This state government/politics business is getting more and more complicated—and at some point hard for most of us grownups, who remember when air conditioning or even FM radios were options on new cars, to decide whether to spend much time fretting about.
Latest furor or maybe—what’s one less than a furor?—is the decision that those state agency budget requests that are supposed to include an option for 5 percent cuts aren’t public records.
Nobody doesn’t like public records, but Gov. Sam Brownback and his budget director, Shawn Sullivan, have decided that those budget requests aren’t public records. So far, they’re just inter-administration memos, probably all neatly typed out and with footnotes about what the budget cuts would mean to actual Kansas residents, not just those who wear white shirts to work, but, at this point, they’re just in-house documents.
There’s a bit of press furor, because this claque of Statehouse denizens, many of whom who can type without looking at their fingers, love those public records, especially those which can be e-mailed and don’t require retyping. That’s what us reporters do, find out information, figure whether it is anything worth bothering readers with, and then put it out to the public.
But, some of us old-timers recall that we weren’t supposed to see our bride in her wedding dress until she walked down the aisle. Not sure why, because most grooms’ suits match up well with white or cream-colored wedding dresses, but that was the rule. You see it at the church, and not before.
Well, the internal machinations by the budget officers of state agencies which are under the control of the governor are a little like that wedding dress. It isn’t officially a wedding dress until the wedding. Those agency suggestions for budget cuts are probably more comparable to, say, chatter on a first date.
In Kansas state government, the vows are the budget, and until the governor signs off on it and presents it to the Legislature, well, it’s not the official state budget, printed at state expense for all Kansans to pore over.
So this in-house budget proposal information apparently isn’t formally a public record that anyone can demand to see if they put together a formal Open Records Act request letter to the governor, and to which the governor says “save your stamp” because he’s not going to give it to you anyway.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t want someone to slip us those budget proposals. If you happen to have a copy that can’t be directly linked to your computer sign-in password, send it.
Bear in mind, though, that those not-yet-pubic record handoffs of the budget proposals further complicate nearly everything. Such as that internal, behind-closed-doors scrimmaging among state agencies which don’t want to lose any budget money.
What if, say, a likely civil service Department of Corrections employee slipped to a reporter a proposal suggesting saving 5 percent by releasing from prison felons who are short—or who are fat and are running up the food budget? Or, if the Department of Transportation wants to safety inspect just bridges over rivers, not just creeks, or test the brakes on just a “representative sample” of school buses? Get the idea? Will that box the governor into a corner and save one agency from cuts?
Now, practically, the governor is going to wait until the estimate of state revenues for the upcoming fiscal year in November and maybe to see just what the new Legislature’s political complexion looks like before choosing what to cut and what to not cut.
But, they all get pretty politically complicated, those budget proposals.
Oh, and remember, state workers can just slip them under the door…
Syndicated by Hawver News Company LLC of Topeka; Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver’s Capitol Report—to learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit the website at www.hawvernews.com.
