Appointees to boards should serve missions

A governor’s power to fill boards and commissions comes with the responsibility to ensure that they will do their statutory duties and serve their missions. If Sam Brownback understands this, Kansans wouldn’t know it from his mishandling of the Citizens’ Utility Ratepayer Board and the Kansas African American Affairs Commission.

CURB has existed since the late 1980s to represent consumers, especially residential and small-business customers, as the Kansas Corporation Commission considers requests by electricity and natural gas companies to raise rates. These ratepayers need a strong, independent voice in what is a complex legal and technical process that tends to favor the companies and their industrial users. CURB has done an outstanding job over the years of minimizing the size and disparities of rate hikes, while helping the public understand their potential and actual impact.

Yet, as The Eagle reported this week, the current CURB, all five Brownback appointees, has barred its acting consumer counsel from representing ratepayers at the Legislature or speaking to news media. Board members are considering whether to dissolve or reinvent CURB as yet another Kansas voice against the Environmental Protection Agency and its emissions rules.

Amid their talk of “climate change fraud” and defeating the EPA, board members also proposed using their resources to combat public perception that Brownback is to blame for utility increases. That’s a bizarre misreading of CURB’s role that doesn’t bode well for the board members’ stated plans to take over legislative and media relations.

CURB chairman Brian Weber resigned in frustration Wednesday. If Brownback won’t take steps to clean up the mess his appointees are making of this important watchdog agency, the Legislature should act.

Meanwhile, the Kansas African American Affairs Commission has been without an executive director for seven months, in part because Brownback failed to choose any of three candidates recommended for his consideration last summer by the commission.

“These people were disqualified only because they were not Republicans,” Wichitan and former Commissioner James Barfield told the Kansas City Star. “The administration wants to micromanage the board, to use the board not to address issues it’s supposed to address but to enhance the Brownback administration.”

The governor also controls three of seven appointments to the commission, with legislative leaders choosing the rest. By law, no party can hold more than four commission seats.

The rejected names included Mark McCormick, executive director of Wichita’s Kansas African American Museum. Another was former state NAACP president Glenda Overstreet, who told the Star that Kim Borchers, the governor’s secretary of appointments, had asked her during a “very abrasive” interview “why I had never supported Gov. Brownback” in commentaries Overstreet had written for the Topeka Capital-Journal.

While declining to discuss specific interviews or hiring decisions, Brownback’s spokeswoman told the Star that the governor was considering two new recommended names forwarded by the commission.

Whether someone supports the governor should not be the prime concern in hiring a leader for the commission, which the Legislature created in 1997 to address public policy concerns of African-American Kansans. The governor needs to ensure that partisanship doesn’t get in the way of this commission’s timely work – nor that of any other panel or agency on his watch.

This story was originally published December 17, 2015 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Appointees to boards should serve missions."