Our first week back for the 2018 Legislative session kept me busy preparing several bills for introduction. One bill I continue working on is the home-owned amusement rides, agritourism activities and hope to have it ready to be read in this second week of session. As we continue to work this bill I will update you with changes to the legislation.
We are also working on legislation that will require municipalities that annex property outside city limits that are currently being served by rural electric cooperatives be compensated for their losses, electrical sales, and infrastructure. This bill was read in and introduced this past week. As of now a hearing has not yet been scheduled.
This year I am serving on the same committees as last year. Agriculture and Natural Resources, Vice Chair for Financial Institutions-Insurance, Pensions and Benefits, Vice Chair for Ways and Means and Chair for the joint committee on Buildings and Construction.
This week the Senate President, Senate Majority Leader, Senate Ways and Means Chairman, and Senate Public Health and Welfare Chairman delivered a joint statement calling for the state to stop moving forward with their plan to make serious changes to the state’s Medicaid system called KanCare.
As many of you know Governor Brownback gave his final State of the State last Tuesday. If you are interested in listening to his final State of the State the full text of the governor’s speech or watch the address. The governor spoke of his many dreams for Kansas and highlighted accomplishments within the state such as 17,000 fewer abortions in the past six-years and a decreasing childhood poverty rate. The one point that received the strongest response was his proposal for Kansas to spend an additional $600 million on school funding over the next five years.
Governor Brownback proposed adding a $16.5 million funding increase over two-years to strengthen child welfare services at DCF. DCF has been affected by a wide range of problems, including children that have been taken into state custody involuntarily, children having to sleep in social workers’ offices because of a shortage of emergency-placement homes, as well as children in foster care that have been reported missing. The $16.5 million enhancement would come from a mixture of funding, including the state general fund and TANF dollars. This is one of the largest single increase in child welfare funding in Kansas history.
Tuesday, January 16, Ag and Natural Resources will have a hearing on Industrial HEMP. The hearings will start at 8:30 a.m. and continue on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. Previously hearings were heard in the commerce committee and a bill was passed out of committee but did not reach the floor of the full house.
It was nice to have many of the superintendents in my district stop by my office this last week while they were attending the KASB meeting in Topeka. Thank you for stopping by!
It is my honor and pleasure to serve the 40th Senate District and I welcome your telephone calls to 785-296-7399 or emails at [email protected].
RICE COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities continue to investigate the cause of fatal weekend accident in Rice County.
On Saturday, sheriff’s deputies received a report of a single vehicle accident on 22nd Road north of Avenue Q in Rice County, according to Sheriff Bryant Evans.
Deputies found a vehicle in the west ditch with extensive damage. The driver identified as 64-year-old Terry Lee Christenson of Hutchinson was pronounced dead at the scene.
The sheriff’s department released no additional details Tuesday.
Begun in 2000, The Fort Hays State University Cottonwood Music Festival celebrates the genius of chamber music by bringing recognized guest artists to Hays to collaborate with FHSU’s Department of Music and Theatre faculty and students for three days of rehearsals, master classes and concerts.
The culminating concert for the festival will be at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 27, in the Beach/Schmidt Performing Arts Center in Sheridan Hall on FHSU’s campus.
Featured FHSU music faculty members will be Shokhrukh Sadikov, assistant professor, violist and conductor; Benjamin Cline, chair and cellist; and Dr. Irena Ravitskaya, associate professor and pianist.
Guest artists are Veronique Mathieu, University of Kansas, violin; Evgeny Zvonnikov, 2012 winner of the FHSU young artist competition, violin; Rudolf Haken, Urbana, Ill., viola; and Sunnat Ibrahim, doctoral student at KU, cello.
Interestingly, all three compositions to be performed were written during a time of immense cultural change in Western civilization, but reveal only hints of things to come.
The program will begin with Edward Elgar’s “Serenade for Strings” (1892), the first composition he was satisfied with and one of his most-performed works. It is a short piece in three movements, very pleasant to the ear if a trifle mundane – critics think the second, slow movement most closely resembles his later compositions. The FHSU Sinfonietta will join guest and faculty artists in this chamber orchestra work.
Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklaerte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night” 1899) will follow next, bringing a joyous mood to the program. This is Schoenberg’s first important work and also one of the icons of post-Wagnerian Romanticism. The poem by Richard Dehmel that gave Schoenberg the title, though about true love, promoted the end of middle-class morality and the beginning of a new humanity, “beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche).
In the poem, a man and woman are taking a walk on a winter night where the woman confesses that, driven by her needs for sex and motherhood, she is pregnant by another man. The man declares his love for her, for the baby to come, and even for the other man. They walk happily along. “Love conquers all” (Virgil).
One of Elgar’s late compositions, the “Piano Quintet” (1918), will conclude the concert. The “Quintet” bridges the cultural chasm between pre-and post-World War I. Musically, it is firmly entrenched in the late Romantic, post-Wagnerian tradition – Elgar himself called it “large” and “ghostly stuff.” It may reflect some of the trauma of World War I and the alienation felt afterward. The piece has a background story from folklore about sacrilegious monks struck by lightning whose ghosts feel “sad and dispossessed.” Unlike the “Serenade,” the “Quintet” took a long time to become part of the standard repertoire, but is now frequently performed.
Please mark your calendar for 7:30 p.m., Jan. 27, in Beach/Schmidt. Also, come to the pre-concert talk by Cline and Sadikov at 7 p.m. As are all HSO concerts, this concert is free and open to the public. The Cottonwood Festival and this concert have been made possible by a generous grant from Claire Matthews. Cathy’s Breads will host the post-concert reception.
Additional festival activities include a performance by FHSU’s Sinfonietta at 1:30 p.m., Friday, Jan. 19, at the Hays Public Library; master classes at 2 p.m., Thursday Jan. 25, and Friday, Jan. 26, and an honors concert at 4 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 27, all in FHSU’s Palmer Recital Hall located in Malloy Hall, room 115. The public is welcome to all these events.
Superintendent John Thissen told the board community members have said the bond was too comprehensive, too long and the financial burden of the bond on individual taxpayers was too high.
Board member Paul Adams said he thought voters also needed to see more concrete plans.
Thissen showed the board photos of several completed projects that DLR, the district’s architectural firm on the last bond, had done in other districts.
“It is hard sometimes to get the visual and understand what the public is really voting on,” he said.
Thissen went over several possibilities for bonds with shorter time frames and lower tax amounts. A 15-year bond, which would increase taxes on a $150,000 home by $12 per month, would generate $29.5 million. If a quarter cent sales tax was added, the bond would raise $38.25 million.
Adams, who has toured the ongoing improvements in Dodge City, which is currently working on upgrades at its high school, said the offerings were allowing students to earn advanced training in arts and sciences and go directly into the workforce after high school.
“The investment they have made in the physical plant is changing the curriculum,” he said. “And they are having these kids ready, as you mentioned earlier with KESA, for the workforce. It is not necessarily to get them ready for college, but to get them ready for work.”
Board member Mandy Fox asked what the appropriate time would be to wait between bonds.
“We have really pushed on it for the last year, year and half,” Fox said. “Do you burn out your volunteers? Do you burn out the community? Do they notice any changes that we have made from one election to the next because they are so quick and close together? I don’t know what the right amount of time is.”
Thissen said he asked DLR and other districts this question and the answer was that it depends. If the district would decide to carve off projects from the first two bond attempts, it could move more quickly than if it started from scratch. The quickest another bond was recommended was September. Thissen said he did not recommend to go on the ballot in November during the state and federal mid-term elections. The next best time after November would be January 2019.
Thissen said he would not like to delay another attempt at a bond for another year or two.
He said the district needs to have a solution for what it is going to do with its oldest buildings, which are 90 years old. The district has serious problems with the plumbing, handicap accessibility and security at several of its oldest buildings.
“A couple of years is an answer. You have made a decision that we are going to replace systems in a couple of our buildings that are in the worst shape because we will have to,” he said. “If you delay it that length of time, you are making a decision. You have almost committed to putting $100,000, $200,000 or $300,000 into some older buildings. Then two years from now or three years from now, it may be hard to have any justification of having a plan of walking away from them.”
If the district would look at a 15-year bond, it would also need to look at what its needs would be 15 years from now, Thissen said. He said district needs to look at all money, including bond money, capital outlay funds and possible lease agreements.
Sophia Rose Young said a long-term plan was something the district needed to focus on to move forward.
“When I attended the Kansas Association of School Boards annual conference, I listened to other school districts talk about their success with school bonds,” Young said. “There was a school district that mentioned their community knows when their next bond was going to come and what it was going to be. They passed one for an elementary school, and they knew in seven more years they were going to come back and ask for that middle school because they had built that plan out and they were planning ahead.”
The board has not decided who will create a new plan. Thissen said the board received criticism during the first bond the board was too involved in the decision-making process. Community members complained too many people were involved in making decisions on the second bond.
“I think the problem in both of those was that the committee went out and did their thing and the board didn’t do a lot,” board member Greg Schwartz said.
Schwartz also said he thought the district needs a long-term facilities plan.
Board President Lance Bickle said he thinks the board needs to find a happy medium.
“I agree I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel, but I think when you are talking about that kind of money, I see the other point as well. … You have a committee that worked all this time and that first Vision Team spent God knows how long on this,” Bickle said. “Who was I after hearing them for a couple of weeks for a grand total of couple hours to say, ‘I don’t like this plan. I think you should do this.’ That is where I personally struggled as a board member. Who was I to come in and question all that? I think we need to find that happy medium and more board ownership.”
He agreed the district needs a long-range plan.
“We have heard that loud and clear that people want a long-range plan,” Bickle said. “They want to see. To me, it comes down to something tangible. We can talk about it until we are blue in the face, but we need to have something out there that shows them this is the plan. We need to have this stuff documented. We need to show them.”
Boar member Luke Oborny said that plan will have to be highly adaptive.
“The only thing I don’t like about that is, realistically, you are paying forever,” he said.
Thissen said the newest building in the district is 40 years old and that the district needs a starting point.
Thissen said in the next two weeks he planned to have one-on-one or individual phone conversations with each board member to get an idea of where the district needs to start working.
The Ellis County Commission voted to approve a bid for fiber optic connections to the new Health Office at 2507 Canterbury at Monday’s commission meeting.
Crews are working to remodel the building at 2507 Canterbury, the future home of the Ellis County Health Department, and the county needs to have the building connected to other core county facilities.
Under the bid approved with Nex-Tech Monday for $33,600, a fiber optic connection will be run from the Emergency Services Building on East 22nd street to 2507 Canterbury.
During the Public Building Commission (PBC) meeting, Project Manager Phillip Smith-Hanes told the PBC the county received three bids for construction at 601 Main, the current home of both the Health Department and the K-State Extension offices.
The Health Department will move to 2507 Canterbury once construction is complete and the K-State Extension will occupy 601 Main.
Smith-Hanes said they received three bids, all from local companies, with the low bid coming from Paul-Wertenberger Construction. The commission will consider accepting the bid at its first meeting in February.
In other business, the commission voted to contribute $300 to the KLPG Oil and Gas Committee fund in support of a possible challenge to current tax policy regarding commercial salt water disposals.
At issue is how the state handles the tax valuations on the wells. The state has an Oil and Gas Guide that lays out the process for values the leases based on an income value. But the Small Claims officer went against the method, which lowered the values.
A group of counties wants to continue appealing the decision in an effort to get some clarification and the KLPG has hired an attorney for an estimated $30,000 to 60,000.
County Counselor Bill Jeter said he believed the commission should contribute as it could benefit Ellis County in the future.
The commission also approved a proclamation declaring School Choice Week Jan. 21-27, 2018 and approved a Resolution to waive General Acceptable Accounting Practices and approved the annual agreement with Developmental Services of Northwest Kansas.
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Royals pitcher Danny Duffy has pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in a Kansas City suburb and has been placed on a year’s probation.
Sean Reilly, a spokesman for the city of Overland Park, Kansas, said Tuesday that Duffy entered the plea last week and will pay $1,220 in fines and court fees. Duffy must report to a probation officer once a month and abstain from drugs and alcohol. He also will be subject to random breath, urine or blood screenings.
Royals spokesman Mike Swanson said the plea is a matter between Duffy, his representatives and the city.
Police stopped and cited Duffy in August after he returned to Kansas City during a road trip for an exam on the elbow of his pitching arm. The left-hander underwent surgery in October and is expected to be ready for spring training next month.
Duffy went 9-10 with a 3.81 ERA over 24 starts in the first season of a five-year, $65 million contract extension. He struck out 130 while issuing just 41 walks, and was expected to be the ace of a rebuilt starting rotation.
ELLSWORTH COUNTY — A Kansas woman was injured in an accident just after 9:30a.m. Tuesday in Ellsworth County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2005 Freightliner semi driven by Levi A. Lister, 36, Salina, was eastbound on NE 190th Road which turns into Avenue Q.
The driver failed to stop at stop sign 6 miles NW of Holyrood and struck a 2003 Lexus ES300 driven by Carolyn V. Soukup, 56, Wilson, that southbound on First Road. Both vehicles came to rest in southeast ditch.
Soukup was transported to the hospital in Salina. Lister was not injured. Both drivers were properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.
January 12, 2018
State of the State
Tuesday evening, Governor Sam Brownback released the details of his proposed budget. His budget contains proposals to increase K-12 education funding by approximately $600 million over the next five years. He also set three goals for K-12 education: first, is to reach a 95% statewide high-school graduation rate; second is a post-secondary effectiveness of 75%; and third, continue to move schools toward the Kansans Can model for school redesign, these goals are to be completed by the end of the 2022-2023 school year.
The next morning, the House Appropriations committee met to discuss the details of the Governor’s budget. The Director of Budget addressed the committee and answered questions that arose regarding the Governor’s budget, it’s feasibility and/or impracticalities.
Many of the questions that were asked by the members of the Appropriations committee, including myself, focused on the increase in spending by the Governor. We also inquired about the cash balances of the state being in a deficit situation as early as 2020. The Governor provided no solution to address the shortfall only that he expects the Kansas economy to grow. On Thursday afternoon, I met with the budget chairs in the House and we began working on a plan to address the financial concerns of all the state’s departments and agencies.
More Items In the Governor’s Budget
Other items that the Governor presented during the State of the State speech are: an additional $5 million for the National Institute for Aviation Research, the National Center for Aviation Training will receive $1.7 million of additional funding, and $1 million will be added to fund Registered Apprenticeships.
National Guard members currently are assisted with 54% percent of their tuition. In the proposed budget, this number will be increased to 100% percent with a goal of increasing participation in the guard.
The Parents-as-Teachers waiting list will be funded, accomplished with a $1 million spending increase for the program.
Citizenship in Action
My office announced on Wednesday that I will be providing one scholarship to a 4-Her between the ages of 13-18, to participate in the Kansas 4-H program, Citizenship in Action, which will take place in Topeka February 18-19, 2018. The Citizenship in Action program allows 4-Hers to travel to Topeka and participate in mock legislative sessions, meet elected officials, and tour the statehouse. The deadline for submissions is Kansas Day, January 29, 2018. For more information, email me at [email protected], or call my office at (785) 296-7672.
Ad Astra Rural Jobs Act
Last year, I introduced job legislation referred to as the “Ad Astra Rural Jobs Act.” The bill passed the House during the 2017 session, with a vote of 97 to 22. The Senate has received the bill and has referred it to the Senate Commerce Committee, with a hearing scheduled for next month. This bill would incentivize businesses that wish to expand or relocate to an area of Kansas defined as a rural area with a city population of 60,000 or less.
I have worked on this legislation during the interim and have gained the support of many colleagues, both urban and rural, Department of Agriculture, and local Economic Development directors. I have also had discussions with Lt. Governor Colyer.
This legislation partners well with the Rural Opportunity Zones (ROZ) as it incentivizes businesses to hopefully create jobs in rural Kansas, as ROZ incentivizes individuals to relocate to ROZ designated counties.
Contact Information
As always, if you have any concerns, feel free to contact me (785) 296-7672, visit www.troywaymaster.com or email me at [email protected]. Also, if you happen to visit the statehouse, please let my office know.
It is a distinct honor to serve as your representative for the 109th Kansas House District and the state of Kansas. Please do not hesitate to contact me with your thoughts, concerns, and questions. I always appreciate hearing from the residents of the 109th House District and others from the state of Kansas, as well.
Jewell County: Cities:Burr Oak, Esbon and Mankato; Townships: Athens,Browns Creek, Burr Oak, Calvin, Center, Erving, Esbon, Harrison, Highland, Holmwood, Ionia, Limestone, Odessa,Walnut and White Mound
Lincoln County: Cities: Lincoln Center(part) and Sylvan Grove; Townships: Battle Creek, Beaver(part), Cedron, Elkhorn(part), Golden Belt, Grant, Hanover, Highland, Indiana, Marion, Orange, Pleasant, Valley and Vesper
Rush County: Cities: Bison, Otis, Rush Center and Timken; Townships: Banner,Center,Garfield, Illinois, Lone Star, Pioneer and Pleasantdale
Troy L. Waymaster, (R-Bunker Hill) is State Representative of the 109th Kansas House District.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed into stricter rules for people on various welfare programs. He credits them for falling poverty in the state. Critics say the rules were too harsh and that people have risen with poverty because of a growing economy. FILE PHOTO / HEARTLAND HEALTH MONITOR
If nothing else, Sam Brownback has marked his time as governor of Kansas with one bold approach after the next. And few remade the status quo as much as his approach to welfare.
That sprung from his belief that even a well-meaning government that fails to prod the poor toward self-reliance ends up creating more dependency and stubborn poverty.
Like his record on such issues as game-shifting tax cuts, the results are arguably mixed.
Still, the wins Brownback notched early in his time in office transformed state government. Even now as his influence wanes — his popularity tanked, his likely future an early exit to a Trump administration job — policy fights now all relate to what he’s put in place.
Consider his signature tax cuts. They were rolled back last year by rebellious lawmakers who fumed that the Brownback approach saddled them with a budgetary mess.
Anti-abortion laws passed in the Brownback era have survived, but they remain a source of bitter criticism from the left and a notable part of his legacy.
Then there’s welfare. In seven years, Brownback shaped cash and food assistance around his vision of self-reliance. With work requirements for Medicaid recipientsnow also on the table, that vision may stretch even further.
“For years, we as a country have worked at and targeted poverty and have not made any progress on it since the War on Poverty was declared,” Brownback said in the speech announcing he’d accepted a nomination to be President Trump’s ambassador for religious freedom.
Kansas, the governor said, turned another way and found success.
In Brownback’s Kansas, people are cut off from welfare more quickly. With few exceptions, every able person had to work. Other rules tightened eligibility and shifted spending away from programs that for generations had been meant for the poorest of the poor.
As a result, the Department for Children and Families pays out traditional welfare to fewer people. It also spends less of its federal grant money.
While the Brownback administration points to a sizeable drop in child poverty as the payoff, that boast draws fire.
Policy analysts and groups that advocate for the poor contend that the drop in child poverty isn’t all because of Brownback’s policies. Rather, they argue those policies could hurt Kansas’ poor down the road. Getting folks to a steady paycheck isn’t as simple as providing job training and a hard deadline and, they say, making work a requirement for welfare ignores what families need.
Temporary assistance, a push to work
One of the Republican Brownback’s most powerful tools in reshaping welfare came out of the Clinton White House. A 1996 law turned Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a federal program that matched states’ spending on cash welfare, into a block grant system. That freed states to attack poverty as they saw fit.
With the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, all states had to do was put up a set amount of money to pull down tens of millions in federal grant money. In Kansas, state spending of about $65 million earns $100 million from Washington.
The money still came with strings attached. The federal and state dollars had to fit at least one of four purposes:
Helping needy families so kids can stay in their own homes
Reducing dependency through job preparation, work and marriage
Preventing and reducing pregnancies out of wedlock
Encouraging two-parent families
In return, states got more flexibility. Rulemakers in Topeka could test their own ideas about where that money went, to whom, and for how long.
The state took advantage of some of the new leeway over the years, but not until Brownback came to power did it aggressively change welfare rules.
The amount of its federal welfare money Kansas spends on work-related activities has dropped steadily since 2011, most steeply between 2011 and 2012, when it it fell from about $13 million to about $8 million CREDIT MADELINE FOX / SOURCE: CENTER FOR BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES/U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Since 2011, Kansas has cut the total number of months a person can get TANF in their lifetime from 60 months to 24. Able-bodied adults essentially earn their welfare checks through a job, or job training, 20 or more hours a week. New mothers were exempted from working, but only for the first three months of a child’s life.
“The goal was to get people employed, and really get people out of poverty — not off the (welfare) rolls,” said Dan Decker, assistant director of employment services at the Department for Children and Families. DCF oversees Kansas’s TANF programs.
Decker said the employment push worked. Some 44,000 people on the dole in 2011 now have jobs. What they’re gaining, he said, is “that value to yourself, that value to the community, through employment.”
Some of those still collect welfare, many don’t. But the overall number of families receiving TANF fell from about 15,000 to roughly 5,000.
Now many of those Kansas families don’t just have wage earners, they’re climbing out of poverty. Child poverty in Kansas fell from 19 percent in 2011 to 14 percent in 2016. Nationally, the rate fell from 23 percent to 19 percent in that period.
“Throwing people off the bus”
Brownback’s critics saw his approach to welfare reform as short-sighted.
Child welfare advocate Annie McKay said Brownback is also taking credit for gains that don’t reflect his policies so much as national trends.
“Poverty has been going down, unemployment has been going down, all over the country. It’s called recovery from the Great Recession,” said McKay, who leads the nonprofit Kansas Action for Children. “What’s happening in Kansas is not unique.”
She worries that the welfare changes passed under Brownback could set the state up for bigger problems down the line.
McKay’s organization advocates for policies that improve kids’ lives across many measures — poverty, academic achievement, health and safety in their families. She said that as kids are disconnected from the safety net provided by state welfare services, they could begin to struggle in school, or their families might fracture, landing children in crisis.
In fact, Researchers at the University of Kansas studying the state’s changes found a preliminary correlation between shrinking welfare help and a new wave of kids flooding the state’s already overwhelmed foster care system.
Rochelle Chronister, who headed Kansas’s state welfare agency in the 1990s, said there’s “absolutely” a connection between welfare reduction and more kids needing to be pulled from troubled families.
“There are things you can do to help improve things for families,” she said “I didn’t see any of those things happening (under Brownback).”
Chronister, who was a Republican lawmaker before taking over what was then the Department for Social and Rehabilitation Services, said the state should try to move welfare recipients toward employment. She wants limits on how long people can receive welfare. She thinks the five-year lifetime limit during her tenure was “about right.”
But by cutting eligibility to two years, she said the Brownback administration is “throwing people off the bus before they’re ready to take that next step.”
Disinvesting from welfare
While Brownback touts self-reliance and a work-first mentality, Kansas actually spends a smaller share of its state and federal welfare dollars on work programs than it did in 2011.
At the same time, it spends a much smaller percentage on cash assistance — those monthly payments that require 20 hours of work a week — than it did before the governor took office.
Kansas’ overall welfare spending is also down. A chunk of the money it gets from the federal government goes unspent, left in a reserve fund that the state might spend on welfare in the years to come.
Since 2011, Kansas has socked away $60 million of federal grant money, up from just $10 million when Brownback entered office.
McKay said she’s angry the state isn’t using more of that money.
“It is unconscionable to me that we are struggling as a state to meet the needs of children and families,” she said. “We are banking dollars that could be making an impact on the child welfare system.”
Meanwhile, the state shifted some welfare dollars from direct assistance to low- and moderate-income tax credits.
The Earned Income Tax Credit puts money back in the pockets of working families. Because it encourages people to work, it meets the federal standard to count as welfare spending — and it’s popular among both Republicans and Democrats.
But what most analysts consider the core of welfare — a safety net of job training, cash and child care the poorest families need during their most troubled times — doesn’t include the tax credit for the working poor.
The EITC was part of Kansas budget obligations before Brownback, and has been partially paid for using welfare money since 2001. But during Brownback’s tenure, the state put an even greater percentage toward the EITC, using the bulk of its obligated state welfare money to cover the tax credit.
The reliance on EITC to comply with federal welfare rules reflects the state budget more broadly, said Liz Schott of the left-leaning national Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Still, the Brownback team champions Kansas as an example of how to wean people off welfare — primarily by insisting that they work.
“We believe the policies are right around TANF,” said Gina Meier-Hummel, the new head of Kansas’s welfare agency. She was tapped to lead DCF by Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, suggesting that Brownback’s policies might continue after his administration.
“We’ve seen great success around families getting to work.”
Madeline Fox is a reporter for the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR. You can reach her on Twitter @maddycfox.
The Hays school board on Monday voted to wait two weeks before making a decision on spending $782,000 for HVAC improvements at Hays High School.
The work would be the first phase in a $4 million to $5 million project to fix the HVAC system at the high school. This first phase would add roof-top units for the main gym, auxiliary gym and wrestling room. The program will also improve controls for other parts of the high school. The district would like to complete construction on the project this summer.
The district has enough money in its capital outlay fund to pay for the first phase of the improvements. The district has lease agreements that will end in the next two years that could allow the district to pay for the additional improvements, Thissen said.
Board member Greg Schwartz has been critical of the board’s decision to use a construction manager at risk for the project instead of sending the project out for traditional bids. Schwartz was not on the board when the board voted in 2016 to hire Building Controls and Services as the construction manager at-risk.
Building Controls and Services intends to hire Glassman Corp. to do the work on the high school.
Schwartz said he was concerned the district is not getting the best deal because it did not use the traditional bidding process. He said he wanted to see the cost for the upgrades at Hays Middle School in 2015 and compare them to the HHS project before making a decision on the HHS project.
James Herrman, BCS representative, said the cost for the HMS project was several dollars cheaper per square foot, but inflation needs to be factored into the increase.
Schwartz said, “I would like to go forward with it … I am one vote, so if the rest of the board wants to move forward with it, I understand. I would just like to see the numbers and have them broken out on those costs. If inflation is the number, look at that. Before I am ready to approve it, I would like to have those.”
Board member Mandy Fox said, “I agree with both points of view here. I do think we are constantly under scrutiny when it comes to financial considerations. We need to do our due diligence and make sure we evaluate all those questions for every board member who is up here.”
Board member Paul Adams said he did not want to wait to vote on the project and made a motion to approve the contract. That motion failed with board members Schwartz, Lance Bickle, Fox and Sophia Rose Young voting against.
Passenger boardings at the Hays Regional Airport last year may have exceeded 10,000 after all, and that would be very good news for the city.
“We were very, very close,” Asst. City Manager Jacob Wood said, “so there are some additional things we’re taking a look at.”
That “very, very close” number was just 169 short of the 10,000 mark, according to Airport Manager Ovid Seifers.
“We think we made it, although it’s not official yet,” Seifers said Tuesday morning. “It appears that we did cross it (the 10,000 threshold).”
If so, the city of Hays would be awarded another $850,000 grant from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for airport improvements to go with the $150,000 in annual FAA funding.
Seifers thinks the city will know the final numbers within a week to 10 days.
Ovid Seifers, Hays Regional Airport manager
“We’ve got one more tentative report, more as a cushion than to get us over, and then we’ll know for sure.”
The boarding reports come from two sources, SkyWest, the airport’s Essential Air Service (EAS) provider with the “lion’s share by far.” Also counted are boardings with charter flights with a Part 135 Operator, an aircraft that is hired on demand for transport. Private aircraft are not included.
The airport’s numbers will be submitted to the FAA, which will publish the final numbers for 2017 on Oct. 1, 2018.
“However, we will know shortly where we’re at exactly,” Seifers said. “There’s very little change after the initial report in January. It’s minimal.”
“We were off 169 passengers, and that number reduced and reduced. Now, all the numbers indicate we are over.”
The Hays Regional Airport last reached 10,000 boardings in 2011 and 2012. In order to hit the mark of 10,000 passengers a year, an average of 833 people need to fly out of Hays each month.
Previous FAA million dollar grants have been used to repair the airport’s main runway and make improvements to the terminal.
