As I mentioned last week, the budget continues to dominate our legislative session, with the House & Senate both working on their own versions of proposals to deal with the significant budget shortfalls in both the current and next fiscal year. The Legislature is not pleased with the Governor’s proposal to fill the bulk of the budget hole with sweeps of fee funds and defaults on loan repayments. More than 150 years ago, French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote in his book “The Law” about the ills of socialism and the greatest threat to liberty being government. He advised to “See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
We are deeply troubled by a gubernatorial budget that attempts to balance the State General Fund balance by literally stealing from funds the Legislature created for a particular purpose and diverting them to cover spending for an entirely different purpose, a maneuver that if committed by managers of the fee funds, would constitute embezzlement. That the media is not outraged by this tactic is equally troubling. Fees collected from taxpayers to support various functions would be swept into the State General Fund by the Governor, forcing the fee agencies to go back to their fee payers and collect more fees. Indeed, this is not the first time fee funds have been raided. The last time this happened I was successful in getting the amounts taken converted into loans that we required the State to begin repaying over a period of time. The Governor, as a part of her budget proposal, would not only make another round of sweeps but would default on the repayment of the loans from the last round of sweeps. Included in the loan defaults are repayments to the Highway Fund of over $30M each this year and next, potentially jeopardizing the K61 Highway project.
Both the House & Senate are looking to balance the 2009 budget as quickly as possible with actual cuts in government spending. We are hopeful the Senate will be able to work their bill this week and get it to the House for quick action.
The House Energy Committee is currently considering at least 14 separate energy bills as a part of an anticipated comprehensive energy package, one that will contain a broad range of energy policy and incentives. Thursday the Republican caucus heard from a representative of Westar who stressed that while we need to continue to research and develop alternative energy sources, including wind energy, these renewable sources are not capable of supplying the ever-increasing energy needs of the state. Coal and natural gas will continue to be critical suppliers of base load energy for the state for many years to come. The Governor’s refusal to recognize the essential role of coal as a reliable and cost-effective energy source is disturbing and she’s considered an extremist and isolationist by many outside the state who are considering Kansas as a potential site for economic expansion.
The proposed Holcomb plants would be among the cleanest and most technologically advanced projects in the country and a model for future cost-efficient energy production. The plants would also be committed to advancing wind energy and would provide the transmission lines to get the wind to market. The $3.6B project would also be a huge stimulus for a lagging Kansas economy, particularly in the west half of the State. While the Governor has recently argued that we have plenty of energy for the foreseeable future her own Lieutenant Governor has admitted that Kansas will need 600 to 700 megawatts of additional base-load power over the next 10-20 years. Wind is an important non-baseload source of energy and we need to embrace the growing wind technology industry, not as a replacement for coal, but rather in addition to coal. Our energy bill will provide a true “win-win” scenario for the State.