The legislature reconvened Wednesday after taking two days off to allow legislative staff sufficient time to catch up with the raft of bills passed by the House & Senate prior to the Feb. 25th deadline for working non-exempt bills in the House of origin. The bulk of the heavy work will be completed this month.
The House Federal & State Affairs Committee will begin hearings next week on a constitutional amendment to limit the use of eminent domain in Kansas. Bills to amend eminent domain procedures statutorily are also pending. The issue has arisen in the wake of a recent United States Supreme Court decision upholding the right of local governments to use eminent domain to take private property for economic development purposes. Most support the need for eminent domain powers but most support limiting the extent of that power. High profile instances of the taking of private property for economic development purposes that put the property taken into the hands of private developers has spurred interest in changing the law in Kansas.
Also pending in the House Federal & State Affairs Committee is the concealed carry legislation. The Committee heard testimony on the bill last Thursday and is expected to take action as early as this week. The bill would allow qualifying Kansans to purchase concealed carry permits, good for 4 years and issued after a strict background check and training course in firearms safety. A large number of venues would be off limits to firearms under the bill. Similar laws are in place in 46 of the 50 states. Still, the issue is controversial and it’s uncertain whether the Governor would sign the legislation into law.
A workers compensation bill being pushed by business interests in the state will be heard in the House Commerce Committee. Already approved by the Senate, the bill shortens from 15 years to 5 years the work performed by an injured worker prior to the injury that would be considered when determining the percentage of work disability. It’s an effort to limit the amount of pre-existing conditions an employer is responsible for following a work-related injury and reduce the cost of insurance to those employers.
Some of you may be surprised to know that currently the law allows girls 12 years of age to marry. The minimum age for boys is 14. Granted, children that age would need judicial or parental consent but it can still happen, as was the case recently with a 21 year old man and 13 year-old girlfriend from Nebraska who crossed into Kansas to marry. A bill pending in the Legislature would bring Kansas in line with 40 other states by raising the minimum age of marriage to 16.
It appears the House is poised to do an “about face” on the issue of in-state tuition for children of foreign workers. The legislature passed a measure last year to allow in-state tuition for children of undocumented foreign workers in Kansas who had received their GED’s in Kansas or who had attended Kansas schools for at least 3 years and whose families had applied for citizenship. Many have taken advantage of the program, mainly at the community college level but the program has remained controversial, with a significant percentage of Kansans objecting to favoring such students over citizens from other states who choose to attend Kansas schools. The House Federal & State Affairs Committee heard a bill that would repeal the one-year-old law and it initially failed to advance in Committee. However, the matter was reconsidered and has now passed out of committee and will be considered by the House in the next few days. Should it pass, its fate in the Senate is unknown.
On the subject of school finance, the Senate has now rolled out an initial plan, similar in scope to the House plan. The Senate plan would apparently increase funding by $480M over 3-years and would, in addition, require another $180M in local effort, that is, local property taxes. These are not new taxes but rather a shift of local option budget dollars to state funding dollars. Even though both the House & Senate plans include components for increases over 3 years, state budget profiles released at week’s end show that the funding is not there in the second and third years, so look for both plans to end up being a year-to-year plan. There is a good deal of support for the notion that with last year’s investment of $289.5M in new funds, we should measure the results of that investment plus this year’s investment before deciding what is needed in years 2 and 3.
