ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
The Kansas Legislature recently wrapped up its session for 2025, and two local lawmakers brought news of the session’s final days to Liberal recently.
In mid-April, the Liberal Chamber of Commerce hosted its final legislative update for the year sponsored by EPIC Touch. Kansas 38th District State Senator Ron Ryckman said the session came to an end with a brief, yet historic, veto session, with more than 30 vetoes being overridden in both the House and Senate.
“Victories were possible due to many more Republicans,” he said. “Most bills we pass go 40-0. Everybody talks about the veto and veto override, but we vote a lot with Republicans and Democrats together.”
This year’s Kansas Senate was made up of 31 Republicans and nine Democrats, and Ryckman said with a total of 27 votes needed to override a veto, the gains and losses for both parties in the last election helped defeat Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes.
“There were some other Republicans who voted with the Democrats who did not get re-elected and did not run,” he said. “We have 14 new Republicans. We have some lawyers and some doctors.”
Ryckman said with only four of the Senate’s 40 members coming from Western Kansas, cooperation with other state lawmakers is important.
“We have to work with the people in the east, and the leadership is in the east,” he said.
Kansas 125th House District Representative Shannon Francis talked about the Southwest Mobility Study Advisory Board, an initiative stated due to frustration from results of the Kansas Department of Transportation’s last round of local consults in 2023.
“It’s going to look at the metrics on what a 21st century transportation plan in Southwest Kansas should look like,” he said. “Sometimes, I have to lower expectations. A four lane from Liberal to Pratt is about $1 billion, and regardless of how big the State of Kansas’s budget is, that’s real money.”
In 2026, there will be a constitutional amendment on the ballot in Kansas which Francis said would allow for the popular election of state Supreme Court justices.
“We’re giving you an opportunity to weigh in on that,” he said. “Some of the specifics of it will be worked out legislatively afterwards about whether they are by district or statewide. I prefer they be by district so we don’t know wind up in a situation where all of the justices come from the urban areas.”
Francis explained the current system of picking Supreme Court justices.
“There’s a committee of nine that submits three applicants, and the governor picks from one of those three applicants,” he said. “The committee’s made up of five members who are picked by attorneys, four members who are picked by the governor. There’s some concerns by people with some of the rulings the Supreme Court has made over the years.”
With eight cases tried by the Kansas Supreme Court since 2007 being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, Francis said this has created concerns for many Kansans.
Francis then talked about the state’s new budget process.
“What had happened for the 10 years I had been there before is we had received a budget from the governor, and our budget committees went through and evaluated that budget,” he said. “Typically, we were put in the situation where we’re making cuts the executive branch wanted to implement.”
Now, Francis said, the proces has been changed to starting with a baseline budget from the prior year’s budget.
“The agencies come in and talk to us about the enhancements they want from that budget,” he said. “We had some great outcomes from it. This year, our budget is $200 million less than it was less year.”
Francis said this means lawmakers could put their thumbprint on what they thought was important.
“It’s important to remember part of the constitution says the legislature appropriates,” he said. “The governor does still have the authority to line item veto anything inappropriate, and we have to address those.”
Francis said he was disappointed, though, with the lack of progress on property tax relief.
“There’s 20 mills that’s levied statewide that goes back to education,” he said. “I had hoped we would cut one and a half mills like we did, but we would also make it revenue neutral. Unfortunately, the fiscal note on that got out of hand in a hurry. One and half mills is about $8.1 million, but when you make it revenue neutral, that number grows exponentially. We didn’t feel we could afford that at this time.”
Work was done, however, with income tax revenues, and Francis said legislators looked at revenues from last year and their growth rate versus inflation.
“If they did grow faster than inflation, we can use that to buy down the income tax rate for all Kansans,” he said.
Francis said the state’s budget stabilization fund, commonly called a rainy day fund, is in good shape at this time.
“It is currently at $1.7 million,” he said. “We have that in reserves for a recession. We also said if our budget is more than 15 percent of that rainy day fund, this ratchet down won’t go into effect either. We’ve got some safeguards to make sure we don’t get ourselves in huge financial issues. It won’t go any lower than 4. Once it gets down to 4 percent on the individual income tax rate, it goes to corporate, and it goes to another number for the financial institutions.”
Francis later discussed a potential ballot initiative in Seward County to allow portions of local sales tax revenues to go toward road improvements.
“One of the reasons that’s necessary on their part is they get one third of the state fuel tax,” he said. “Our state fuel tax receipts have been flat since 2003 because of the increasing fuel efficiency of our internal combustion engine vehicles. Like everybody’s budget, when that has been flat for 20 years, inflation has increased, yet their ability to address revenues has stayed the same.”
Francis said this likewise affects cities.
“One of the things we did this year was we increased registration fees to add parody between different technologies,” he said. “We increased the EV fee from $100 to $165. We increased the hybrid fee from $50 to $75, and if it’s a plug-in hybrid, we increased it to $100. KDOT did a study on what would a car that drives 12,000 miles that makes the average miles per gallon, which is 23, pay for registration fees and state fuel tax, and we adjusted the EVs and hybrids to reflect that.”
