Chamber-backed group misrepresents Troy Tabor’s position on school funding

A political action committee with ties to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce has been sending out mailers in the Wichita area that misrepresent a state Senate candidate’s position on school funding.

The mailers from Quality Schools For All Kansas Kids, a political action committee, accuse Troy Tabor, an Andover City Council member seeking a seat in the Senate, of placing “a higher priority on more road construction than our schools and children’s education.”

The source the PAC cites for that information is a Facebook post that Tabor made earlier this month.

The post does not reference school funding but instead laments Gov. Sam Brownback’s use of highway funding to plug budget gaps.

“Did you know that over $1 million dollars per day is being diverted from the Kansas transportation budget and used to cover the mismanaged budget Brownback and the current legislators have created?” wrote Tabor, who is challenging Sen. Ty Masterson, R-Andover, in the Republican primary in Senate District 16 in Sedgwick and Butler counties.

Quality Schools For All Kansas Kids received $25,000 from the Kansas Chamber of Commerce PAC in 2014, nearly all of the group’s funding for that election.

Asked whether the chamber’s PAC was supporting the group financially again this election, a spokeswoman for the chamber wrote back a one-word e-mail reply, “Yes.”

Campaign finance reports for the current year will be filed next week and show the extent of the group’s spending around the state. The PAC has also waded into races in Topeka and Johnson County.

A ‘false front’

“That organization is not anything to do with education at all. … They put the word in ‘education’ in their media simply to trick people,” Tabor said. “It’s a shadow company. They’re not real. It’s a false front … to attack people like me.”

Tabor said he supports more funding for both schools and highways. He said he is open to revisiting income tax cuts, which went into effect in 2013, as a way to secure more revenue for both. However, he stopped short of calling for a full repeal of the tax cuts, saying that doing that hastily could cause as much damage as the tax cuts caused in the first place.

The chamber is one of the main organizations pushing to preserve the tax cuts. Tabor’s opponent, Masterson, the Senate budget chairman, is one of the policy’s staunchest defenders in the Legislature.

Doris Riley, the PAC’s treasurer, said she does not design the group’s mailers and had not seen the mailer in question.

“It’s my understanding that the candidates normally see those before they go out,” Riley said.

“Does Masterson approve of it?” she asked. “I don’t know who sees them, but I would assume that if I was running for office and somebody was going to send out a mailer for me I’d want to know about it.”

Masterson said he thought coordination between candidates and political action committees was prohibited under Kansas law. He said he had not seen the mailer until Tabor showed it to him at a forum this week.

“Not only had I never seen it, I had never heard of them. And when I saw the name of that group I looked them up. I’m not even familiar with any of the names I’ve seen that are attached to it,” Masterson said.

‘Issue ads’

Carol Williams, executive director of the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission, said it would have been legal for the PAC to coordinate with Masterson or other candidates on mailers as long as they do not include a specific line about which candidate to vote for.

These mailers omit words such as “elect” or “defeat” and are therefore considered issue ads instead of candidate ads, “which means it falls totally outside the campaign finance act,” Williams said.

Andrew Toburen, the PAC’s chair who lives in Johnson County, did not return phone calls or e-mails Friday.

Tabor said he took Masterson at his word that he did not coordinate with the PAC.

Masterson dismissed the ads’ claim that Tabor “chose roads” over kids.

“He’s definitely running on more spending, but I can’t speak to his personal priorities of roads or kids,” he said.

Masterson said that he was trying to run a positive campaign and that his own mailers were highlighting legislative accomplishments rather than making attacks on his opponents.

He said Tabor’s own mailers have unfounded claims that he has created “chaos” and a “combative atmosphere” as budget chairman.

He also objected to Tabor’s claim that Masterson had helped cause crucial bridge and road projects to be halted, saying in an e-mail that “not only are specific projects not my decision, its not even true, name one?”

Tabor said he stood by everything in his mailer, noting that the Kansas Department of Transportation announced plans to delay 25 building projects in April after Brownback’s office announced plans to sweep $115 million from the state’s highway fund.

This story was originally published July 22, 2016 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Chamber-backed group misrepresents Troy Tabor’s position on school funding."