Editorial: Budget choices

When is a cut not a cut?

On Thursday, Gov. Sam Brownback sent his budget director, Shawn Sullivan, to outline to the news media nearly $63 million in spending reductions for the fiscal year that began on Saturday. Although Sullivan acknowledged that “a couple things you could call pure cuts or reductions” but added, “what we tried to do was minimize the impact on services.”

Whether the state achieved that goal may be a matter of perspective.

The largest single reduction was $17.7 million that will be taken from the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage for children whose families are low-income but earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. The reduction in the state’s contribution to the program will be offset by an increase in federal funds that was intended to enable states to increase SCHIP benefits. So Kansas is taking money that was supposed to expand health insurance for needy children and is using it to help bolster its financial reserves.

Sullivan said the increased federal funding would be used to maintain the current level of service in Kansas but acknowledged that if the state wasn’t taking money from the program, “then the other options would be to provide other services, expand eligibility, those sorts of things.” Kansas decided not to pursue that option.

The budget-cutting plan also included another $8 million “sweep” from the Department of Transportation. Sullivan said that money remained unspent from KDOT’s budget for last year and would not impact its construction projects. KDOT Secretary Mike King told the Wichita Eagle that some of the savings resulted from a mild winter that required less highway plowing and treatment. He also said he was “proud that we were smart in how we spent money last year and created some savings.” “Smart” spending is good, but it seems likely that motorists around the state could identify a number of projects that could have benefited from that $8 million.

A number of smaller reductions and transfers seem to have the greatest impact on vulnerable Kansans: $4 million from a fund created by the Legislature in 2004 to improve and expand health care for low-income residents, $2.8 million from a reading program that (for whatever reason) cost less than expected in 2015, $2 million from the Department of Corrections because of reduced juvenile caseloads and unexpected grant funds, $1 million to help eliminate a waiting list to provide services to Kansans with physical disabilities, $3.9 million from Department of Commerce programs including a disability employment incentive program and $1.9 million from the Kansas Board of Regents incentive grant for GED programs.

The budget that legislators approved for this year required the governor to make at least $50 million in arbitrary spending cuts. Whether the plan announced last week meets the Brownback administration’s goal of making cuts that “minimize the impact on services” is up to Kansans to decide.