Recent Kansas Editorials

Wichita Eagle, April 27

Does Kansas value justice? If so, it needs to adequately fund its court system.

And as a recent study by the National Center for State Courts found, that’s not happening.

Among the findings:

- District court judges have not received a pay raise in nine years. What’s more, their pay is the second lowest in the nation (only New Mexico is lower).

- Magistrate judges would need a 22 percent pay raise to be at the market rate.

- Other court employees, such as clerks and court reporters, are paid between 4.6 percent and 22.2 percent below market. More than a quarter of these positions have starting pay below the federal poverty level for a family of four, and nearly a third of employees work additional jobs to make ends meet.

The low pay makes it difficult to keep and replace employees, James Fleetwood, chief judge of the Sedgwick County District Court, told the Eagle editorial board.

It also threatens the operations of courts and is a potential public safety risk - such as when there aren’t enough probation officers or when it becomes difficult to obtain a protection-from-abuse order.

The judicial branch is seeking a $20 million budget increase to raise the salary of district court judges to the average of neighboring states and to raise the pay of magistrate judges and other court employees to their market levels.

This could be difficult to afford, given the state is already facing a huge budget shortfall and needs to increase funding for K-12 public education.

But as Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss told the Eagle editorial board, “It is way past time for this to happen.”

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Lawrence Journal-World, April 27

A Justice Department audit of a private prison in Leavenworth highlights valid concerns with operating jails as for-profit businesses.

An audit released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the Leavenworth Detention Center was chronically understaffed, tried to hide the practice of triple-bunking inmates in a single cell and that the prison lacked adequate oversight by the U.S. Marshals Service.

The Leavenworth Detention Center is a 1,033-bed prison that houses defendants awaiting trial in federal criminal cases. The prison is operated by CoreCivic Inc., a private company based in Nashville that formerly was known as Corrections Corporation of America or CCA.

The Associated Press reported that CoreCivic signed a $697 million contract to operate the Leavenworth Detention Center for 20 years, through 2026.

The audit focused on operations at the prison from October 2010 through May 2015. The audit also found that CoreCivic improperly contracted with a local government to house nonfederal inmates at the facility, a move that the Marshals Service improperly signed off on.

“We identified several significant concerns,” Deputy Inspector General Rob Storch said. “We found that understaffing at Leavenworth potentially placed the security of staff and detainees at risk.”

The audit comes on the heels of an investigation, the findings of which were released in February, that showed the prison had secretly videotaped hundreds of meetings between inmates and their attorneys.

Critics have long contended that privately run prisons are a bad idea because for-profit companies have financial motivation to keep staffing low and are less apt to invest in rehabilitation, education and job training services. Many private prison contracts guarantee inmate population levels, which incentivizes incarceration. According to a federal audit, private facilities have higher levels of violence and security incidents than government-run facilities.

Former President Barack Obama had started down a path of phasing out private prisons, but the Trump administration reportedly supports private prison contracts. Perhaps President Trump should take a long hard look at what’s happened at Leavenworth Detention Center before heading down such a path.

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Topeka Capital-Journal, April 30

When Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn released a skeletal summary of President Trump’s tax plan on Wednesday, Kansans immediately realized that the country is flirting with a fiscal disaster. Most Kansans, that is - here’s what Gov. Sam Brownback had to say: “I’m pleased to see them put that plan forward, because it will work and it will stimulate small business growth and it will stimulate employment.” Here’s a tip for anyone formulating tax policy: If Brownback is pleased with your work, it’s time to make a few major adjustments.

Trump’s tax plan will reduce taxes on individual and corporate income, but Kansans are most concerned about his proposal to dramatically cut taxes on pass-through businesses. This is disturbingly similar to what has become known as the “LLC loophole” in Kansas - Brownback’s ill-founded decision to exempt businesses from paying any taxes on their income. About 330,000 businesses have taken advantage of the exemption - far more than state officials anticipated when Brownback’s 2012 tax cuts were passed. The LLC loophole costs Kansas around $250 million per year in lost tax revenue.

In 2012, Brownback assured Kansans that his tax policies would be a “shot of adrenaline to the heart of this economy” - a remark he must regret by now. Almost five years later, the evidence of economic revitalization is sparse. Since January 2013, private sector employment in Kansas has increased at less than half the national rate. Over the past year, the state’s rate of job growth has been 0.3 percent - the ninth-lowest in the country. Between 2013 and 2016, Kansas’ nominal GDP grew by 7.4 percent compared with 13.4 percent nationally. And the average unemployment rate has decreased faster in the Midwest than it has in Kansas since 2012.

While Brownback often cites our low unemployment rate (3.8 percent) as proof that his tax cuts are working, this measure is misleading. When Brownback took office in January 2011, every state in the U.S. was emerging from the most devastating recession since the Great Depression. Our unemployment rate started trending downward when Brownback still had 16 months left in the Senate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Kansas’ unemployment rate either fell or stayed constant for 42 consecutive months before the 2012 tax cuts were implemented. Kansas had the ninth-lowest unemployment rate in the U.S. at the beginning of Brownback’s first term, and it’s now in a five-way tie for 15th.

And what has Kansas received in exchange for this mediocre-to-poor economic performance? A projected $900 million budget shortfall over the next two years; cuts to infrastructure, higher education, Medicaid and a range of essential state services; a school finance lawsuit that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars; a credit downgrade; and a batch of delayed obligations (such as pension contributions) that will end up costing the state far more than they save. Brownback wanted to give the state a “shot of adrenaline,” but he ended up administering a few doses of morphine instead: Just withhold funds from KPERS for a little longer, pull a little more money out of KDOT, deplete one more long-term investment fund.

However, lawmakers recognize that we have to break this addiction to short-term budget measures and figure out how to deal with our state’s self-inflicted fiscal pain in a more sustainable way. That’s why they’re trying to repeal the very policy that Trump wants to impose on the rest of the country.

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Hutchinson News, April 28

In the world of political campaigns, big, brash talk is king - and the sort of thing that leads to being viewed as a winner in the eyes of the majority of voters. Yet, when talk meets reality, and when the race has been won and it’s time to sit down and do the job for which you were chosen, the simplicity of bold statements doesn’t hold up in the face of complex policy decisions.

Such is the case with President Donald Trump’s premature statement that he’d pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement - a statement from which he backed off when faced with the reality of the situation.

In Kansas, backing out of the trade agreement would erode the state’s economy.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, U.S. agricultural exports total $20.5 billion to Canada and $17.9 billion to Mexico, which is also the biggest buyer of U.S. wheat exports. In the world of agricultural exports, Mexico and Canada both rank near the top. There’s not a producer in Kansas who wouldn’t be negatively affected by withdrawal from the trade agreement - compounded by a glut of grain from previous harvests that is working to drive prices down.

Serious concerns were raised about NAFTA when it was implemented, and the evidence bears out that it’s not been especially gainful for the manufacturing sector of the economy.

Yet, once an agreement is in place and international trade is built around it, unilaterally dropping out of the agreement would do more harm than good.

If, as Trump now says, he hopes to renegotiate the terms of the agreement in a way that is more favorable to the U.S., that might not be all bad. But threatening to simply scrap a trade agreement altogether isn’t the sort of thoughtful approach one hopes to see from a man tasked with navigating the delicate and important issue of international trade.

Though much of the Midwest and rural parts of the country supported Trump for president, it is now clear that on a number of issues, rural residents and agriculture producers must take a guarded approach to the president - lest his campaign talk become reality.