Legislator predicts gridlock in Topeka

After describing the increased disrepair affecting many of the county’s secondary roads — a consequence of the construction project currently jamming parts of U.S. 169 — Allen County commissioners were able to secure a verbal pledge from Sen. Caryn Tyson, who said that she would do everything in her power to see that the Kansas Department of Transportation provides funding assistance to Allen County for the restoration of its heavily-trafficked byways.

That was the good news. The bad? Asked what else Kansans can expect from the upcoming legislative session, Tyson was blunt: gridlock, she prophesied. “We all know we have a new governor and we have a few new legislators, including a couple of new senators.” She continued: “So the dynamics of the bodies have changed but the overall personalities are the same, which is a little discouraging.”

Sen. Tyson, a conservative Republican from Parker — who will retain her position as the chair of the Assessment and Taxation committee when the Legislature convenes on Monday — visited with commissioners Tuesday morning.

Her projections for the state’s soon-to-be divided government were not exclusively glum, however. Tyson pointed to the area of mental health reform, where she and Gov.-elect Kelly have a profitable history of working together. Tyson believes, too, that she will be able to find common ground with her former Democratic colleague in the state senate around their shared desire to lower Kansas’s unusually high sales tax on food (though when to do this and by how much will likely remain a sticking point between the two).

But the political distance between Tyson and Kelly on almost every other topic remains cavernous.

Commissioner-elect Bruce Symes asked Tyson to air her thoughts on the proposed expansion of Medicaid, a primary imperative of the incoming Kelly administration. “It’s been estimated that over the last several years our hospital has lost out on about a million dollars a year from the lack of Medicaid reimbursement,” explained Symes. “What’s your feeling at the state level regarding [Medicaid]?”

Tyson is a longtime opponent of expanding Medicaid, a program primarily funded by the federal government. Without offering examples, the senator warned that “there have been programs like this before. They’ll start out funding 100 percent, then they come down to 90 percent, then they gradually get to the point where they’re not funding it at all.”

Tyson differs from Gov.-elect Kelly on taxes, too, especially when it comes to the $100 million windfall that Kansas received as a result of a series of sweeping federal tax cuts in 2017. For many legislators, however — Tyson included — this additional revenue is viewed as a silent tax hike. “With these cuts,” Tyson explained, “the average Kansan that itemizes will not be able to itemize on their Kansas tax return, which means a tax increase. … So I am pushing for…legislation that would allow Kansans to itemize [deductions] on their state return.”

Gov.-elect Kelly has said that she prefers to return that money to Kansans in the form of improved services, and is wary of depleting state reserves that will likely be required to maintain the integrity of the state’s transportation, pension, education, and health care programs.

“We will first stabilize the budget before we make any changes to the tax code,” the Gov.-elect told the Topeka Capital-Journal this week. “We need to let the dust settle on all of the tax changes that have been made in the past few years, both at the state and federal level.”

THE MEETING’S inaugural guest, however, was Iolan Larry Walden, who appeared before the body with his 2018 end-of-year list of complaints against the county commission.

Walden’s menu included more than a dozen reproaches ranging from the perceived failure of the county to make its stationery and letterhead uniform so as to be in compliance with a 2014 state statute to the failure of the county to prohibit Mitch Garner from using the title “director of public works” — as opposed to “supervisor” or “administrator” — so as not to be in breach of another statute, which, emphasized Walden, requires any “director” of public works to be a licensed engineer. Additionally, Walden doesn’t believe that Allen County’s nepotism policy — though ratified and upheld by the Kansas Association of Counties — is sufficiently potent. He believes former Commissioner Jim Talkington, who voluntarily resigned from the commission in February, was “bullied” into that decision by the Iola Register and by former Allen County commission chair Tom Williams. The Allen County website, says Walden, has “several mistakes” and the “pictures are not of uniform size.” He says Humboldt’s impending ambulance barn should be placed in the town’s new industrial park and that the speed limit north of Humboldt Hill should be reinstated to 55 mph. He gave the commissioners an index of relevant statutes he’d printed from the Kansas Revisor of Statutes website and presented them, before any of this, with a hand-made gift — a narrow wooden mechanism intended to act as an ergonomic lock on the meeting-room door, saving commissioners having to bend over to fuss with the doorstop every time they enter into an executive session.