By Brad Cooper, Kansas City Star, May 11, 2011
TOPEKA | After rounds and rounds of talks, a panel of Kansas lawmakers late Wednesday forged an agreement on a spending plan that cuts funds for schools and social services.
A committee of Senate and House negotiators agreed to go with the governor’s proposal to reduce state base aid for elementary and secondary education by about $104 million because of exhausted stimulus funds.
The proposed $14 billion budget also calls for a nearly $10 million across-the-board cut in social services and a nearly $6 million across-the-board cut in state agencies. The $6 million is in addition to a nearly 2 percent cut to state agencies that was added to the budget in the House.
The budget proposal, which cuts overall spending between 5 percent and 6 percent, probably will be voted on by the full Legislature on Friday or Saturday. Most of the reduction stems from the dropoff in federal stimulus funds.
Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Sedgwick Republican and the lead negotiator for her chamber, called the cuts in social services severe.
The proposed budget could "wake up a population of individuals that are going to find out what services government provides because there’s going to be a lot of these services that are no longer there," McGinn said.
On education, Gov. Sam Brownback had proposed funding state base aid per pupil at $3,780 next year, down from the $4,012 that schools received at the start of the current fiscal year.
The governor’s position essentially represented middle ground between the House and the Senate as the two chambers wrangled over the state’s budget, including $6 billion in state general funds.
The Senate had wanted to fund schools at $3,786 per student while the House wanted to pare education funding to $3,762 per pupil.
The two positions potentially represented hundreds of thousands of dollars in cuts for Kansas City-area school districts. Kansas school districts in the area are already trimming their budgets to deal with declining state aid.
Already braced for the worst, some school officials were relieved the cuts weren’t worse.
"We probably weren’t going to do much better than that this session, that’s the sad part," said Bill Reardon, lobbyist for the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools. "This is better than some options I saw earlier, but I can’t bring myself to support this."
The budget increases state general fund expenses to about $6 billion in 2012 from about $5.7 billion in the fiscal year ending June 30. It also contains a $50 million rainy day fund that House leaders had been pushing for to avoid midyear budget cuts.
Brownback praised the Legislature for turning a half-billion-dollar deficit into a $50 million surplus, calling it “a great victory for Kansas.”
Although there’s been grumbling by some lawmakers that the Legislature isn’t cutting enough, Republican House Speaker Mike O’Neal was optimistic that the budget would pass his chamber.
"I think this budget meets the expectations of the majority of the House," O’Neal said.
"There will be people who will vote no because there are too many cuts. There will be people who vote no because there aren’t enough. What this budget is for is those in the middle."
Senate President Steve Morris, a Hugoton Republican, called the budget proposal "the compromise we were hoping for."
"We’ve put together a solution that cuts spending and forces government to live within its means without jeopardizing the state we know and love."
To reach Brad Cooper, call 816-234-7724 or send e-mail to bcooper@kcstar.com.
Read more: Budget deal struck - House and Senate agree on spending plan by Mike Shields, KHI News Service.