ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
The 2025 session of the Kansas Legislature is well under way, and Saturday morning, two area lawmakers were in Liberal to bring local constituents up to speed on what has been happening thus far in Topeka.
Kansas 125th House District Representative Shannon Francis, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, said appropriations have been a big focus this year at the state capitol, and a large part of that focus has been the state’s budget process.
“What has happened the last 20 years or so is we wait until after the State of the Union to find out what the governor’s budget is, and we start from the point,” he said. “We’re responding to the governor’s budget request. It gets very difficult because the second we have the governor’s budget request, our staff in the legislature has to go through it and get it in a format where we can actually work on it.”
Francis said in previous years, budget information has been available to legislators in October of the previous year, and he said this is not a change.
“The agencies submit a budget,” he said. “That budget has last year’s budget plus the enhancements. The governor goes through and looks at the enhancements, decides which ones she’s supportive of and adds whatever she would like to add to that.”
This year, though, Francis said lawmakers started with what Gov. Laura Kelly had available in October 2024 and prepared a budget bill the first day of session.
“It was basically the base request, and we went through and looked at what the governor’s asked for,” he said. “We also compared those to what the agencies asked for in enhancements, and then we made decisions on the budget process. We passed out the House’s recommendation on budget Thursday night about 8 o’clock, and we’ll vote on that early next week.”
Francis estimated 2024 state general fund expenditures at $9.365 million. He added, however, much inflated spending was seen due to funding the state got from the federal American Rescue Plan Act because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Last year, largely because of COVID money, they moved up to $10.8 billion,” he said. “Our actual revenues are running somewhere around $9 billion to $10 billion. This year, leadership said we have got to get our spending in line with our revenues.”
After budget cuts, Francis said agency have decreased from $11.5 billion to $10.5 billion. He did say, though, expenses are exceeding revenues by about $638 million in the FY 2026 budget.
“We spent a month trying to distinguish what necessary government spending, where our core responsibilities were,” he said. “If we don’t do something now, it’s really going to be a mess in a couple years.”
Francis touched briefly on $75 million lawmakers used to increase Medicaid rates for nursing homes.
“We’ve got a number of nursing homes across the state that are on the verge of bankruptcy, so we increased the Medicaid reimbursement rates for those,” he said.
Both Francis and Kansas 115th House District Representative Gary White talked about what is going on with water legislation for this year’s session.
“Water is one of the most important things for our communities,” Francis said. “You’ve got to have water. We’ve got reservoirs filling up with sedimentation in Eastern Kansas.”
White said studies show if Southwest Kansas’s Groundwater Management District 3 would cut back on water usage by about 17 percent, levels in the Ogallala Aquifer would rise above needed conservation levels.
“We would get too stable,” he said. “We would level. The water would quit going down. If you want water out here for your grandkids, too stable is what we want.”
White said a 17 percent reduction is doable.
“They’ve done it in Northwest Kansas, North Central Kansas,” he said. “We can do it out here. The $11 million is going to go to conservation. How they did it up there was real-time measuring moisture in your soil and just being more efficient with our irrigation. We can do that. It’s doable.”
White said the higher levels of sedimentation in state waters are easily explainable.
“Upstream, we need to stabilize the streams that are feeding that,” he said.
To conserve the Ogallala, though, White said agriculture needs to change with the times of the 21st century.
“The technology’s there,” he said. “We have to change that mentality. There’s better ways of getting the same amount of money.”
