While the administration in Washington is now carefully declaring that it sees a glimmer of light at the end of the recessionary tunnel, the reality “on the ground,” particularly for publicly financed services, remains grim. The current question in Topeka is not whether there will be enough to maintain a zero-growth state budget next year, but, instead, how big the deficit will be.

State agencies and others dependent on state funding for all or part of their budgets, such as K-12 education, have already suffered through several years of significant and, at times, crippling, cuts. As the residents of Kansas and the legislators whom we have elected to go to Topeka to represent us grapple with another year of deficit and cost-cutting, the questions of how to reduce the state deficit become critical.

Although many will argue that further budget cuts are unacceptable, the reality of the current political situation in Topeka makes it virtually certain that neither the Kansas House nor Senate will agree to raising taxes as a means of reducing the deficit. Further, while we may hope for revenue growth and more business relocation and startups, it is also clear that the majority of legislators seem unwilling to pin their fiscal decisions on such hopes.

This means that unless Kansas experiences an economic miracle, the Legislature will enact further budget cuts for the fiscal year beginning in July 2010. So the real question we must all confront is not whether there will be further cuts in the state budget, but how such cuts will be made.

I believe that any significant further reductions in state funding must be the result of a rethinking and reworking of state government. Nothing should be off the table, including a reorganization of the Legislature itself. The members of the Kansas House and Senate have a unique opportunity to transform the way the state provides services to its residents and to find efficiencies through transformation that simply are not possible without serious and creative planning in which partisan politics are not allowed to dominate all discussions.

What do I mean when I say that I think that we need to radically transform state services? A few examples may make this clear. As I have suggested several times in the past, the Legislature, working with the Kansas Board of Regents, must ask tough questions about whether Kansas residents are best served by multiple teaching and research programs conducted separately in two or more universities.

Do we need all of the business schools, engineering schools and law schools we currently support (yes, I did say law schools)? Are there efficiencies to be gained by consolidating programs at one or two locations in the state? On the K-12 side, do we need to maintain all of the school districts and all of the school facilities we currently have? Would consolidation onto campus-style locations be more efficient, economically and possibly educationally?

Do we really need courthouses and judges in every one of Kansas’ 105 counties, even when the population of a county is so small as to guarantee that the courtrooms will be empty most of the day? Would we be better off extending home confinement to more nonviolent criminals who are now kept in prison at a huge cost to the state? All of these questions and many others need to be discussed, analyzed and debated.

Many people in Kansas today are suspicious of the hearings and committee studies planned for the fall by the Republican-dominated Legislature in Topeka. Personally, I think that these plans are a great idea, if they do not descend into political theater but, instead, are serious sessions where serious men and women transform our state government in a responsible and creative way. Time will tell.