A
team of efficiency experts delivered a $2.6 million study to the poltroons who
run Kansas government this week. The gist of their findings: There’s $2 billion
to be saved between now and 2022 if Gov. Brownback and his legislative lackeys impose
crappy medical insurance on state and school workers, privatize Medicaid
administration, deny poor expectant mothers access to doctors and adopt other petty
cost-saving recommendations that inflict pain on the powerless.
Screw
the usual suspects again, in short, and our state’s zombie-budget years are over. No need to ask the (non) Job Creators
exempted from business and personal income taxes a few years back to contribute
a little more to the common good. Why, it’s even possible that flogging the
helpless could end the gang rape of the highway fund.
Being
a liberal-arts major, I'm not qualified to question the math supporting the
efficiency experts’ conclusions. But you don't need a doctorate in finance to understand
that they jiggered their findings to fit the mean-spirited proclivities of
their clients, while wisely not asking said clients to inflict pain on anyone
important. If that weren’t so, the experts would have identified the glaring structural
flaws that have plagued state government for generations. They’d have
recommended steps to lower the trajectory of Kansas public spending while
making governance itself more elegant and, um … what’s the word I want? Oh,
yes: efficient.
To
prove that I’m not full of crap, let me throw out a few ideas:
●
Eliminate the office of state treasurer and fold its functions – chiefly
banking and investing state funds – into the Department of Revenue.
●
Eliminate the office of secretary of state while returning control of local elections
in Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Wyandotte counties to the elected clerks of those
counties. No more incompetent county election commissioners, in short. Create a
bipartisan state commission to oversee elections in Kansas. Farm the office’s
other functions out to the Department of Administration.
●
Make Kansas commissioner of insurance an appointive office and capture the
millions it collects in fees from insurance companies for general-fund use.
●
Declare Kansas a single school district governed by the Department of Education
and overseen by the elective State Board of Education. As part of this reform,
mandate that each schoolchild in Kansas receive appropriately weighted state
aid directly. If that’s too daunting a challenge, mandate that there be one
school district per county, reducing the total from 286 to 105. And please cut the
State Board of Education from 10 members to five. It’s so pointlessly
cumbersome now.
●
Cut the size of the Legislature in half – from 40 to 2o senators; and from 125
to 63 representatives.(Colorado, a larger state by far, gets by just fine with
35 senators and 65 representatives.) The result would be much larger Kansas Senate
and House districts, most of which would include urban, suburban and rural
voters. Fair-minded, sensitive legislators (a huge improvement over the current
lot) would be the byproduct of this new environment.
●
Base legislators’ pensions on their salaries for the four-month session.
Current pension law pretends they work year-round and earn about $90,000 per
year. Added bonus: Ending this pension grab would breathe a little life into
the beleaguered Kansas Public Employees Retirement System.
How
much money would these reforms save? I have no idea. Maybe the experts could
work up some estimates in return for the $2.6 million they’re pocketing. But
the savings would be substantial – and permanent.
Most
of these reforms would require constitutional amendments, while a few could be
handled with simple statutes. Passage of any of them would be hard. But if
Brownback and his lackeys are serious about right-sizing state government,
they’ll look for real inefficiencies and attack them, regardless of whose
feelings get hurt. If they settle, this election year, for once again savaging
the usual suspects and doing nothing more, our suspicions that their hearts are
chilly and their brains small will be borne out.
I
will post more ideas for reinventing state government as they occur to me. I
also invite commenters to pitch ideas of their own. dc
