An online petition drive started this weekend has gathered 650 signatures asking Gov. Sam Brownback to veto a massive tax-cut package approved this month by the Legislature.
Organizers said they started the petition Saturday morning after complaints began appearing on Twitter saying that people were unable to leave voicemail messages with the Governor’s Office.
Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag said upgrades to the phone system that began earlier this year had interrupted voicemail access to 877-KSWORKS, the constituent’s services number, a glitch that was discovered Saturday.
“The phone techs were able to fix the voicemail issue by about 3:45 p.m. on Saturday and Kansans were able to leave messages when they called the 877 number,” Jones-Sontag wrote in an email.
The volume of calls was as high as it has ever been over a weekend, acknowledged constituent services representative B.J. McClelland, before referring questions about the calls to the governor’s media relations office. Jones-Sontag did not say how many calls were received for or against the tax bill, saying only that they were outnumbered five-to-one by a controversial anti-Sharia bill approved by the Legislature in its final days.
Mike Gaughan — who posted the petition on behalf of the Working Kansas Alliance — a pro-labor group — said when he tried calling the Governor’s Office on Saturday the phone system seemed to be malfunctioning.
“It went into some sort of digital phone system — not an answering machine,” Gaughan said. “It didn’t even say it was Gov. Brownback’s office, it just said like ‘Cisco Systems’ or something and put you into a phone directory.”
“We wanted to make sure there was an avenue for people to express their concern, so we put up the petition,” said Gaughan.
The Governor’s Office announced today that Brownback will sign the bill at noon.
According to the Legislature’s research arm, the measure would deplete the treasury by $829 million in the coming fiscal year and create a deficit of between $2.4 billion and $2.9 billion by fiscal 2018.
The governor and many legislators have said the costs of the proposed tax cuts would be partially offset by new jobs and business growth that would add to tax collections.
“It would create tens of thousands of new jobs and combined with spending restraint will help to reverse a lost decade of declining employment,” Brownback has said.
Steve Anderson, the governor’s budget director, has said the “projected dynamic impact” of the tax-cut package would mean “22,900 new jobs on top of normal growth” and a state population increase of 35,740 people, both by 2020.
However, those numbers would not come close to closing the budget gap, said Bernie Koch, executive director of the Kansas Economic Progress Council, which represents various business and trade groups across the state.
“With a $2.5 billion deficit by fiscal year 2018, there’s no way the state can make that up even if we have very good years of job creation,” Koch said. “A simple calculation shows that 23,000 jobs will have to generate over $108,000 in sales and income taxes per job in a single year.”
Critics of the tax bill say it will mean drastic cuts to education and social services and pressure local governments to raise property and sales taxes. The Kansas Constitution requires the state have a balanced budget.
“As state budgets are cut and state services go away, there will be more and more pressure on local governments to take up those services. The only way they have to pay for that are sales and property taxes for the most part,” Koch said. “Based on the surveys I’ve heard of, (tax cuts) are just not a priority for Kansans. They are more concerned about education and quality of life.”
But the bill had strong backing from the Kansas Chamber and from Americans for Prosperity, the state’s most active anti-tax group.
Kansas AFP director Derrick Sontag said there’s simply a difference of opinion about the implications of the tax cut.
“If you have economic activity occurring because of the (tax) relief, then logically there’s going to be an expansion of that tax base. If you have a larger tax base for local units of government to operate from then the need to increase property taxes is diminished,” Sontag said.
He acknowledged that cuts to state spending would be required in at least next year’s budget.
“This next year is going to be the most interesting budget in that they need to tighten the belt and allow for the economic expansion to occur after that,” Sontag said.
Many Kansas House members have been euphoric in their praise for the measure.
Rep. Owen Donohoe, R-Shawnee, called it “the greatest thing that’s ever happened to Kansas.”
He said reducing the size of state government was long overdue and that he hoped the measure would force the Legislature to do so.
“It will hopefully force us to be more efficient. If we become more efficient — that means we provide the same if not better services to the people, and we do it at a lesser cost and save money — why is that not a good thing?”
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