By Roy Wenzl, Special to Leader-Courier
She’s heard the predictions that a Democrat can’t get elected Kansas governor these days. Kansans vote mostly Republican, after all, even in her State Senate District 18.
So, Sen. Laura Kelly knows better than most that the race will be a close one. Recent polls show her slightly ahead of her Republican challenger, Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
But Kelly knows Kansans, Republicans and others. She knows what their big worries are, including that “Idealogues” might bring back tax cuts that she says “devastated” the state’s schools, roads and other institutions in recent years.
Kelly said she has been able to work across the aisle with Republicans.
“My own senate district is very Republican, by 10 points plus,” she said. “I’ve been able to win that district four times. And it’s because I’ve formed these relationships and maintained them.”
A common thing she’s heard from Republicans in her district during her four terms: ”I voted for you because you showed up.”
And she has been endorsed in the gubernatorial race by two popular Republicans, former Gov. Bill Graves and former U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum.
What she’ll do as governor: Fix what she calls the damage from “the dark years.” Everywhere she goes, voters describe to her what the 2012 “Brownback tax experiment” did to state institutions:
• Class sizes ballooned; teachers left the state.
• The Kansas roster of foster kids jumped from 5,000 to 8,000 because there were no longer enough social workers to reunite them with their families or adopting families.
• Thirty hospitals are on the verge of closing in Kansas because the government refused to deal with Medicaid expansion, a topic she says voters bring up at every stop she’s made.
• Roads are crumbling. “You go into KDOT now (Kansas Department of Transportation) and it looks like a ghost town.”
• “And we’ve had the greatest out-migration ever in the past seven years. It’s because all those cuts made Kansas a much less attractive place.”
• “And there’s one thing I always bring up, on the road – I want to re-instate the state arts commission. I get a standing ovation anytime I bring that up, and it doesn’t matter what part of Kansas I am, Overland Park or Oberlin. We were spending $750,000 on the arts commission — and getting back $28 million, either from the feds or foundations. It was a great investment and reaped rewards all over the state.”
The dark years ended, she said, “because the Republicans and I want the same things: they want to fund their schools. They want Kansas to be a well-respected place that businesses want to move to and to grow.”
Republican voters two years ago elected moderates who combined with Democrats to end some of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts, and override Brownback’s vetoes. Kris Kobach wants to bring the cuts back, she said.
In the state’s primary in August, “Some of those really wonderful moderate legislators were taken out. We’ll have to see what happens in November, whether they are replaced by an ideologue, or by a Democrat.”
All this and more, she said, is why more than two dozen past and current Republican legislators in the red state of Kansas have endorsed her, including Kassebaum and Graves.
“We need to re-brand … go back to being a sane, open, welcoming state that businesses will look at, that people will look at.”
Voters are telling all three candidates that property appraisals and the sales tax are pricing some voters out of their homes and retirement savings. She agrees with Kobach and Orman that those taxes are too high. “We’ve got to lower the sales tax, particularly on food. Our property taxes are too high. Beyond that, we’ve got to get back to a balanced approach to taxes.”
The Brownback cuts forced the legislature and local municipalities to raise those taxes, she said, to offset what they lost from state-run programs funded with the income tax.
So would a Governor Kelly lower all taxes? Would she raise state taxes to rebuild schools, roads and other programs she said were gutted by Brownback?
“I’m not prepared to do anything about revenues until we really understand the full implications of what we did in overturning the Brownback experiment, and then what the feds did,” she said. “And we’re not going to know that until the middle of 2019.”
She hopes to make state government more open, but said she wants conversations with legislators before she would make any moves. There are many moves to consider, she said. Legislators often prepare bills without putting their names on the bills. Committees, where most of the debate and work takes place, don’t record the votes of committee members, another way to hide a legislator’s maneuvers. Legislators sometimes remove all the wording from a bill, and substitute other wording, a secretive process they themselves call “gut and go.”
Oftentimes, she said, the only way voters find out about state mistakes, big and small, is when a newspaper reporter digs up documents and exposes wrongdoing.
News reporters are not the “enemy of the people,” she said. “Sometimes we need help. Somebody needs to hold us accountable, and the press does a really good job of that.”
Kelly has a master’s degree in therapeutic recreation from Indiana University. Her husband is a physician; they have two daughters.
Her running mate is Lynn Rogers.
