Brownback on budget cuts: ‘We’re looking at everything’

Gov. Sam Brownback will announce about $50 million in budget cuts next week, but he would not say Friday which services or agencies would be affected.

He did say K-12 education would not be included.

Lawmakers left Topeka last month with the understanding that the governor would cut an additional $50 million from the budget to shore up the state’s cash reserves.

“We’re looking at everything,” Brownback told reporters at a wide-ranging news conference Friday.

The cuts come on top of previous reductions to state government made since December in the face of a massive revenue hole.

One entity affected by the earlier cuts was the Kansas Bioscience Authority, which recently halted new investment and laid off half its staff to avoid default.

“We were in a very tight budget cycle, so their funding went down. … We’re prioritizing education, public safety, Medicaid, trying to get the pension system in better position. Its priority level has been lower than those items,” Brownback said of the KBA, a quasi-governmental agency established under Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to invest in the biotech sector.

A bill floated during the last legislative session would enable the Commerce Department to absorb the KBA and liquidate its assets. Brownback would not answer directly when asked if the KBA would exist by this time next year.

“I think everybody’s reviewing what it looks like,” he said. “I support the mission. We’re in a tight budget atmosphere, and education is a higher priority.”

Rep. Melissa Rooker, R-Fairway, scoffed at the governor blaming the situation on budget constraints. She said the constraints had been created by the tax cuts championed by Brownback during his first term. Rooker said the tax cuts were draining the state’s resources for economic development.

“I would like to understand why a pro-jobs, pro-growth governor is willing to gut the funding for an agency that has proven to be successful in its mission,” Rooker said.

Brownback said the media has overlooked what his administration has done to spur job growth.

“Most reporting focuses on the fight, not on the vision. … What we’re trying to get to is a state that’s growing more than in the past,” Brownback said.

“It’s happening. It’s slow and it’s early,” Brownback said. “And I wish more Kansans knew that.”

This week, Governing magazine released an analysis that showed Kansas to be 10th worst in the nation in job growth among all states and the District of Columbia for the first six months of 2015.

Kansas had only .1 percent growth since December and gained 1,700 seasonally adjusted nonfarm jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the magazine noted.

Brownback dismissed this analysis because it did not look exclusively at private sector job growth. He said he ran on a platform to boost private sector jobs, which he noted don’t require taxpayer funding. He contended that the state gained 4,300 private sector jobs last month, which he credited to his policies.

Rep. John Carmichael, D-Wichita, said the governor “lives in a fantasy world where he believes that allowing the wealthiest Kansans to pay no income tax somehow magically creates jobs.”

He said trying to separate public and private sector growth “is only an attempt to distort the statistics. The bottom line is there are more jobs being created in our adjoining states than there are in Kansas and we need to change that.”

This story was originally published July 24, 2015 at 8:26 PM with the headline "Brownback on budget cuts: ‘We’re looking at everything’."