Gov. Sam Brownback and the state of Kansas today made the front page of The New York Times…Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a favorable story.
The headline was “Kansas’ Blame Game Over School Funding Crisis.” The story was about the fierce kickback Brownback and the Republican-dominated State Legislature are getting over the state’s budget crisis and how it is hurting elementary and secondary education.
Interestingly, three of the people who are quoted in the story as being critical of Brownback and the Legislature are Republicans. One, Dinah Sykes, who lives in Prairie Village, is so upset she is running for a State Senate seat, challenging the Republican incumbent in the August primary.
Sykes, whose photo appears on the front page, along with the story, is quoted as saying: “We’re getting a bad reputation: that our state doesn’t care about public education.”
LeEtta Felter, a Republican who is a school board member in Olathe, says in the story that “any responsible entity has a rainy-day fund except for the state of Kansas.” It had a rainy-day fund, but it got washed away because of the budget crisis owing to the Brownback-sponsored state-income-tax cuts of 2013.
Another Johnson County Republican, Cindy Neely, told The Times the sentiment she regularly hears from people is, “We need different representation in Topeka that will stand up to the governor.”
…When I was in The Star’s Johnson County bureau in 2004 and 2005, I remember a political reporter named Jim Sullinger — now retired — doing story after story about the pitched battle between conservative and moderate Republicans in the Legislature. The battle had gone on for years, so long that some editors at The Star — and probably readers, too — would roll their eyes at the latest incremental development in the battle. Well, the conservatives finally won out, and those stories stopped.
For the last several years, all of Kansas has been paying the price for the conservatives’ victory. Now, perhaps, moderates are about to mount a comeback. And while I’m not too keen on the prospect of a new, years’ long sequence of stories about a renewed conservative-moderate battle, it would be a healthy, positive development for the state.
And, come to think of it, we really wouldn’t be subjected to as many stories as we were before because The Star has its own budget crisis, and the number of reporters doesn’t approximate what it was back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
**
Congratulations to The Star on the hiring of veteran reporter Steve Vockrodt of The Pitch. (Congratulations to Vockrodt, too, of course!)
Vockrodt’s last day at The Pitch was yesterday; he starts at The Star Monday. Vockrodt has had a number of ground-breaking stories since starting at The Pitch in 2013. Before that he was with the Kansas City Business Journal for six years. He’s also a University of Kansas graduate.
Steve Vockrodt, new hire at The Star
This marks the first time in years, to the best of my recollection, The Star has hired an established, experienced journalist for the newsroom. Several years ago, The Star made a high-profile catch when it hired Vahe Gregorian away from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But Gregorian is a sports columnist, and sports is the only department where The Star has made an all-out effort to maintain the the quality and substance the paper enjoyed until the mid-2000s, when print advertising started falling off a cliff.
Star editors have toyed with the idea of hiring Vockrodt for a couple of years. I don’t know what finally prompted them to make the leap, but I’d like to think it was the appointment early this year of Tony Berg as publisher. At his introductory speech In January, Berg told reporters and other editorial employees he would fight for them and that he understood the work coming out of the newsroom is “what makes us so important in the community we work in.”
Vockrodt will be primarily a business reporter. Watch for his byline…
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
First, congratulations to Steve Vockrodt. In general, I liked his work at The Pitch and, quite frankly, it does a better job of covering political sleaze in the area than The Star. Was this a demotion?
As for the school finance follies, the amount spent on schools has gone up every year during Brownback’s tenure and indeed, the latest negative decision from the unelected, unrepresentative tyrants of our Kansas Supreme Court is based on the issue of equity, not adequacy given that even those KNEA stooges would be hard pressed to argue that over $13,000.00 per pupil is inadequate with a straight face.
As I write, the legislature has called it a day without addressing the court’s ludicrous and never-ending demands and one can only hope that our elected representatives tells the shysters of the bench to go to hell.
If things keep going like they have been, the next step in the state’s transformation into a sinkhole will be asking voters to do away with the non-partisan court plan and return to partisan election of all judges, including Supreme Court justices. Assuming conservatives would prevail across the board, the last check on legislative power would be eliminated.
That appears to be where Kansas is headed. Good luck to my friends across the state line and remember, we would welcome you with open arms in Missouri, where a smaller percentage of people are walking around wearing blinders.
About freaking time…
Good point concerning how “old” the “news” is about Kansas moderate vs. the crack pot right. I feel that messenger, I.e., The Star is somewhat to blame. The same thing occurred in the 1960s with school levy elections in KCMO SD. The Star continually wrote and railed for passage for more money…the voters always defeated the request. The defeats were orchestrated by conservative, NE, Catholic, faction politicians that had their kids in Catholic schools and hated the idea of pouring money into “black” schools. (Of course, those same politicians had no qualms about grifting the district. Sound familiar, boss Hinson?) Anyway, The Star understood the twisted politics of the situation, but due to a don’t ask, don’t tell policy, they wouldn’t call out the reality. Needless to say, Star editorialists hated writing on this topic because it was a fool’s errand and made the writer look ineffectual. I remember that it was a way of liberation for the writer when a “new guy” came on the page and, of course, they were stuck with this dog of an assignment. I am afraid Kansas school money is cursed with the same formula — people inside the system controlling the levers of power are aligned with the forces outside the system that is restricting the cash. In other words, we have installed parasitic leadership that pays itself first, then helps the enemy destroy the system. (Subs included.)
Say it isn’t so, Nick — about the subs, at least.
Actually, the data suggest that the method of selection of judges and justices makes very little difference simply owing to the makeup of the legal occupation. If you elect them, the large law firms finance the campaigns and you get what you get with a secret panel made up of the lawyers from the big time law firms selecting them directly.
I studied this a bunch when there was an effort to have judges elected in JOCO. They talk about the elegance of the “merit” selection process and yet if you examine the candidates that process puts forth each time, everytime it’s a collection of cronies, major campaign donors and political hacks.
For instance, in 2004 both judges appointed came from Dennis Moore’s defunct lawfirm and the last justice appointed to the Supremes and the last justice appointed to the JOCO court by Sebeljevich both came out of the then chair of the KS Democrat Party’s lawfirm (JCCC’s no bid legal contract also went there). in another panel of three, two were major donors to her campaign and the biggest donor got the gig.
Lawton Nuss was a plaintiff’s attorney on the original Gannon school finance case and yet has never had the integrity to recuse himself (although he was more than happy to engage in ex parte meetings with legislature in violation of judicial ethics, but then again the Supremes control the whorehouse that is the Disciplinary Board).
Kansas’ Supreme Court is an embarrassment to the rule of law. they have been slapped down twice by SCOTUS for their attempts to de facto eliminate the death penalty and by KS statute, the courts are not allowed to shut down Kansas schools. But what are statutes when they can pull an opinion out of their ass?
And political ideology makes no difference either. Derek Schmidt completely ignored the CCH licensing law when his office got bogged down in 2013(?) He just made up what he wanted to do out of whole cloth until things calmed down. ( I filed a complaint against him with the Disciplinary Board and was told that failure to follow the law was not an ethical violation. Go figure.)
Bottom line is that the legal occupation needs radical reform because right now the rule of law in this country is a joke.
KU law professor Stephen Ware has written several pieces concerning judicial selection, etc that give little comfort to any of the arguments, pro, or con, for retaining, or altering the current system. Good stuff though for anyone interested in the topic.