ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
The 2025 session of the Kansas Legislature gets under way this week, and two local lawmakers were in Liberal last week to give a preview of what could be coming up in Topeka this year.
Kansas 38th District Senator Ron Ryckman and 125th House District Representative Shannon Francis were at Memorial Library last week with a legislative update sponsored by Seward County Farm Bureau.
Both legislators reviewed their committee assignments, with Ryckman serving on the Senate Ag, Local Government, Judiciary and Commerce Committees and the Veterans Caucus. He also talked about another committee, one he does not serve on, called Government Efficiency.
“The federal government’s going to be doing that,” he said. “We’re going to see how well we can save some money.”
With much money in the legislature’s rainy day fund, Ryckman said Republicans in both chambers are pushing for relief on property taxes.
“The governor’s pushing back on that,” he said. “She doesn’t want property tax relief. We’ll see what happens there.”
Despite Gov. Laura Kelly’s rejections, Ryckman said some pro-life legislation was passed in 2024. Ryckman also talked about the governor’s efforts to fund Democratic candidates in urban Johnson County, particularly how those candidates were defeated by Republican opponents.
“We’re going to have 30 Republican senators,” he said. “We had three Republicans who were voting with the governor on her tax issues. All three of them are not coming back. We’ve got the same senate president, but the offices below that are filled by ones who will help make it run a little more smoothly.”
Ryckman said despite differing points of view on both sides of the Sunflower State, compromises can be found.
“The people of Western Kansas think a little bit different than the ones in Eastern Kansas, but we have to work with them,” he said. “We try to and do the best we can.”
Like Ryckman, Francis talked about the anticipated push for property tax relief in the legislature.
“Our local governments depend upon property taxes to fund the functions they perform for us,” Francis said. “Property tax is also one of the most hated taxes up there, and it’s very hard for us to address that unless we’re going to hurt the funding local governments use like where the county, the city and the schools get their local funding.”
At this time, 21.5 mills of the state’s budget is earmarked for education, and Francis said he would like to see this changed to help lower that amount and make it more revenue neutral.
“As valuations increase, the actual mill levy will go down,” he said. “We’ll backfill that funding for schools with some of our other revenue sources. I think that’s achievable. It’s probably not as much as we’d all like to see in our own personal tax statements, but it is something we can do. More and more, we can leave that funding source for the local governments to use.”
Francis too said he is expecting lawmakers to look at a new budget process for the state.
“Historically, what’s happened is we don’t get the budget until the governor’s state of the state, which is going to be the Wednesday after we go back in session this year, and we have to wait until our staff can get it in a format we can view,” he said.
However, Francis said legislators usually have access to this data by October of the previous year, but they do not have the governor’s priorities at that time.
“We’ve started a process where we start to evaluate the base budgets, and we look at what the agencies are requesting and try to set our priorities from that point instead of waiting to see what the governor’s priorities are,” he said. “Legislative leaderships wants to try to get a budgeting process in place where it depends more upon what we spent last year and what inflation has been rather than one where we’re reacting to what the governor’s proposed. We’ll have to see how that works, but I know they’re trying to be very thoughtful about that process so we can make sure we’re providing services you want without spending money that would be better served to be in your pockets.”
As with most legislative sessions in Topeka, Francis said this year’s will again have an emphasis on water.
“I know the governor’s gone around the state and had local consults on water, and we’ll have to see what happens on that,” he said.
Francis said his committee assignments have not changed for 2025. He will serve on the House Appropriations, Tax and Legislative Post Audit and Rules Committees. He is also chairman of the Transportation Committee and serving on the Turnpike Board.
Francis urged motorists who travel the Kansas Turnpike to take advantage of the K-TAG program.
“We’ve went to cashless tolling on the turnpike,” he said. “It’s a simple thing. You don’t pay anymore. If you used to pay by cash, you can’t do that anymore. They read your license plate, and they send you a bill in the mail. If you get set up on K-TAG, it happens seemlessly, and it’s half the cost.”
Francis said he was unsure of what was going to happen this year with education.
“I do know the legislature passed legislation to set up a study group for the next school funding plan,” he said. “Our school funding plan expires at the end of 2026, so we’ve got to have a new one in place by 2027.”
In the past two Kansas gubernatorial elections, Gov. Kelly has won eight of the state’s 105 counties, and Francis said despite this and many rural counties losing population, there is still a strong group of lawmakers representing Western Kansas and other rural areas of the state.
“Our education chairman this year is from Dodge City,” he said. “That’s going to be a key position to help to make sure the new school funding plan represents the needs of rural Kansas. The ag chair is from Western Kansas. Our water chair is from Scott City. The Ways and Means chair, which is an important position, is from Goodland. This year, the House assistant majority leader is from rural Kansas from Coldwater. We’ve got a strong team up there to help represent rural Kansas and make sure we’re heard. We don’t always get what we want, but we’ve got people in good spots for what we need.”
Francis revisited transportation, saying making sure electric vehicles pay their fair share of maintaining the state’s roads will be part of the conversation this year in Topeka.
“I don’t know if anything’s going to happen,” he said. “Right now, EV’s don’t pay fuel tax. They pay a higher registration fee, but it doesn’t reflect the wear and tear of the roads. We need to address that so that’s equitable.”
As chairman of the Transportation Committee, Francis requested the Kansas Department of Transportation to hire an engineering consultant to study roads in Southwest Kansas, particularly how they connect to the rest of the nation and region, and come up with a plan to improve area roads.
“One of the big problems with what happens in the current funding process is there’s no long-range plan for the improvement of Highway 54, Highway 83 and Highway 50,” he said. “They come out every two years. They do a local consult, and there are a few minor projects handed out. There’s no long-term plan about when we hit certain traffic volumes and how that’s going to happen. The road between Mullinville and Pratt has a ton of traffic. We do have passing lanes, and those have been great, but we need a long-term plan so we know how to plan for the future.”
Francis said as the dairy industry continues to grow in the area, which is great for local grain prices, more traffic will be seen on highways from dairies such as High Plains Ponderosa Dairy on Meade Lake Road to Dodge City and other area towns in the future.
“It’ll help all of us if we know what the plan is for the future and we get buy in from the state,” he said. “I look forward to the engineering consultants coming out to get local input on what our needs are out here and how we can improve the safety of our roads in the future.”
