Determining the origin of bills in the Kansas Legislature can be a tedious task for the legislator’s constituents for years. The committee sponsors nearly 85% of its proposals, so identifying the group or lobbyist responsible may require questioning multiple lawmakers or, in recent years, reviewing YouTube videos of meetings. there is.
But this year, the Kansas House is making it a little easier for state residents to find out who and what they want from their representatives. In addition to the number and official sponsor, each bill now lists who commissioned it, whether it was a lawmaker at someone’s request or a private lobbyist for a particular client. The changes started in January.
This is an unprecedented move for the state legislature. At least a few states require lobbyists to list specific bills of interest in publicly viewable reports, but the Council of State Governments does not actually list lobbyists or organizations on bills. I don’t know any other state legislature — the Senate, which I don’t even know about in Kansas.
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“I’m excited to see that,” said Heather Ferguson, a Kansan native and director of operations for government transparency group Common Cause. “This will help rebuild some of the public’s confidence in elected officials, institutions, and the legislative process in general.”
In Kansas, House Bill 2527, which would rewrite the law on how the state sets electricity rates, was pushed by lobbyists for Evergy, the state’s largest utility company. A Kansas Farm Bureau lobbyist proposed HB 2691. It would require power companies that seek to use prominent land to acquire entire privately owned land for power lines or other projects to pay owners 50 percent of the fair market value.
In some offices and hallways beneath the copper dome of the Kansas State Capitol, the reaction to the new practice was less enthusiastic than Mr. Ferguson’s, but lobbyists did not criticize it publicly. Eric Stafford, a lobbyist with the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, said he doesn’t care “as long as it’s consistent.”
Two of the dozens of Kansas House bills, two of which include the names of groups and lobbyists who asked lawmakers and committees to introduce them, were released on March 25, 2024, at the state capitol in Topeka, Kansas. It was seen. (AP Photo/John Hannah)
The Kansas Senate is not required to comply with additional disclosures, as they are specified in the House Rules (Section 7.01).
Indeed, Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican, said he hadn’t given the idea much thought, “but I’m not scared.” But he also argued that when it comes to who is behind the bill, “people tend to know that anyway.”
According to Common Cause, at least seven states (Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Utah) have disclosure rules that require lobbyists to provide information about specific policies that their clients are focused on. . Kansas requires lobbyists to submit six annual reports on their spending, but does not require them to list individual actions.
In 2015, John Cox, a California businessman who would later become a Republican gubernatorial candidate, told state elected officials he would issue stickers and badges during public legislative sessions that “displayed the names of the 10 people who contributed the most to his campaign.” proposed a ballot initiative that would require people to wear one. Efforts to put it on the ballot failed.
Some MPs like the idea of greater transparency in the House of Commons and appear willing to push for it further.
For example, when U.S. Rep. Stephanie Sawyer Creighton, a Kansas City-area Democrat, learned that California had begun the effort in 2015, she responded, “Let’s give it a try,” but lawmakers told TGI Friday -She said that people might think of her as a server at a restaurant.
“Most of my top donors are a great group and even more great people, so I carry those flair with me throughout the day,” she said. “I’d be happy to do that.”
In fact, the Kansas House of Representatives changed its rules for requesting more information about bills in 2021, but it took the chamber’s technical staff three years to finalize the details, according to House leaders and staffers. Democratic state Rep. Boog Heiberger, a member of the House Rules Committee that pushed for the change, believes it is a meaningful but small step toward greater government transparency.
Rep. Adam Thomas, a Kansas City-area Republican, said more transparency is a good thing and that more transparency would be a good thing if lawmakers’ names were attached to the bill, regardless of whether interest groups were on the list or not. He said he expected to be asked questions.
“Now we really need to know what this bill does, what it means and its impact,” Thomas said. The change was adopted without debate, and the rule received broad bipartisan support.
In many states, most bills are sponsored by individual legislators, a traditional practice in the Kansas Legislature. Fifty years ago, nearly 70 percent of Kansas’ bills and resolutions were proposed by individual legislators. This year, that number is just over 15%, after decades of the committee increasing its share of bills.
The acceptance of these so-called “anonymous” bills is such that the Kansas City Star, in a 2017 series on Kansas state government, said the process for passing bills in the Republican-controlled state Legislature was “the least transparent in the nation.” It was one of the customs that led to the declaration that “It is one of the . ” Critics still say the public often has a hard time knowing the status of bills on key issues until it’s too late to block their passage.
But David Adkins, a former Kansas state lawmaker and current executive director and CEO of the Council of State Governments, said lawmakers have moved on to creating a committee to sponsor the bill. He said he may have done so. Personal sponsor. This may have been a way to help the bill be considered more easily during the 90-day annual session.
Listing the groups and lobbyists who requested the bill could also serve a similar purpose, allowing lawmakers to decide how to vote without reading the text, he said.
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“At the top of the funnel, time is your biggest enemy,” said Adkins, who served in Congress from 1993 to 2004.
But Adkins also worried that the House’s approach, aimed at restoring trust, could lead the public to view the legislation as “transactional.”
“Some might argue that in some ways, this law resembles NASCAR cars with prominent sponsorship stickers on the cars,” he says.
