Topeka ? The more Les Donovan thought out loud, the more agitated he grew. He called the ideas he saw “blatantly awful” and compared them to setting wild beasts loose among children.

During a recent meeting of the Senate Assessment and Taxation Committee, Donovan, a Republican senator from Wichita, was not alone in his view of the proposals from Gov. Kathleen Sebelius for raising revenue.

Her proposals to accelerate the collection of some taxes created consternation — enough to raise the question of whether the Democratic governor would have been better off politically to propose tax increases instead.

To avoid higher taxes, she had endorsed ideas to make paying taxes more frustrating for thousands of Kansans.

“This is personal to everybody who owns a business in this state,” said Donovan, a prominent Wichita car dealer.

Faced with likely approval of a $10.2 billion budget that would leave the state with a projected deficit of as much as $230 million at the end of its next fiscal year, Sebelius outlined a plan for allowing the state to muddle through.

She wanted to avoid a tax increase, prevent further cuts in education, and leave the state with cash reserves to avoid fresh spending reductions should revenues fall short of expectations. During her gubernatorial campaign last year, she promised to protect aid to public schools and said higher taxes were “not on the table.”

Faster tax collections were to raise $180 million in her $405 million package, the rest coming from bonds, expanded gambling and a tax amnesty program.

Sebelius wanted monthly payments from most businesses that now remit sales taxes or income taxes from employees’ paychecks quarterly. She proposed giving oil and natural gas producers only a month, rather than two months, to remit mineral severance taxes.

Those proposals would have created a one-time revenue infusion of $18 million in fiscal 2004.

Another proposal would require Kansans to pay half their property taxes in May and half in December, starting in 2004. The deadlines are now June and December.

If local governments take in the money early, they appear to have more revenues in fiscal 2004. Additional money locally means the state’s aid obligation to school districts declines $162 million in fiscal 2004.

But the proposals had real consequences.

“It certainly has the effect of offending a lot of people,” said House Taxation Committee Chairman John Edmonds.

The property tax change probably would have the most wide-reaching effect, though a temporary one.

About two-thirds of the home owners in Kansas cover their property taxes through their monthly mortgage payments. Temporarily, those payments will have to increase, because their mortgage companies would have only five months, not six, to collect for a half year’s worth of taxes.

Lenders told The Wichita Eagle last week the change would strain what is supposed to be a finely tuned machine for collecting money and holding it in escrow for later tax payments.

Businesses were upset about changing from quarterly to monthly filing on sales and income taxes. About 45,000 would be affected.

Some would be small, remitting as little as $80 in sales taxes a year or withholding as little as $200 a year in income taxes from employees’ pay.

To gas producers, the decrease in time for remitting severance taxes seemed especially troubling. Industry officials told legislators that gas producers must read meters on wells and often do not have enough data within a month. They would have to estimate their payments one month, then file a corrected tax return the next.

Sebelius’ fellow Democrats defended her proposals as better than increasing taxes, but they acknowledge — as she does — that the ideas wouldn’t be considered were it not for the state’s dire financial problems.

“It’s a small sacrifice to make for attempting to address this year’s budget crisis,” said Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka.

But others, particularly Republicans, do not see such proposals are worth the trouble they stir up.

“It is the kind of thing that makes me think Kansas really doesn’t want to have me around,” said Senate President Dave Kerr, R-Hutchinson. “I think people would resent the artificial harassment from these types of policies, even more than higher taxes.”