TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Democrat Laura Kelly’s top priorities as Kansas’ new governor arise from her work as a state lawmaker and a decade as one of the Legislature’s key players on budget issues.
Kelly, formerly a veteran state senator from Topeka, has an agenda that includes boosting spending on public schools and expanding the state’s Medicaid health coverage for the needy.
A look at Kelly’s priorities as governor and her history:
PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDING
The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in June that a bipartisan law phasing in a $548 million increase in public school funding over five years wasn’t enough because it did not account for inflation. The State Board of Education estimates that legislators could meet the court’s demand by phasing in an additional $364 million increase over four years.
Kelly and fellow Democrats want to move quickly, to end a lawsuit over school funding that’s been pending since 2010. But top Republicans are wary of so much new spending.
MEDICAID EXPANSION
Kelly is a vocal supporter of expanding Medicaid in line with the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act to cover as many as 150,000 more Kansas residents. She has promised to have a team develop a bipartisan plan.
Kansas hasn’t joined other GOP-led states in expanding Medicaid because Kelly’s predecessors Republican Govs. Sam Brownback and Jeff Colyer opposed the idea. The idea has bipartisan support, but Republican legislative leaders oppose it, and the House and Senate health committees are led by expansion opponents.
KELLY’S LEGISLATIVE CAREER
The 68-year-old Kelly represented a Republican-leaning, Topeka-area district in the state Senate for 14 years. She won her first election in 2004, ousting a GOP incumbent by a mere 100 votes out of more than 30,000 cast.
For a decade starting in 2009, Kelly was the top Democrat on the Senate Ways and Means Committee, one of six lawmakers who negotiated the final version of all budget legislation. She also served on a task force reviewing the state’s child welfare system and an oversight committee for the Medicaid program.
Kelly’s position as a budget negotiator and on the Senate committee meant that she spent countless hours hashing over the details of spending in agencies across state government. She told voters during her campaign that she learned that many agencies suffered significantly during the Brownback and Colyer administrations and now need to be rebuilt.
But she’s likely to face some resistance from GOP lawmakers, who argue that she must show that her spending proposals can be sustained into the future without a tax increase.
“Making sure that we don’t overspend, I think, is a big priority for me,” said Senate Vice President Jeff Longbine, an Emporia Republican.
WELFARE RULES
Kelly’s work on the child welfare task force reinforced her belief that lawmakers should roll back work requirements and other cash assistance rules championed by Brownback. She contends the rules have hurt poor families.
In addition to the work requirement for able-bodied adults, the rules cap lifetime benefits at 36 months, even with a hardship. But a proposal to loosen them will be difficult to sell to the Republican-controlled Legislature because its leaders view them as promoting self-sufficiency.
LGBT RIGHTS
The new governor has repeatedly promised that her first official act in office will be an executive order barring anti-LGBT bias in state hiring and employment decisions. Then-Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius issued such an executive order in 2007, but Brownback rescinded it in 2015, saying that legislators should set such a policy.
KELLY’S FIRST WEEK
Kelly is scheduled to provide more details about her legislative agenda in the annual State of the State address Wednesday evening and release details of her budget proposals Thursday.
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