Article Highlights- Click the Arrow to the Right

  • Governor Brownback’s plan reneges on a promise made last year after delaying KPERS payments.
  • Budget hole for remainder of this year estimated at $350 million grows to $600 million next year.
  • Brownback wants to freeze KPERS at 2016 levels while refusing to pay back with interest last year’s delayed payments as he promised.
  • Brownback’s proposal would further delay KPERS actuarial balance by a decade from 2033 to 2043.
  • Brownback’s KPERS attack and broken promises are a one-time fix for the budget mess that only helps to solve this year’s problem.

Brownback launches another attack on KPERS to pay for his reckless and irresponsible tax policy.

In 2012, Gov. Sam Brownback conned the Kansas legislature into passing a discredited trickle down economics tax plan. He promised a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the Kansas economy. Instead, we have suffered through years of collapsing revenue while Brownback, to preserve his tax plan, robbed the highway fund to near bankruptcy, slashed the state budget to the bone and then into the bone, and raised sales taxes to record highs. All of this in the defense of tax cuts for the wealthiest Kansans. Tax cuts that middle and low-income Kansans are being forced to pay for.

Last year, in a desperate move to plug the drain on the state budget, he approved a delay in paying $100 million to KPERS while promising to pay it back with interest.

In the meantime, the state’s revenue situation continues to collapse and the state budget is in a roughly $350 million hole for the last six months of this fiscal year. That hole is expected to be about $600 million next fiscal year.

How does the Brownback budget plan to plug that hole? His budget reneges on the promise to pay KPERS back AND proposes that KPERS payments for the next two years be no more than they were in 2016. In other words, his budget robs the $115 million from KPERS (the delayed payment with the required interest) and stops meeting the recommendations of actuaries adopted in an effort to stabilize a system which had suffered from chronic underfunding.

And legislators are angry. All of the heavy lifting the veteran legislators have been doing in recent years to put the system back on sound financial footing is undone in the Governor’s budget. By the Governor’s own admission, his plan would add 10 years to the period of time needed to bring the system into balance.

Lawmakers – and KPERS advocates – were delighted that changes made over the last few years would have resulted in actuarial balance by 2033. The Governor’s new plan, if adopted, would push that out to 2043.

And worst of all, the Governor’s proposal would not deal at all with the underlying budget problems. It is one-time money meant to plug today’s budget hole but does nothing to solve the growing chasm in future years.

Reckless and irresponsible: robbing the highway fund, robbing KPERS, cutting back on Medicaid reimbursement rates, dismantling support for early childhood programs. We could go on. This will be Sam Brownback’s legacy.