Kansas Governor Sam Brownback sits down with reporters for a year-end interview in his office on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2016 at the Kansas Statehouse.

Topeka ? In the six years that Gov. Sam Brownback has been in office, he has already accomplished most of the major initiatives he had campaigned for.

He has pushed through sweeping income tax cuts, privatized Medicaid, reduced the size of state government, overhauled the state pension system, reined in the civil service, signed some of the nation’s strictest limits on abortion and laid the groundwork for overhauling the way Kansas funds its public schools.

He even pushed through a major change in the way Kansas Court of Appeals judges are chosen, although he has been unable to accomplish the same for selecting Supreme Court justices.

That has led many people to speculate that he may not serve out his full second term, perhaps choosing instead to take a federal appointment in President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration.

“Sam Brownback, whether you like him or not, is one of the most successful politicians in Kansas history,” Clay Barker, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, said at a recent panel discussion at the Dole Institute of Politics.

But in a pre-holiday interview with reporters Wednesday, Brownback gave no sign that he’s thinking of leaving anytime soon. In fact, he still has several goals he wants to accomplish as governor.

School finance

But the biggest piece of unfinished business remains building a new school finance formula, something that lawmakers are expected to tackle in the upcoming session.

Brownback said he plans to lay out some overriding principles for a new formula, but said much of the work will be up to the Legislature.

“What we’ll put forward is a series of ideas that we think are important to include in a school funding system and an overall concept of how to look at it,” he said, “but the writing will have to be legislative.”

One of the overriding principles, he said, will be to tie funding to student performance, something the Kansas Supreme Court also emphasized in its initial ruling on the current school finance case in 2014.

“Our system produces decent results for a fair number of students, but yet there are quite a few students who don’t do very well under our system,” Brownback said. “And I want to see all of them have better outcomes. And I think we should incent that piece of the system.”

Brownback did not say specifically how that kind of funding system would work. But he said he received a number of good suggestions from people who responded to his open call for suggestions earlier this year.

“There were several that were good ideas, but I think more kind of reinforced some of the things we were looking at anyway,” he said. “I thought actually we would get people writing actual proposals — big school districts or small ones coming together and writing proposals, and I hope they actually have been doing that. And that’s what we’ve been hearing, that different groups are writing proposals.”

Officials at the Kansas State Department of Education have agreed that the next formula needs to focus on outcomes. But they estimate the cost of a program aimed at bringing all students up to grade level in reading and math at about $900 million over the next two years.

Brownback has been tight-lipped about his plans for next year’s budget, and he would not discuss in detail Wednesday where he thinks additional revenue would come from.

He said he is willing to look at proposals from the Legislature, even if they include repealing the so-called LLC exemption for farms and small businesses, but would not commit to endorsing that idea.

He did, however, reject the idea of imposing sales taxes on services that are now tax exempt. And while an increase in the statewide property tax for schools may be on the table, he rejected the idea of a constitutional amendment so that farm land would be taxed the same as residential and commercial property, at fair market value instead of “use value.”

“That’s a big fish to fry,” he said.

Other issues

Beyond school finance, Brownback said there are still several other things he wants to accomplish in his last two years, starting with extending the life of the state’s water supplies.

“I want to get the state in a better position long-term,” Brownback said. “So I’ve been emphasizing water for some time, and I’m going to keep doing that, particularly the Ogallala.”

Brownback said he has taken part in discussions in western Kansas, encouraging irrigators to voluntarily cut back on the water they use.

“I was just in Wichita County (near the Colorado border),” he said. “Farmers out there are voluntarily signing up to cut back themselves 29 percent on their water allocation. If they do, it extends the aquifer there 35 years. If they don’t, they’re going to be out of irrigation in probably five.”

Western Kansas, however, is not the only region of the state facing water supply challenges. In eastern Kansas, which relies heavily on water impounded in federal reservoirs, soil erosion is filling up the lakes with silt, reducing the amount of water those lakes can hold.

“We need to do more on soil conservation. We still have way too much erosion,” Brownback said. “And that’s caused us problems at John Redmond that we’re having to take the silt out. But we need to go upstream and not lose as much of the dirt, and that’s better for our farms anyway.”

Other goals he mentioned include addressing the shortage of health care workers in rural Kansas. And he remains concerned about continuing to lower the unfunded liability in the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System.

But he said one of the big areas he wants to focus on is projects aimed at improving the quality of life in Kansas, something he said is important for retaining business and population.

“We came way too close to losing Cargill in Wichita, and their issue was attracting millennials and quality of life items,” Brownback said. “OK then, what do we need to do here to try to address that? Kansas City does a great job, it seems like, at that.”

Among the projects Brownback said he wants to work on are the proposed whitewater rafting and outdoor recreation center at Clinton State Park near Lawrence and completion of the 100-mile Flint Hills Trail in central Kansas.

“It’ll be a high quality hiking, biking trail, something like the Katy (Trail) in Missouri,” Brownback said. “We’re going to have to discuss that a little more in the final two years.”