The new leaders in the Kansas Legislature face no small challenges, but they started by striking the right tone.

Rep. Ron Ryckman Jr., R-Olathe, was elected speaker of the Kansas House on Monday, and Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, was re-elected to serve as Senate president.

Their reward? Ryckman and Wagle are charged with developing a strategy to deal with a $350 million hole in the state budget that is expected to grow to more than $500 million in 2017. An impending decision from the Kansas Supreme Court is likely to require the state to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on public K-12 education.

And amid the fiscal challenges, it isn’t clear that Republican Gov. Sam Brownback is ready to work with the legislative leadership. Brownback, widely blamed for pushing tax policies that led to the state’s budget woes, has said he will not submit a plan to address the budget woes until January, and even then, he doesn’t see the budget problem as his responsibility.

Ryckman replaces outgoing Speaker Ray Merrick, a strong Brownback ally known for punishing those who opposed him and for limiting the number of bills that were debated on the House floor.

In his remarks after being elected speaker, Ryckman at least sounded like someone willing to take a different, more collaborative approach.

“I believe if you look at the members of our state and the members of our caucus today, they did select a broad variety of individuals that I believe have come here to do the state’s business and to get us on the right path to restore a little civility and accountability to our process,” Ryckman said. “It’s all-hands-on-deck, and if someone’s willing to find a way to get to a yes (vote), we’re definitely willing to listen.”

Wagle is not new to Senate leadership. She was Senate president when many of the state’s budget problems came to be. But the August Republican primaries, in which several moderates won contests over hardline Brownback conservatives, got Wagle’s attention. In October, Wagle called a news conference with 25 other GOP senators and candidates and acknowledged that she had heard the voters’ anger on the campaign trail. The group pledged that, if elected, they would address the state’s budget crisis even if it meant reversing some of the tax policies that Brownback had championed and that many of them had supported.

Like Ryckman, Wagle struck an inclusive tone Monday.

“I have never squashed debate,” Wagle said. “We need to recognize that we are a diverse group of people from all walks of life who have made a tremendous sacrifice to put their name on the ballot in a year that we know is going to be very difficult to govern.”

The makeup of the Legislature in 2017 will be very different from that of the past six years. The 2016 election made clear that the voters aren’t happy with the direction the state is headed. The challenges are as big as they have ever been and will require compromise and collaboration to solve. It remains to be seen if Ryckman and Wagle can offer such consensus-building leadership in 2017, but at least they sounded the part on Monday.