For the past 13 years, Adrian McKee has been a corrections officer at the state prison in Lansing. He is paid $17.70 an hour.

He’s never received a bonus, he said. He doesn’t know anyone who has.

So when he found out that in each of the past two years, more than 400 Department of Transportation workers  engineers and computer technicians, mostly  each pocketed anywhere from $3,000 to $14,000 in annual bonuses, he felt like he’d been stabbed in the back.

“It just goes to show that labor negotiations in this state mean nothing,” said the 39-year-old McKee, noting that a promised 6 percent pay raise for Lansing officers fell through last year.

“I’ve been to Topeka, and I’ve talked to a bunch of legislators,” said McKee, a member of the corrections officers union’s executive committee. “They all say they don’t have the money, but then they turn around and give all these KDOT guys big bonuses. How can they do that if they don’t have any money? Something’s not right.”

State social workers didn’t get bonuses, either.

“I’ve never even heard of bonuses,” said Sky Westerlund, executive director of the Kansas Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.

“This is appalling,” she said. “It really shows where the state’s priorities are.”

First word

News of the KDOT bonuses surfaced during a House budget debate last week. Rep. Doug Spangler, D-Kansas City, and Rep. Alan Goering, D-Medicine Lodge, revealed that in the past five years the state has quietly handed out $12.4 million in bonuses.

“This is despicable,” Spangler said. “It’s like we’re being told the house is on fire and, quick, everybody run to the barn  and then when we’re in the barn, they’re back in the house stealing all our money.

“This kind of stuff goes on all the time up here,” he said. “It stinks to high heaven.”

Minutes after Spangler and Goering circulated a 20-page list of state employees who had received more than $7,000 in annual bonuses, House members voted to eliminate any and all bonuses in the budget for Fiscal 2003, which begins July 1.

“The vote was 122 to 2,” Spangler said. The amendment is now part of the budget bill being debated in the Senate.

Few legislators knew about the bonuses  “Most of them are asleep at the switch,” Spangler said.

But administration officials say bonuses are effective tools for both recruiting and keeping workers with much-needed skills, as well as those who could make more money in the private sector.

Closing salary gap

In the past five years, Gov. Bill Graves has approved modest bonuses for state printers, police officers at Kansas University and KU Medical Center, workers at the state-run Rainbow Mental Health Facility in Kansas City, and rookie corrections officers at Lansing Correctional Facilities.

But in October 1997, the governor initiated the Information Technology (IT) Bonus Program, allowing agency heads to award:

l As much as $3,000 in sign-up bonuses for IT workers with “mission critical” skills.

l $500 bonuses for workers instrumental in recruiting IT workers.

l 10 percent bonuses for retaining workers with “mission critical” skills.

Hundreds of IT workers benefited. In the Department of Human Resources alone, more than 80 IT workers each took home between $4,000 and $7,000 in bonuses in 1999 and again in 2000.

At the Department of Revenue, more than 120 IT workers were each given bonuses, ranging from $1,000 to almost $6,000, for one, two or three years.

Graves approved the IT bonuses after studies revealed a widening gap between state and private-sector salaries; also, a then-booming economy added to the state’s difficulties in retaining and hiring skilled workers.

‘Three-way crunch’

At the same time, the administration was trying to prepare for the unknowns of Y2K.

“Bonuses were a way to keep people from jumping ship and to bring new people on board,” said Graves spokesman Don Brown.

Without the bonuses, Brown said, department heads would have been forced to turn over much of the work to consultants and private contractors, costing the state even more.

Incoming IT workers weren’t eligible for a sign-up bonus until they signed a contract agreeing to pay it back if they left within a year. Incumbent IT workers couldn’t get their retention bonuses unless they agreed to return half of it if they left within a year.

As the economy softened, most IT bonuses were phased out by 2001.

Graves sanctioned the KDOT bonuses in May 2000 after learning the department needed more than 100 new engineering positions to keep pace with projects in the state’s 10-year, $13.6 billion highway package, which the Legislature approved in 1999.

At the time, 45 percent of the department’s entry-level engineering positions were vacant, KDOT officials said.

“We were caught in a three-way crunch,” said KDOT spokesman Marty Matthews. “Because of the competition with the private sector we were unable to hire entry-level engineers, we were losing the engineers we already had to the private sector and other DOTs around the country, and we had a lot of them retire.”

Declining vacancies

At KDOT, an entry-level engineer earns $33,400 a year. In the private sector, the same engineer is likely to make $40,600, according to recent market surveys.

Since the bonuses began, KDOT’s vacancy rate for beginning engineers has dropped to 8 percent.

“They did what they were supposed to do,” Matthews said of the bonuses.

Under Graves’ directive, KDOT has permission to use the bonuses on an as-needed basis through 2006.

If legislators vote to kill the bonuses this year  as many predict they will  dozens of KDOT engineers who each got $5,000-to-$10,000 bonuses on top of their salaries in 2000 and 2001 won’t get anything in 2002.

“If that happens, I’m afraid we’ll see a gutting of KDOT, and that’s not in the state’s best interests,” said Rep. Tom Sloan, R-Lawrence.

The Graves administration has only itself to blame, said Rep. Goering, who introduced the amendment to eliminate the bonuses.

“People wouldn’t be so upset about this if the governor and his people had been upfront about it,” Goering said.

“If things were as bad as they say they were, they should have come to the Legislature and say, ‘Look, here’s the problem and here’s what we ought to do about it.'” he said. “Instead, they dealt with it in an underhanded, backdoor manner that has everybody suspicious.”

Haves and have-nots

Brown disagreed. The Legislature’s job, he said, is to craft policy and set the budget. As long as government stays within budget, the governor and his administration are in charge.

“Both the IT and the KDOT bonuses were within budget,” Brown said. “So at that point, these become agency-operation decisions that are the governor’s to make.”

State agencies are not allowed to give workers bonuses if the money isn’t in their budgets.

In recent years, KDOT had enough money for bonuses. Others  state universities, for example  do not.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to provide bonuses. Our budgets are bare,” said Kim Wilcox, president of the Kansas Board of Regents.

Back in Lansing, corrections officer McKee said lawmakers still have missed the point.

“I’ve always thought it’s the little people, the people who spend their days and nights in the trenches and on the front lines, who make government what it is,” he said.

“I’m one of those people,” he said. “I spend my days protecting society from convicted felons. It’s dangerous work.

“I see KDOT engineers and computer people getting bonuses, but I don’t see the people in the trenches getting bonuses. I don’t think that’s right.”