The Legislature reached its first major landmark of the 2008 session Friday as the House and Senate finished up work on their respective bills and passed them over to the second house. The House is in recess until Wednesday to give staff time to catch up with the numerous bills worked late last week.
The Energy conference committee is said to be close to agreement on a compromise of the energy bill essential to revisiting the Sunflower Electric application for permits to build two new energy efficient coal-fired plants near Holcomb. The Secretary of Health & Environment is in the process of negotiating with existing plants to reach agreement on CO2 emission reduction standards. We are hopeful of having sufficient votes to override a threatened gubernatorial veto and end up with a bill that represents a win-win situation for Kansas, one that protects the unprecedented $3.6B economic development project for Western Kansas and one that contains incentives for CO2 mitigation and renewable energy sources.
Bills passed by the House last week included a rewrite of the state’s stalking law to make it one of the toughest in the nation. Drafted in the wake of the Jodi Sonderholm tragedy in Ark City, the new legislation will give prosecutors more tools to seek prosecutions earlier in a perpetrator’s course of conduct toward a stalking victim. Other legislation passed last week would reduce judges’ discretion in granting probation to violent sex offenders. That legislation was written in the wake of highly controversial rulings by a Topeka judge last year who used downward departure authority in the state’s sentencing guidelines to grant probation to at least two sexually violent felons. We also beefed up criminal sentencing laws aimed at repeat property theft felons.
Disappointments last week included three education bills that were defeated by heavy lobbying from the states teachers’ union. One proposal would have addressed a legislative post audit recommendation to reduce low-enrollment weighting for school districts that are small by choice. Another curious defeat involved legislation aimed a distributing high density at risk funding more equitably. The vote was curious since many whose districts would have benefitted voted against the measure. Finally, a measure aimed at getting schools more money to attract math & science teachers was narrowly defeated because the teachers union objected to any class of teacher getting more pay than another; this in spite of the fact that we have a huge shortage of math & science teachers, many of whom take higher paying jobs in the private sector. These defeats don’t bode well for our efforts to provide schools with alternative certification programs to address the teachers shortage. The teachers union opposes that proposal as well.
The Senate has passed a measure that would mandate kindergarten attendance while the House defeated a proposal to fund all-day kindergarten.
At week’s end we received more good news on the revenue side. February tax revenues were up $16.7M over estimates, putting us a total of $29M ahead of estimates for the year. Sales tax receipts continue to stagnate but personal and corporate income taxes came in ahead of projections.