Absurd to blame the victims
A state Senate leader thinks some school districts’ cash reserves “are just absurd.” A House subcommittee votes not just to reject state universities’ funding requests but also to chastise them for the “absurdity” of the proposals.
In reality, what’s absurd is that architects of our state’s budget crisis would urge school districts – once scolded for not having businesslike reserves – to get busy and spend down their balances. And it’s unimaginable if Kansas is now a place where Board of Regents institutions are expected to be grateful for whatever flat or reduced support the state gives them and to not bother with visionary plans for the future – or at least bother the Legislature with requests to help invest in those plans.
It was Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, R-Hutchinson, who said the cash balances in some K-12 districts “are just absurd,” joining Gov. Sam Brownback and other leading Republicans in urging that savings be used to cope with midyear budget cuts.
District leaders say the numbers being used are outdated and misleading, and that funds in reserve either are already committed or necessary to handle known or unknown hits ahead, including a delay in the state’s capital outlay equalization funding.
The slap at higher education for what Rep. Virgil Peck, R-Tyro, called the “absurdity of some of the enhancement requests” came in a House budget subcommittee Monday, according to the Lawrence Journal-World.
“Some of our agencies in the state are working with us to do the best they can to save taxpayer money, and others are throwing out all kinds of requests for additional funding,” said Peck. He asked that a note chastising the institutions be added to the Board of Regents budget when it went to the full Appropriations Committee, which approved the subcommittee report Wednesday with no changes.
But the two-year budget items proposed by the Board of Regents hardly seem like nutty extravagance. They look like the forward thinking that Kansans would expect on their state campuses, including $10.9 million for Wichita State University’s innovation and technology transfer initiative; $10 million for a drug and vaccine institute at the University of Kansas; and $10 million for a new architecture building at Kansas State University. Also rejected by the governor and House budget leaders: a $7.5 million request to increase need-based financial aid. The subcommittee also cut $2 million for WSU’s National Center of Innovation for Biomaterials in Orthopaedic Research.
Peck variously suggested that universities spend their reserves, “stop building a few buildings” or raise tuition – as if the institutions hadn’t been bitterly criticized at the Statehouse in recent years for steady, steep tuition and fee hikes.
As Rep. Barbara Bollier, R-Mission Hills, reminded Peck and other colleagues: “It is a policy choice to have reduced our revenues.”
During the rest of this difficult session, GOP lawmakers would do well to refrain from blaming and lecturing the victims of their absurd tax policy.
For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman
This story was originally published February 18, 2015 at 6:06 PM with the headline "Absurd to blame the victims."