Topeka ? At the end of the legislative session, when tax and revenue proposals were popping like popcorn, it was Kansas Revenue Secretary Joan Wagnon who raced around the Capitol to lobby, cajole and provide information to lawmakers as they put together the final package to balance the budget.

Wagnon, a longtime Democratic politician, re-emerged as a political force after disappearing for two years after a contentious term as mayor of Topeka.

“I’m probably going to have to have a knee replaced, and this session didn’t help it,” she said of the long hours spent going to committee meetings, lawmakers’ offices and the House and Senate chambers.

But, she said of the work, “It was entirely too much fun.”

Fun was not what she expected when she signed on in January as a favor to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to take over the Revenue department on an interim basis until Sebelius could find a permanent secretary.

Out of office

Even by Topeka’s dysfunctional standards of city politics, the treatment of Wagnon as she was voted out of the mayor’s office in 2001 was shabby.

On primary night as Wagnon was losing, an effigy of the mayor with her head in a toilet was placed outside the mayor’s office at City Hall.

Police said the culprits were three of her longtime political foes — two council members and a county commissioner. Publicly, the three men have refused to confirm or deny whether they were involved in the incident.

The incident put an exclamation point on the divisiveness at City Hall in the capital city, and Wagnon said she was ready to quit politics.

“I left the mayor’s office after four fairly bruising years at City Hall. I didn’t think I wanted to do anything more in politics,” said Wagnon, who had earlier served as a state representative for 12 years and had run unsuccessfully in 1994 for the Democratic Party nomination for governor. Her husband, Bill Wagnon, is a member of the Kansas State Board of Education.

Kansas Revenue Secretary Joan Wagnon reviews paperwork before meeting with auditors. Wagnon, former Topeka mayor and 12-year state representative, joined Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' administration earlier this year.

After losing her re-election bid for mayor, Wagnon became president of Central National Bank in Topeka.

In January, Sebelius called, asking her to be secretary of revenue.

“I said I’d do it for a few weeks. I had a great job at the bank. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back in the middle of the political storm,” Wagnon said.

But after a few weeks of dealing with the Legislature, she said she rediscovered her love of forming policy and the political process.

Wagnon was regularly seen at committee meetings, voluntarily testifying before lawmakers; a far cry from the past few years when revenue secretaries seldom appeared voluntarily at committee meetings.

“I got hooked,” she said.

Wagnon said her approach might be different than revenue secretaries from the immediate past, but that when she was a House member from 1983 through 1994, the revenue secretaries were always available to lawmakers, often sitting on the front row of committee meetings to personally monitor the action.

Changes in the department

As Wagnon came on board, state audits revealed that the revenue department needed to tighten up its tax collecting.

One report found that the agency wasn’t doing a good job of monitoring corporate tax collections, having conducted just 25 audits of 31,000 corporate taxpayers in 2002.

Another report said the state was losing millions of dollars in uncollected taxes on the sale of motor vehicles in both dealership and individual transactions.

Wagnon said there were serious problems in the agency, but added, “they are entirely fixable.”

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She said the agency enacted a mammoth computer and organizational change since 1999 that was focused on processing returns more quickly.

Now, she said, the department needed to focus more on making sure it was collecting the amount of taxes owed. And that means more audits of taxpayers, she said.

In addition, Wagnon is overseeing a tax amnesty program designed to bring up to $20 million into the treasury.

The final crush

When lawmakers returned earlier this month to wrap up the session, numerous ideas were floated to close a $255 million revenue gap.

Republican leaders offered a measure to delay some tax refunds, but Wagnon was sharply critical of the measure, leading the Sebelius administration charge against it.

In the end, the tax refund delay was adopted but with a provision that gave Sebelius the option of accelerating property tax collections next year, an option that Sebelius said she will probably use.

The Legislature also delayed by two years the rollback of the state sales tax from 5.3 percent to 5 percent.

During the final days, Wagnon and two of her key staff members, Richard Cram, the director of policy and research, and Steve Stotts, director of tax operations, were often engaged in advising lawmakers.

“She was very helpful,” said Sen. David Corbin, R-Towanda, the chairman of the Senate Tax and Assessment Committee. “Joan’s not new to the process.”

Her being a Democrat doesn’t bother Corbin, he said.

“We were trying to do the same things,” he said.

Despite her enthusiasm for re-entering the legislative process, Wagnon said she had no desire to re-enter elective politics.

“What is so wonderful about this job is I was in the middle of the Legislature and got to do the things that I enjoy, which is policy, but I didn’t have to go out and knock on doors, walking blocks with my bad knees, and I didn’t have to raise money,” she said.