” in the realm of educational spending.

“The Supreme Court order didn’t specify exactly what we had to spend,” he said. Steineger's opinion, however, is one that many in the legislature wouldn't likely share, especially after the court's insistence on adding hundreds of millions of dollars to education funding, starting with an incrase of more than $140 million in 2005.

Steineger said that while he represents a relatively poor area of eastern Wyandotte County, he doesn’t believe there’s any sentiment among residents to see tax hikes.

“In Wyandotte County, are you kidding me?” he said. “We’ve got old people who are being chased from their homes by high taxes.”

Americans for Prosperity recently conducted a poll that showed the same voter sentiment.

The poll of 600 Kansans showed that:

• 67 percent of voters prefer reductions in state spending over raising taxes in times of state revenue shortfalls

• A majority of voters in all age groups preferred reduced spending to increased taxes

• Voters surveyed in the 30 to 44 age group overwhelmingly chose reductions in state spending, with 71 percent saying they would prioritize spending cuts over tax increases.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Labor has issued a report saying poverty in Kansas has risen dramatically during Sebelius' term in office, as Kansas Liberty reported this week.

Steineger, Merrick and Colyer all agreed that Kansas needed to improve the way it goes about building its budgets. Specifically, they said some form of zero-based budgeting should be implemented, an idea that also is embraced by Americans for Prosperity.

“I’ve always been a proponent of zero-based budgeting,” Merrick said. “I sit in those committee hearings and see agency after agency come in asking for a 10 percent increase over the previous year’s budget. I finally asked one guy how they arrived at that figure and he said that’s the way it’s always been done. I say we’ve got to start making every agency justify every dollar it requests.”

Merrick said the budget hole facing Kansas could be even deeper than what’s being forecast by the state budget director.

He pointed out that Gov. Sebelius had called for a meeting of the Finance Council, on which he sits, to discuss disaster relief for tornado stricken areas of Kansas.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she asks for $40 million and says we can just bond the money,” Merrick said. “But we’ve already got $3.6 billion in bonded indebtedness that we’re paying $368 million in interest for every year.”

So, with all the tough choices facing Kansas legislators, why is Merrick seeking re-election?

“I’m a masochist I guess,” he said.

 The Week in Review