Former Andover school board member to seek Kahrs’ Kansas House seat

Saying he wants to restore funding for Kansas’s struggling education system, former Andover school board member Roger Elliott filed Thursday to run for state representative in the east Wichita-based District 87.

Elliott’s filing, the first in the race, comes one day after incumbent Mark Kahrs announced he won’t seek a third term in the Legislature.

Both are Republicans, but Elliott’s views are more moderate than those of Kahrs, a consistently conservative supporter of Gov. Sam Brownback.

Although he’s the first GOP candidate for the August primary, Elliott said he doesn’t expect to be the last.

“I know I’ll have a Republican opponent,” Elliott said. “A very conservative one.”

A 12-year member of the Andover board and retired vice president of CornerBank, Elliott said restoring school funding and helping fix the state’s troubled budget would be his top priorities.

“We can’t ask the public schools to condense their operations any more,” he said. “We’ve got some districts that are already going to four-day weeks and others having to go with fewer teachers and having larger-populated classrooms, which is a real detriment to learning.”

Elliott served on the school board from 2003-2015, before moving to Wichita from unincorporated Sedgwick County.

On the budget, Elliott said he’d like to pare back Brownback’s income tax cuts, including requiring owners of limited liability companies and other businesses to pay some tax instead of the zero rate Brownback and the Legislature gave them.

“In my view, we don’t have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem,” Elliott said, reversing a Ronald Reagan quote that has become the battle cry of Capitol conservatives defending Brownback’s tax cuts.

Elliott criticized the governor for sweeping once-dedicated funds from highways, children’s programs and elsewhere to patch deep holes in the budget.

“We’ve got to create cash flow,” Elliott said. “We can’t just keep shifting funds around.”

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 9:12 PM with the headline "Former Andover school board member to seek Kahrs’ Kansas House seat."