Kansas Gov. Kelly mocks Trump on windmills, blasts Brownback and Colyer on prisons
Gov. Laura Kelly mocked President Trump’s stance on renewable energy Tuesday night at a town hall meeting in Wichita.
“I want you to know I do not think windmills cause cancer,” Kelly deadpanned when asked if she supports clean energy policy.
That was a dig at Trump’s comments a week ago at a fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee, where the pro-coal president told the audience “the noise (from windmills) causes cancer.”
For Kelly, it was possibly the biggest applause line of the night in the meeting at the Wichita school district office, the former Southeast High School.
The meeting drew a friendly crowd of about 300 to hear from the Democratic governor and two Democratic state legislators, Sen. Henry Helgerson and Rep. Elizabeth Bishop.
On energy, Kelly lauded Westar Energy for exceeding a state goal of getting 20 percent of Kansas power from wind by 2020. Westar’s energy mix now stands at 36 percent wind, she said.
Helgerson, however, said Kansas’ record on clean energy is mixed and embarrassing compared with other states. “Whatever it is, windmills, (electric) cars, we pay them a little lip service but we haven’t gotten very far,” he said.
The governor also addressed what she acknowledged as a crisis in the state’s prison system.
She said when she inherited control of the prisons from Republican predecessors Sam Brownback and Jeff Colyer, the problems “were a lot worse than we were ever led to believe over the last eight years.”
The biggest problem was that the replacement of Lansing State Prison has caused overcrowding at other facilities and unrest.
“El Dorado took the brunt of that,” she said. Instead of one prisoner to a cell, the prison has been double bunked.
Kelly said in her view, the state locks up people who don’t need to be locked up and keeps other too long.
She said most inmates will get out some day, but the state isn’t doing enough to help them succeed in the outside world.
She cited better job training and substance abuse treatment as two ways to address that.
“I want to move our prison system from all punitive to much more therapeutic,” she said
The town hall came hours after Kelly held a celebratory bill signing for a new law that adds $90 million to school budgets across the state, which she says will end years of litigation over school funding.
“This legislation represents a significant bipartisan effort to address the last remaining component of last summer’s court ruling,” Kelly said, referring to a Kansas Supreme Court order to increase funding for schools.
She called the bill, Senate Bill 16, “a meaningful, reasonable plan that maintains the stability of the rest of the state’s budget.”
Kelly made her remarks during a ceremonial bill signing at Cloud Elementary School in Wichita, standing with several state lawmakers and school officials.
She officially signed the bill into law last weekend.
“Now we’ve just repeated signing this bill that will end this litigation once and for all,” Kelly said, after signing copies of the bill and before posing for pictures with a fourth-grade class.
The measure was a response to the long-running Gannon school finance case. The Supreme Court will review the funding plan to determine whether it meets the constitutional requirement that the state provide suitable funding for education.
Although the bill signing was conducted in a Wichita school, the Wichita school district is the largest of four districts that sued the state government seeking additional money for all schools.
A lawyer representing that coalition of districts said last month that the $90 million in additional funding is not enough.
After the bill signing, Wichita school Superintendent Alicia Thompson would not say whether the district would be satisfied with the money provided under SB 16, or ask the court to order more funding.
Wichita will get about $9 million in additional funding if SB 16 is upheld in court.
This story was originally published April 9, 2019 at 4:42 PM.
