The 2007 Kansas legislative session is fast approaching first adjournment. The House and Senate reached agreement last week on the final calendar for the year. The legislature will reach first adjournment April 3 this year. Committees will meet until March 23. The House and Senate will then wrap up work on non-exempt bills March 28. Conference committees will meet to work out differences between House and Senate versions of bills on March 29th and 30th and the House and Senate will return on April 2nd and 3rd to work final conference committee reports. The Legislature will then recess until April 25 for what is expected to be a 4 day wrap-up session. If all goes according to plan, this year’s session will be only 86 days.
House Republicans last week released our expanded health insurance initiative, utilizing federal funding flexibility and waivers. The basics of the plan include reducing insurance mandates, expanding private-sector offerings of health insurance through reduced regulation of insurers, Medicaid reform and incenting charitable health care for the poor. Unique to the House plan is individually owned health insurance policies which employees can take with them when they change jobs. Availability, affordability and portability are the key components to the plan. The House plan would also expand so-called “Section 125” health plans that allow individuals to use pre-tax dollars to pay for health insurance, which could save individual policyholders, whose premiums aren’t paid by employers, up to 15% of the cost of buying health insurance with after-tax dollars.
The House Select Committee on State Employee Pay has recommended a plan on state pay. The plan includes a 1% base pay increase, a 5% targeted increase for classified employees who are paid more than 25% below private market levels, a $1,450 bonus which would be excluded from retirement calculations and $150 to match employee contributions to a pension plan. The cost of $44.3M is the same as the Governor’s spending proposal for a 2.5% step movement and 1.5% base salary adjustment plus longevity bonuses, but the key to the House proposal is the fact that the bonus provision would not be included in retirement calculations. This lowers the total annual cost of the bonus by millions of dollars. The 5% targeted increase would go to at least 1,533 state employees whose jobs pay at least 25% less than similar jobs in the private sector.
Work continues on the House Mega Appropriations bill for the year. The base bill was passed out of committee last week and should be worked sometime this week on the House floor. The committee added some $160M of spending to the bill, which was still some $50M less than the proposed spending in the Governor’s budget. In addition to the state pay plan funding, the committee added $28M in social services spending, including replacement of lost Medicaid funds. A total of $10M was restored to the Regents operating grants and $7.6M of additional funding was provided for re-entry and day reporting, parole and post-release supervision. Another $5.1M was added for offender education and training programs in the Department of Corrections.