Voice For Liberty

Tag: Karl Peterjohn

Sedgwick County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Friday July 1, 2011

    This Week in Kansas. On this week’s edition of the KAKE Television public affairs program This Week in Kansas, Ken Ciboski (Associate Professor of Political Science at Wichita State University), John D’Angelo (Arts & Cultural Services Manager for the City of Wichita), and myself join host Tim Brown for a discussion of arts and government funding in Kansas. This Week in Kansas airs in Wichita and western Kansas at 9:00 am Sundays on KAKE channel 10.

    Kansas taxes. A short report produced by Americans for Prosperity, Kansas shows some of the reasons why economic growth in Kansas has been sluggish: “Kansas’ state and local tax burden continues to be amongst the highest in the region.” Kansas has fewer private sector jobs than it did ten years ago. And in what should be a grave cause for alarm, Kansas was the only state to have a net loss of private sector jobs over the last year. … A table of figures illustrates that although Oklahoma kept its sales tax rate low and constant while Kansas increased its rate, tax revenue increased much more in Oklahoma. Download the report at AFP-Kansas Income Tax Policy Primer.

    Wichita sales tax. Speaking of sales tax and its harmful effect, Wichita seems to want to raise its rate. Proposals have been floated for a sales tax for economic development in general, for increased transit (bus) service, for drainage projects, and for downtown projects. Boosters cite the Intrust Bank Arena as an example of a successful project paid for by a sales tax that disappeared as promised. That’s despite the dreams of Sedgwick County Commissioner Tim Norton: “Then, as that tax was nearing its end, Norton ‘wondered … whether a 1 percent sales tax could help the county raise revenue.’ (‘Norton floats idea of 1 percent county sales tax,’ Wichita Eagle, April 4, 2007)” … Boosters of the arena promote it as a financial success, and there was the presentation to the county of a check for $1,116,442 as its share of the arena’s earnings. This figure, however, does not represent any sort of “profit” or “earnings” in the usual sense. In fact, the introductory letter that accompanies these calculations warns readers that these are “special-purpose financial statements” and “are not intended to be a presentation in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.” In particular, Commissioner Karl Peterjohn has warned that these figures — and the monthly “profit” figures presented to commissioners — do not include depreciation expense. That expense is a method of recognizing and accounting for the large capital cost of the arena. In April the County released that number, and I believe it has not been reported by any news media. That may be because the number is pretty big — $4.4 million, some four times the purported “earnings” of the arena. … Without honest discussion of numbers like these, we make decisions based on incomplete and false information. Don’t look for many local government leaders and officials to talk about this number, and certainly not the Wichita Eagle editorial page.

    Koch criticism backfires — again. For those who follow the issue, it’s no surprise that Lee Fang, a reporter for the liberal think tank Canter for American Progress has come out with another attack on Charles and David Koch. Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard reports on this effort: “Think Progress reporter Lee Fang has a long history of being spectacularly wrong. However, there’s a seemingly unending thirst for his breathless demonization of the Koch brothers and other rants about corporate greed among the low IQ end of the liberal spectrum.” Fang disagrees with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, and he lambasts the litigators who brought the suit as “heavily financed by right-wing corporate money, particularly from Koch Industries and Walmart.” He also criticizes organizations for not dislosing their donors. Hemingway notes this: “In the case of the Koch brothers, they have been outspoken philosophical libertarians for decades. Their support of free speech over onerous campaign laws is entirely consistent and should not be surprising. However, in the case of Wal-Mart Fang is also astoundingly hypocritical. Because you know who else is a ‘Walton-Funded Group’? Lee Fang’s employer.” And the secret donations that Fang rails against so passionately? Hemingway again: “You know who else accepts ‘secret donations from individuals and corporations’? That’s right — the Center for American Progress.” … For another example of Fang’s reporting, see ThinkProgress and Lee Fang: wrong again.

    Tension on debt ceiling issue. In The Wall Street Journal Kimberly Strassel writes that the current debt and spending crisis may lead to an end to farm subsidies, something she described as a “sacred federal spending cow:” “For decades, the House and Senate agriculture committees have been the last redoubts of congressional bipartisanship, liberals and conservatives united in beating back any outside attempts to cut off tens of billions annually for price supports, crop insurance, weather assistance, conservation handouts and nutrition programs. The last real stab at reform was the mid-1990s Freedom to Farm bill. Most of the changes were obliterated by subsequent bailouts and new spending.” … She describes how Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake got a limit of farm subsidies through the Appropriations Committee, but House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas used a maneuver to block Flake’s proposal. So much for that effort at reform, blocked by a Republican. Lucas’ website promotes a conservative message, with one post criticizing bailouts. But not for farmers, it seems. … Wichita’s Mike Pompeo is mentioned: “Mr. Pompeo is waiting to see what debt package emerges and says his vote will depend on whether it contains real ‘structural’ reform. But he also tells me he doesn’t intend to let parochial interests cloud his decision. ‘I came here to be a small-government guy every day, and not just when it is spending cuts in somebody else’s district,’ he says.” … Although not mentioned in this article, Tim Huelskamp, who represents the Kansas first district, has been upfront in discussing the need to reduce or eliminate farm subsides, and so far, many farmers seem to be accepting of that. Huelskamp’s district, which covers all of western Kansas (and more), is usually second on the list of congressional districts in terms of total farm subsidies received. For 2009, that figure was $369 million.

    Stossel: The Money Hole. A recent episode of John Stossel’s television program is now available on the free hulu service by clicking on The Money Hole. Writes Stossel in his introduction to the show: “We will soon spend ourselves into oblivion. But finally … movement! Budget slashing proposals from Paul Ryan, the Republican Study Committee, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and even Tim Pawlenty! But politicians and real people across the spectrum still resist change. What should government do? What’s its role? What have other countries done? The Money Hole tackles that.”

  • Kansas judicial selection should be reformed

    By Karl Peterjohn.

    Removing politics from the Kansas judiciary is about as likely as removing the moo from a cow. In Kansas the there is no transparency and a great deal of discrimination in this back room judicial selection process. Judge Ricard D. Greene’s defense of appellate judge selection (February 24, 2011 Wichita Eagle) in Kansas neglected these odious features in his defense of this terribly flawed system.

    I write this as a second-class Kansan who has been disenfranchised in the process of selecting a majority of this powerful governmental committee that is dominated by the members of the Kansas bar and the group that picks who will become its appellate judges. There is no other government panel in Kansas that empowers one small class of special citizens at the expense of the rest of us. I recently asked the Secretary of State’s office for the election results for selecting this powerful state committee’s lawyer members. I was told that information is not available.

    Five of the nine members of this powerful committee are elected solely by the members of the Kansas bar. The other four are appointed by the governor. While this committee selection process is used in a number of other states, none of them provide for making a majority of its members are lawyers.

    This type of closed door selection process which occurs outside the public’s view is a reason why a few years ago, six of the seven members of the Kansas Supreme Court who had been selected using this process were members of one political party while the seventh who wasn’t, was a friend of the governor (see kansasmeadowlark.com). The latter was judicially reprimanded but that admonishment and the underlying egregious misbehavior that led to this punishment did not keep Lawton Nuss from his current promotion to be the Chief Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.

    Yeah, there aren’t any politics here. Yeah, only the best and the brightest are being added to the court according to Judge Greene. I must note that none of the Eagle’s news coverage of Nuss during his retention election last year mentioned his reprimand or kept the Eagle’s editorial page from endorsing him despite his ex parte abuse with litigants in the Montoy case.

    Judicial selection is important and decisions will impact state policy. Must the state spend $853 million more for K-12 schooling to comply with the KS Constitution? Yes says the unanimous supreme court in overruling its own earlier decision. Are state owned casinos constitutional? Yes again, despite the fact that there never was a statewide vote on legalized casinos. Was the Kansas death penalty constitutional? The Kansas Supreme Court overruled itself from an earlier case and said no, but then Attorney General Kline took this case to the US Supreme Court. Kline won in Washington and that decision was reversed.

    Today, the politics of the Kansas judiciary are now occurring behind the closed door-back rooms of the bar association. Transparency is non existent when the meetings of the government committee occur behind closed doors and without any public records being recorded from these meetings.

    KU law professor Stephen J. Ware has written that this is an inequality that goes against the “one person, one vote” principle of democracies. The power of a vote of a member of the bar is “infinitely more powerful” than the votes of non-lawyers.

    When comparing the method of judicial selection in Kansas to other states, Ware said that “Kansas is the only state that gives its bar the power to select the majority of its supreme court nominating commission.”

    The Kansas House majority supporting HB 2101 should be praised for eliminating this vestige of elite discrimination by one class of specially empowered citizens. The attorneys and their hand picked judges won’t like this bill, but the politics of judicial selection should be out in public where everyone has a say as well as a clear view, instead of hidden in back rooms. I hope that a majority of the Kansas senate as well as Governor Sam Brownback agree and HB 2101 becomes law as a first step in reforming appellate judicial selection in Kansas.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Sunday December 12, 2010

    This week at Wichita City Council. This Tuesday, six speakers have signed up to appear on the public agenda. This is a portion of the meeting where citizens may speak on nearly any topic. Five are speaking on the city’s proposed trash plan, while one is speaking on a city-wide recycling project. … Approval of the city’s legislative agenda will be considered. Probably the greatest threat to economic freedom is this plank: “City of Wichita supports continued use of effective private-public partnerships and the appropriate intervention of state and local governments to spur economic development.” Also the city expresses support for highly subsidized, expensive, and little-used passenger rail service. … Also the council will consider amending the Wichita-Sedgwick County Comprehensive Plan to include Project Downtown: The Master Plan for Wichita. This is the plan that consulting firm Goody Clancy developed for the revitalization of downtown Wichita. The complete agenda report is at Wichita City Council, December 14, 2010.

    Sedgwick County Commission this week. On Wednesday the Sedgwick County Commission will vote on its legislative agenda. The agenda, or platform, is not law, but expresses the sentiment or desire of the commission. Last year Commissioner Karl Peterjohn shepherded through the requirement that voters approve all tax rate increases. This year the same language is proposed, but it may not pass. (The proposed language is this: “All local sales tax increases must be approved by voters under Kansas law. All property tax increases that raise the mill levy should also be required to receive voter approval.”) Some commissioners believe that voters elect them to use their judgment to make decisions on taxes, while other commissioners believe voters should have the final say on something as important as this. The agenda and backup material for Wednesday’s meeting is at Sedgwick County Commission, December 15, 2010.

    Wichita Eagle: Adopt downtown plan. Today’s Wichita Eagle editorial calls for passage of the downtown master plan recently developed by planning firm Goody Clancy. Rhonda Holman argues that a “busier, richer core” will benefit the town economically, adding that “downtown matters too much to be left to chance.” The idea that the core is essential to progress is taken as a given, but when downtown supporters are questioned, no evidence to support this nostrum is given. Also, this concept of “chance” that Holman doesn’t trust could also be described as a dynamic marketplace of ideas and capital, with many diverse players with dispersed knowledge acting to advance their own self-interest by creating things people will freely buy, all coordinated through the magic of the price system. What Wichita — with Holman’s support — plans to do is to replace this with the bureaucratic and political system.

    City planning by “Those Who Know Best.” “While the fixations of trendy planners might not register on the list of things that average Americans think about, these new utopian land-use ideals are filtering down into government agencies and city councils, and might eventually impact the way we all live.” Writing in the Orange County Register, Steven Greenhut quotes the definition of New Urbanism: “New Urbanism is the most important planning movement this century, and is about creating a better future for us all. It is an international movement to reform the design of the built environment, and is about raising our quality of life and standard of living by creating better places to live. New Urbanism is the revival of our lost art of place-making, and is essentially a reordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages and neighborhoods …” He warns: “Whenever some ideologue claims to offer the most important thing since sliced bread and then promises to reorder my life around it, we should all get nervous.” (The downtown Wichita planners do not use the term “New Urbanism,” but they share the same characteristics and goals.) And even more strongly: “The New Urbanists claim to want to give our lives meaning by creating superior urban forms of living, yet they miss the most meaningful things in life because they emphasize architecture over people. Like all totalitarians, they assume that what they prefer is so good and noble that they have the moral right to impose it on everybody else. The rest of us need to take notice now, so there is still time to oppose it.”

    Anderson appointment criticized. KU political science professor Burdett Loomis criticizes the appointment of Steven J. Anderson to be the new Kansas budget director, branding him an “ideologue” that has made “broadside attacks on public education.” Anderson believes in limited government, and his “attacks” on public — let’s be clear here — government schools are advocating school choice through vouchers. In states where vouchers are used, evidence is that public schools improve in response to the competition from private schools that parents can now actually afford. Plus, the state saves money, too. Loomis also criticizes Anderson for uncovering the large unspent fund balances in many Kansas agencies, balances that Loomis seems to doubt exist. Overall, Loomis presents an argument for the status quo in Kansas government, and the potential for change in the direction of restraining its growth has Loomis — in his own words — “concerned — worried, even.”

  • Hayek vs. Keynes to be discussed in Wichita

    This Friday (July 30) the Wichita Pachyderm Club features “A celebration of Milton Friedman’s birthday featuring a discussion of the Friedrich Hayek and the John Maynard Keynes economic schools of thought.”

    Presenters will be Karl Peterjohn, Sedgwick County Commissioner, for Hayek, and Bill Miles, WSU Assoc. Professor of Economics For Keynes.

    All are welcome to attend Wichita Pachyderm Club meetings. The program costs $10, which includes a delicious buffet lunch including salad, soup, two main dishes, and ice tea and coffee. The meeting starts at noon, although it’s recommended to arrive fifteen minutes early to get your lunch before the program starts.

    The Wichita Petroleum Club is on the ninth floor of the Bank of America Building at 100 N. Broadway (north side of Douglas between Topeka and Broadway) in Wichita, Kansas (click for a map and directions). You may park in the garage (enter west side of Broadway between Douglas and First Streets) and use the sky walk to enter the Bank of America building. The Petroleum Club will stamp your parking ticket and the fee will be $1.00. Or, there is usually some metered and free street parking nearby.

  • Sedgwick County Commissioner disputes Wichita Eagle headline on audit

    This week controversy arose surrounding a request by two Sedgwick County Commissioners for more information from the county’s auditor, Allen, Gibbs & Houlik, L.C., a public accounting firm.

    The financial issue concerns the way that EMS employee pay is budgeted and its impact on the county’s budget. Commission chair Karl Peterjohn and Commissioner Kelly Parks asked questions of the county’s auditor on this matter, exercising what Peterjohn describes as due diligence. But the issue has grown to become political.

    In a Wichita Eagle news story, the county’s chief financial officer said he expected to receive a bill from the auditor for about $900 as a result of what the Eagle characterized as an audit. As this was initiated without a vote by the entire commission, some members are “irked,” according to the news article.

    Peterjohn says that the questions he asked are “within the normal scope of the contract between Sedgwick County and AGH” and that there should be no charge for answering these questions. He also notes that the auditing firm works for the commissioners specifically.

    There is disagreement as to the scope of the financial irregularity. In an email message, Peterjohn said that “[Commissioner Dave Unruh] does not believe that there is a financial problem here. I strongly disagree. The county will republish its budget because of this problem.”

    Following is a letter Peterjohn wrote to the editor of the Wichita Eagle.

    I am writing to demand a retraction from the Wichita Eagle’s July 14, 2010 headline, “Parks, Peterjohn order audit without vote.”

    We did not order an audit and the article that Ms. Gruver wrote does not state that we did. We did discuss a $300,000 discrepancy that county staff had found in the EMS Department with the county’s outside auditor Mark Dick. Mr. Dick is operating under an existing contract that his accounting firm, Allen Gibbs & Houlik (AGH) has with Sedgwick County. This sizable financial discrepancy extended back to 2007.

    The current contract that the county has with AGH goes back to 2008. AGH’s accounting work with the county goes back decades and well before 2007. The current contract requires AGH to perform outside auditing of the county’s books and related financial services. This specifically includes: “…require AGH plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable, rather than absolute assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement whether caused by error, fraudulent financial reporting or misappropriation of assets.”

    The unexpected and negative financial revelation about this $300,000 discrepancy led me to want to know if AGH would be changing their letter concerning the county’s financial reporting for last year or any previous years going back to 2007. I was also concerned that problems in one county department might extend to other departments as well as revising any of the previous audit letters issued by AGH in the past. This is especially necessary since we are beginning to work on our 2011 budget and my questions to Mr. Dick reflected these concerns on this subject.

    This is the appropriate and proper form of due diligence that is needed to be asked by any elected official who has the responsibility for the expenditure of taxpayers’ funds. My inquiry as well as Commissioner Parks may have led AGH to take action under the terms of this contract relating to county finances and record keeping.

    I asked questions. So did Commissioner Parks. Commissioners ask questions all the time without having to meet and cast votes. In the 18 months that I have been a commissioner, Mr. Dick and AGH have presented the results of their annual audit to the commission. At that time Mr. Dick has said that the auditors work for the commissioners and are ready to answer any financial and audit related questions we have under this contract.

    If there are financial discrepancies in a county department, this needs to be identified and corrected. A lack of proper and appropriate financial controls can impact the county’s bond rating and I believe that by asking my questions, along with Commissioner Parks’, for Mr. Dick were appropriate and were the due diligence that needed to be performed.

    Mr. Dick responded to our inquiry since he was not aware of this $300,000 discrepancy until we told him. Mr. Dick looked into this matter under the terms of the AGH-Sedgwick County contract. Mr. Dick then issued a letter to all of the commissioners informing us of what he had found. Commissioner Unruh then expressed his opinion about this inquiry at the commissioner staff meeting last Tuesday.

    If county records are flawed, there are provisions to cover this within the contract. These provisions include, “… establishing and maintaining effective internal control over financial reporting and safeguarding assets, and for informing us of all significant deficiencies in the design or operation of such controls of which it has knowledge,” is a county responsibility. In addition the county is also responsible for, “… for adjusting the financial statements to correct material misstatements,” and “… properly recording transactions in the records.”

    My intent in asking questions is to make sure that taxpayers’ funds are being spent appropriately and proper records are being kept. Let me add that in many cases in this country public officials, both appointed and elected, have lost their jobs for financial discrepancies a good deal smaller than $300,000 or improper financial variances that are a lot less than 4 years in length. This variance will require the county to re-publish its budget.

    I believed that the questions I asked were within the normal scope of the contract between Sedgwick County and AGH. The headline that Commissioner Parks and myself ordered an audit outside the boundaries of this contract without a required vote is odious and false.

  • Second amendment decision not permanent

    By Karl Peterjohn

    The United States Supreme Court narrowly agreed today that the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects an individuals right to possess firearms. Sadly, this was a narrow, 5-4 decision that could be changed when another 2nd Amendment case works its way to the Court when its membership changes.

    This has happened in the past. In fact, my lawyer friends tell me that it is not unusual for this to happen.

    Yet this is an individual right. The United States could not have been created if this had not been implicit among the rights claimed by our colonial forefathers.

    One overlooked fact is that this right is clearly called out in many state constitutions. This includes Kansas where Section 4 in the Kansas Bill of Rights states: “Bear arms; armies. The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security; but standing armies, in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be tolerated, and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power.”

    That’s clear language. The people have this right and not the “national guard” as the statist left has been alleging. The fear expressed here if of standing armies, not individuals and their firearms. Now, this is not to say that this language cannot be misconstrued. It can and in Kansas, it has.

    However, the people have this power and this language clearly says so. Like the First Amendment in our federal Bill of Rights that begins, “Congress shall make no law…” when it comes to religion, speech, or press. Despite this, the regulation of speech continues and even thrives. Efforts to continue to destroy our 2nd Amendment freedoms will continue.

    The odious statist mayor in Chicago has said that they will continue to flout the 2nd Amendment. However, this is a victory for freedom, but only by a tiny 5-4 margin.

  • Sedgwick County jail programs are working

    By Karl Peterjohn, Sedgwick County Commission Chair

    While making this community as safe as possible from criminal activity is a never-ending challenge a major achievement has been accomplished in Sedgwick County. The Sedgwick County jail population growth that appeared to be rising inexorably has been reversed in the last nine months.

    This is a major success.

    The June 18 Wichita Eagle editorial and news coverage about the recent success is understated with figures that diminish instead of accurately reflecting this accomplishment. As the new commissioner I had to cast a very difficult vote to appropriate additional tax funds of $2 million to finance the growing jail population last year. The jail population had been rising throughout 2009.

    By last October we had as many as 1,760 people in the jail, work release, or in other county jails around Kansas. That month’s average was 1,736. This was much higher than the beginning of the year.

    What changed? The county has expanded a number of alternative programs including day reporting, drug court, mental health court, and around the beginning of September, an expanded pre-trial services program. The intent was to make the people involved in a variety of misdemeanors and non-appearances for court dates more accountable for these types of illegal behavior and an extra benefit would be a reduced cost to taxpayers.

    In addition, a series of articles discussed the delays in sentenced criminals in being sent to the state prison.The impact of these articles resulted in changes and has had a major positive impact on the number of people occupying the county jail. In one day last month, the number of people in the jail dropped to 1,477.

    The cost of putting a person in the jail is over $65 a day. Pre-trial services cost per person is roughly 1/10 that cost. The jail problem is not solved, but the dimension of this problem has changed significantly for the better with a population that is closer to 1,500 than 1,750. June 22 there were 1,502. This is about the same as the average number of people in the jail between 2005-to-2008. When the cost exceeds $65 a day, this translates into $5 million a year, or over 1 mill on county property taxes.

    There are no final solutions for the larger issue of crime. However, there are much lower cost alternatives that are now being used to help keep this community safe. This success by Sedgwick County has not mentioned any of these jail population figures in the editorial commentary or news coverage. There is a lot of credit that deserves to be shared with all of the people: elected, staff, and judicial who are all involved in trying to keep our community safe.

    As a county commission candidate in 2008, I spoke out against spending over $125,000 per bed for additional space in the county jail expansion proposal that had a total price tag of almost $50 million. I said that there were better options available to keep this county safe at a reasonable price. These detention figures indicate that Sedgwick County is making significant progress in utilizing lower cost detention options.

  • Kansas Governor, Wichita Eagle: why ‘pigs’ at the trough?

    When the Kansas Chamber of Commerce recently referred to the need to control Kansas government spending and taxes, a few politicians and newspaper editorial writers embellished what the Chamber actually said in order to make their own political points.

    Here’s what the Kansas Chamber said in its press release dated May 8:

    “As of today, the legislature has failed to address the needs and wishes of the business community. It has instead catered to the needs of those at the government trough. The Kansas legislature has turned a deaf ear to the hard-working businessmen and women who have made the decision to invest in Kansas and provide jobs for our citizens. Instead of responsibly funding state government without raising taxes, a coalition of liberal House and Senate members have instead chosen to slash crucial services and push for a historic tax hike on Kansas families,” said Kansas Chamber President Kent Beisner.

    Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson, an advocate for greater government spending and taxing, seized this opportunity for political gamesmanship. His press release on May 10 stated “It is heartbreaking to think that somebody would equate the disabled, the elderly, school children, veterans, law enforcement and the poor to pigs at a trough.”

    His message used the “pigs at a trough” symbolism several additional times.

    The Governor’s use of the word “pigs” — inflammatory imagry, to say the least — started making the rounds. It was picked up by editorialists and other writers, including the Wichita Eagle’s opinion editor Phillip Brownlee. In his editorial Kids, disabled aren’t pigs at a trough (Wichita Eagle, May 13) Brownlee wrote: “So schoolchildren and individuals with disabilities are akin to pigs at a trough?”

    Brownlee’s editorial starts by complaining that the Kansas Chamber used some “over-the-top rhetoric during the state budget debate.”

    Well, the Kansas Chamber didn’t use the word “pigs.” That was the governor’s language, then repeated by liberal editorial writers like Brownlee and the Winfield Daily Courier’s David Seaton when he editorialized: “Efforts by the president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce to characterize educators, the elderly, the disabled and public safety employees as pigs at ‘the government trough’ did not succeed.”

    Since Governor Parkinson brought it up, we ought to think about it for a moment. Schoolchildren, of course, aren’t pigs at the trough, no matter what the governor and Wichita Eagle say. For one, children don’t make the decision to attend public (government) schools, as their parents make that decision for them. It is the schools themselves, specifically school spending advocates in the form of Kansas National Education Association (or KNEA, the teachers union) and the Kansas Association of School Boards (KASB) that are the pigs.

    If these school spending advocates were truly concerned about the education of Kansas schoolchildren, they would allow for government spending on education to be targeted at the child, to be spent wherever parents feel their children’s needs will best be met. But the school spending lobby in Kansas vigorously resists any challenge to their monopoly on public money for education, which reveals that they’re really more interested in spending on schools by any means, at any cost rather than on education.

    If we need any more evidence of the never-ending appetite of schools for money, consider a story told by Kansas House Speaker Pro Tem Arlen Siegfreid (R-Olathe) of a conversation he had with Mark Tallman, lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards: “During our discussion I asked Mr. Tallman if we (the State) had the ability to give the schools everything he asked for would he still ask for even more money for schools. His answer was, ‘Of course, that’s my job.’”

    The Eagle editorial mentions a number of local chambers of commerce that have split away from the state chamber. We should recognize that in many cases, local chambers have become boosters for big government taxes and spending. An article titled Tax Chambers by the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore explains the decline of local chambers of commerce: “The Chamber of Commerce, long a supporter of limited government and low taxes, was part of the coalition backing the Reagan revolution in the 1980s. On the national level, the organization still follows a pro-growth agenda — but thanks to an astonishing political transformation, many chambers of commerce on the state and local level have been abandoning these goals. They’re becoming, in effect, lobbyists for big government.”

    This was certainly the case with the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce. Under its president Brian Derreberry, it had been in favor of increased government interventionism instead of free markets. An example was its support of proven fiscal conservative Karl Peterjohn’s opponent in the campaign for Sedgwick County Commissioner in 2008. In that campaign, the Wichita Chamber spent some $19,000 — 44% of all it spent on campaigns that year — on Peterjohn’s opponent, a small town mayor who had just increased taxes.

    Last year the Wichita Chamber hired former Kansas House Member Jason Watkins to be its lobbyist. The hiring of Watkins, a fiscal conservative, seemed to signal a possible shift in the Wichita Chamber’s direction. The fact that the Wichita Chamber did not break away from the Kansas Chamber’s opposition to tax increases validates that perception.

    We should also note that many of the goals of the Kansas Chamber, such as efficient government, reducing taxes, encouraging business investment and growth, and promoting economic growth in Kansas, are good for all Kansans, not just business. Even government employees — and the governor himself — must realize that government does not create wealth. Instead, it is business that creates wealth that provides for our standard of living. It is business that creates the economic activity that generates the tax revenue that makes government spending possible.

    The Eagle’s repetition of the governor’s attack on the Kansas Chamber fits right in with its pro-government, anti-economic freedom agenda.

  • Sedgwick County Commission Chair to speak

    On Friday April 30, Karl Peterjohn will address members and guests of the Wichita Pachyderm Club. Peterjohn is the chair of the Sedgwick County Commission. His topic will be “A view from the county commission.”

    All are welcome to attend Pachyderm club meetings. The program costs $10, which includes a delicious buffet lunch including salad, soup, two main dishes, and ice tea and coffee. The meeting starts at noon, although it’s recommended to arrive fifteen minutes early to get your lunch before the program starts.

    The Wichita Petroleum Club is on the ninth floor of the Bank of America Building at 100 N. Broadway (north side of Douglas between Topeka and Broadway) in Wichita, Kansas (click for a map and directions). Park in the garage just across Broadway and use the sky walk to enter the Bank of America building. Bring your parking garage ticket to be stamped and your parking fee will be only $1.00. There is usually some metered and free street parking nearby.