‘It’s a lot,’ Gov. Sam Brownback says of 2012 agenda

Gov. Sam Brownback roared up to the Statehouse last week on his Big Dog Motorcycle.

“A real sweet machine,” Brownback said of his Wichita-made bike.

It was a grand entrance for the Republican governor attempting to make a grand impact on Kansas. With just a year under his belt, Brownback has proposed a 2012 legislative agenda that’s already been labeled the nation’s most ambitious for any state.

Some lawmakers are recoiling from it, calling it too much too fast. Others are praising it as a bold, new conservative vision.

Medicaid reform. A new school-finance formula. Pension reform for state workers. Paying down state debt. A new, flatter state tax code aimed at lowering income taxes, but one that wipes out popular deductions for home mortgage interest and charitable contributions.

It’s all happening as lawmakers grapple with the intensely political once-a-decade task of redrawing state House, Senate and congressional boundary lines.

Call it a big, meaty lineup for a governor who insists the state has little choice.

“I don’t know what I’d take out of the agenda,” he said during a recent interview in his office. “That’s the problem.

“Take the school finance out? You’re staring at a monster lawsuit. Take the tax plan? No. Because we’ve not been growing. Growth is what we desperately need.

“It’s a lot,” Brownback conceded. “There’s no question about it. But all of it ties together.”

The sheer magnitude of the package has led to grumbles from members of both parties and may have contributed to lousy poll numbers. There’s another risk: The legislative load could wind up crushing lawmakers.

Senate President Steve Morris, R-Hugoton and the chamber’s leading moderate, acknowledged that the Legislature is grappling with so many big topics that the entire Brownback agenda could collapse under its own weight.

“There’s always that chance,” Morris said. “No matter what kind of session we have, you could lose the main focus of the big issues and have nothing get done for a year or two. Sometimes you have to work things over for a longer period of time.”

Plans face criticism

Already the school funding plan is drawing mixed reviews and took a hit recently when the administration revealed that it wanted to post teacher evaluations on public web sites.

The governor’s tax plan also ran into a buzz saw with voters, many of whom told their lawmakers that they don’t want to lose their cherished home mortgage interest deductions.

The plan has another problem: Brownback wants to maintain a 1-cent sales tax increase that many conservatives had promised to repeal. And claims that the plan was “close” to revenue neutral raised eyebrows among some lawmakers when it was later revealed that it was $60 million short, and then more like $90 million short.

GOP legislative leaders wound up proposing their own tax plan that lowers income taxes based on growth, but keeps the two popular deductions.

Meanwhile, the pension reform plan is complicated. And Brownback’s Medicaid plan hit a snag when Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, the state’s largest insurance company, announced it would not participate in the governor’s program – although Brownback insisted that other insurers would take its place.

“We have a number of groups looking at it who will be putting in bids for it,” he said.

Time is short

Only a month into the 90-day session, however, some lawmakers are still grappling with the fine print and practical implications of what the governor wants to do, especially in the areas of taxes and school finance.

“As we come close to one-third of the way through the session, we still don’t have all the details we need to assess these different programs,” said Rep. Pat Colloton, R-Leawood. “It starts to become a problem because time is short. We’re a 90-day citizen legislature. It takes us a while to absorb information on diverse topics such as education, taxes and pensions.”

Other lawmakers were even more critical.

“He has a number of issues he puts out there, but it’s hard to find out much depth about them,” said Sen. Tim Owens, R-Overland Park, who at times has sparred with the administration as Judiciary Committee chairman.

“You ask questions and when you hear people speak about them, they’re very superficial,” Owens added. “It’s almost like sometimes he throw things out there to see what’s going to get hit back at him. … He’s not invoking a lot of confidence in his administration at this point.”

Brownback said the Legislature’s response to his proposals amounts to normal legislative tinkering.

“What you see is a normal trajectory,” the governor said. “This is a difficult job. And we’re proposing a lot change, and change is uncomfortable. But we are on a bad trajectory of what we have seen of job growth, of what we had seen in budgets in this state. We’ve got to get off this trajectory.”

Administration’s controversies

That tough job may have been made even more difficult by a series of controversies created by the Brownback administration itself.

Perhaps the most prominent was “Twittergate,” which drew nationwide attention after Brownback’s staff notified school officials about a high school senior’s tweet that said Brownback “sucked.” Critics said the governor’s aides overreacted.

Then last fall, his top choice to be chief information technology officer resigned from a $150,000-a-year job when questions were raised about his academic credentials. And the governor’s choice to run the state’s social services agency resigned weeks after mixing it up with legislators over plans to combine juvenile justice programs with the agency.

The latest skirmish involved a series of legislative gatherings at the governor’s mansion in January that may have run afoul of the state’s open meetings act. Last week, the Shawnee County district attorney, a Democrat, asked legislators and Brownback to retain records and electronic files about those events as “potentially relevant evidence.”

There also was a flurry of criticism about Brownback’s new food-stamp policy involving the children of illegal immigrants and his decision to, at least in part, reverse his defunding of the state’s arts program.

Governor points to achievements

Asked whether those controversies had sidetracked him, Brownback responded instead with a list of achievements that, he said, too often have been overlooked.

“Twelve thousand new private-sector jobs over the last year. How about Kansas is going to be number one in new wind energy projects in 2012? No. 1 in the country. How about Kansas is in the bottom 11 in the country in unemployment rates?” he pointed out.

New oil drilling in south-central Kansas could reap a huge windfall for the state, he noted. The state’s aviation industry, hit hard by the recent news that Boeing is pulling up stakes in Wichita, has been buoyed by good news recently. And Brownback said he worked to boost the state’s ending balance from near-zero to $100 million without a tax increase.

Brownback wishes his critics, and the media, would focus more on those positives.

The governor’s allies agree.

Secretary of State Kris Kobach praised Brownback, who some have called the most conservative chief executive in Kansas history, as a “transformative governor” who “has a lot of momentum going into his second year.”

State Sen. Julia Lynn, R-Olathe, praised Brownback’s leadership as “gutsy” and said: “I like following a leader who wants to shake up the status quo. That’s really healthy.”

But some noted that the governor was bound to run into rough road while trying to reroute the direction of state government.

“I am really pleased that the governor was willing to present such a bold agenda this year,” said state Rep. Lance Kinzer, R-Olathe. “It’s difficult to predict at this point how much of that is going to make it all the way through the process and in what form. I think every aspect of the agenda is still in the process and being worked on.”

Kinzer said Brownback is generally respectful of the state legislative process, which may explain why he tends to stay away from arm-twisting legislators to support his ideas.

“It’s fair to say the governor has approached his proposals as starting points to further discussion,” Kinzer said. “I think the governor’s leadership style in general is that he’s very respectful of, and in some degree deferential to, the legislative process, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.”

Brownback said he offered the general framework of his school funding plan — which allows districts more leeway in seeking local property tax increases — to lawmakers last fall to give them enough time to digest it. He insisted that legislators have been dealing with many of the same issues for years.

“The proposals we’re putting forward are not out-of-the-box novel,” Brownback said. “These are known approaches.”

Risk and reward

Democrats complain that Brownback’s agenda has been overly ambitious and may explain his low job approval rating.

“He’s loaded it up,” said state Sen. Kelly Kultala, D-Kansas City, who was her party’s 2010 lieutenant governor nominee opposing Brownback. “Any one of these issues could take a whole session to work on.”

Kultala said Brownback, a former U.S. Senator, has made more political missteps than she anticipated “maybe because (his team) is all from Washington D.C. I think it’s a rocky start.”

The governor, meanwhile, dismissed as faulty a recent SurveyUSA poll finding that showed that only 36 percent of Kansans approved of the job he was doing compared to 49 percent who disapproved. The rating was two points lower than the 38 percent that President Obama, a Democrat, received in the same poll.

But Brownback said his own polling numbers routinely have shown his job approval in the low 50s.

Washburn University political scientist Bob Beatty, however, called the SurveyUSA poll sobering for Brownback.

“To be fair to him, if you don’t risk, you may not gain,” Beatty said. “But there’s also the risk in taking on such a big agenda that you may heighten expectations and, if you don’t meet them, there might be some disappointment.”

This story was originally published February 6, 2012 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘It’s a lot,’ Gov. Sam Brownback says of 2012 agenda."