Go ahead. Raise Phil Struble’s taxes.

He figures that pumping money into schools would help fuel job creation, economic development and overall economic growth.

“It just boggles my mind that the legislators in Topeka don’t understand that education is the biggest economic-development engine we’ve got in the state of Kansas,” said Struble, president and CEO of Lawrence-based Landplan Engineering, which helps design up to $75 million a year in new construction statewide. “There’s nothing better.”

Kansas Senate President Stephen Morris, who addressed about 20 business and government leaders during a luncheon Tuesday in Lawrence, remains hopeful that his colleagues in the Kansas Legislature will see that spending money on education would pay off down the road.

He said that that while school work was ongoing in Topeka — the House has approved a bill to raise another $112 million, while the Senate’s bill calls for another $145 million — any move to increase taxes likely won’t clear until the veto session convenes April 27.

If at all.

“I look at (school spending) as an investment in economic development,” said Morris, a Republican who spent 15 years on the Hugoton school board before joining the Senate in 1992. “But there’s a mentality (in the legislature) that all tax increases — for anything, ever — are bad. It’s a difficult attitude to change.”

Businesses looking to expand or relocate often cite education in making their decisions about where to build. Expansion Management, a trade magazine, recently ranked Lawrence as the second-best metro area in the country for educational quality, as it relates to site selection.

Such rankings can’t withstand a lack of financing, said Randy Weseman, superintendent of Lawrence public schools. The district’s 800 teachers went without pay raises last year, and programs already have been cut to make ends meet.

Struble fears that his potential clients — especially industrial operations — will avoid Kansas if legislators fail to come to grips with a tax increase for schools.

“They’ll go to Missouri,” he said.