Topeka ? Lawmakers griping about how there is no additional money to meet a court-ordered increase for schools might look at their own handiwork over the past 10 years.

Tax cuts, credits and exemptions approved by the Legislature have totaled cumulatively $5.8 billion since 1995, according to the Kansas Department of Revenue. For comparison purposes, the state expects to receive about $4.3 billion in tax revenue this fiscal year.

Even taking into account sales and cigarette tax increases adopted in 2002 to shore up a sinking budget, the annual loss of revenues from tax cuts handed out by the Legislature in the 1990s is running about $800 million per year, budget experts say.

“That’s real close to what the court said schools need,” April Holman, a fiscal analyst for Kansas Action for Children, said.

Rep. Kenny Wilk, R-Lansing, and chairman of the House Taxation Committee, isn’t so sure.

“Had we not cut taxes,” Wilk said, “we would’ve spent more money, but not necessarily on schools.”

The Legislature will meet June 22 in a special legislative session to tackle school finance after the Kansas Supreme Court ordered a $285 million increase for schools by July 1, and possibly an additional $568 million next year, for a total of $853 million.

Tax base erosion

Last year, as school finance litigation traveled through the courts, Holman did a report on erosion of the Kansas tax base through legislative actions.

The report found that when the economy was booming in the 1990s, lawmakers were generous with tax cuts that mostly benefited upper-income residents and businesses.

“The result is a tax structure that is more reliant on regressive taxes and places the highest tax burden on those Kansans least able to pay them,” the report stated.

State government is relying more on sales taxes than income taxes than it did 10 years ago, the report said. Sales taxes hit the low- and middle-income Kansans the hardest because the rate is the same regardless of income.

Ten years ago, the state sales tax was 4.9 cents per dollar and there were 36 exemptions. Now, the state rate is 5.3 cents per dollar and there are 60 exemptions.

Holman, a former budget analyst for the Legislature, said if a tax increase becomes part of the solution to the school funding problem, lawmakers should not place that burden on low-income residents, the very ones that the school lawsuit seeks to help through additional education funding.

Shifting burden

Mark Tallman, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said the tax cuts enacted by the Legislature in past years have had a direct impact on school finance.

“We’ve really made the tax system less equitable by shifting school finance down to the local level,” Tallman said.

The cut in statewide property tax mill levies for education shifted the burden to local property taxes, he said. “Local school boards had to backfill those dollars.”

“The issue of the tax structure for education has to be part of the discussion and that hasn’t been there,” he said.

Wilk said he would ask legislative leaders to allow for an interim study on the state tax structure.

He said the numerous tax exemptions needed to be analyzed to determine whether they accomplished what policymakers wanted them to.

“It’s kind of time to turn all those over,” he said, “and give them a look.”