photo by: Peter Hancock

Rep. Jim Ward, center, D-Wichita, grills Kraig Knowlton, the state's director of personnel services, about proposed regulatory changes that would remove or scale back many job protections and benefits that state employees currently enjoy.

Topeka ? Democrats in the Kansas Legislature pushed back Tuesday against regulatory changes that Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration is proposing that would scale back or remove many hiring and employment protections for state employees.

Their comments came during a hearing before a legislative oversight committee where the Department of Administration outlined the changes being proposed.

Generally, they would cut back on the use of administrative leave and limit the ability of retiring employees to donate their unused leave to another employee undergoing family hardships.

They would also limit employees’ ability to appeal performance reviews and give hiring officers more discretion in deciding who could be laid off during a reduction in force, and who could be hired back after having been laid off.

photo by: Peter Hancock

Rep. Jim Ward, center, D-Wichita, grills Kraig Knowlton, the state's director of personnel services, about proposed regulatory changes that would remove or scale back many job protections and benefits that state employees currently enjoy.

“These regulations, one after another, tend to attack state employees,” said Rep. Jim Ward, D-Wichita, who serves on the panel. “They reduce the benefits and privileges of being a state employee, make it difficult, or more difficult, or less attractive to be a state employee. I don’t see one thing that you’ve proposed here that I would point to and say, that’s worker-friendly. That’s state employee-friendly.”

Ward and other Democrats on the panel suggested the administration was proposing new regulations because they represented changes that would never pass the Legislature if they were proposed as new statutes.

They also suggested the administration was proposing the rule changes now, in preparation for mass layoffs that they said may be necessary due to recent revenue shortfalls.

But Kraig Knowlton, director of personnel services for the Department of Administration, denied there were any plans in place for mass layoffs.

“I have not been informed of any pending mass layoff; I truly haven’t,” Knowlton said.

In fact, Knowlton said, while the size of the state workforce, not including Regents university employees, has shrunk 15 percent since Brownback took office in 2010, most of that has not been the result of layoffs.

In the five years since Brownback took office, Knowlton said, 285 state employees have been laid off. He said that’s less than the 365 who were laid off in the two years immediately before Brownback took office.

“Layoffs have always, and will always be out there,” Knowlton said. “They’re not something an agency is going to immediately jump to because the work still has to get done. So the reason for this is, in those situations where it is necessary, we want to make sure our best performers are the ones (being retained).”

But Rep. Ed Trimmer, D-Winfield, said the layoffs in 2009 and 2010 happened in the midst of the Great Recession and that it’s not fair to compare those years to the five years since. And, he said, the administration’s push to reduce the size of the state’s workforce is part of the reason why some people have been suspicious about the administration’s motives.

“You’ve talked about shrinking government 15 percent,” he said. “Shouldn’t that be a concern, because that seems to be something you’re proud of, that the administration is saying that’s a good thing. And it may be, but shouldn’t that be a concern when employees are put in a situation where they have less input and have less ability and less recourse when it comes to their employment, their rehire and their layoff?”

“I know that there are some people who are going to be concerned about it, and I doubt there’s anything I can say that will allay those fears,” Knowlton replied. “Some people are going to perceive it one way; some people are going to perceive it another way.”

Most of the proposed changes would only affect classified employees who are covered by the state’s civil service laws.

Rebecca Proctor, executive director of the Kansas Organization of State Employees, which represents about 8,000 state workers, said the number of classified workers has been declining steadily because in 2015 the Legislature passed a bill allowing agency heads to fill all new or vacant positions with unclassified employees.

She argued that the proposed changes would be another step in the direction of making all state workers “at-will” employees.

But Knowlton said the shift toward unclassified jobs was intended to make the workforce more efficient, allowing department heads to shift duties between people or to add more duties to one person’s job description without having to go through the process of reclassifying the job.

The Joint Committee on Administrative Rules and Regulations is only an advisory committee, meaning it has no authority to block an agency from adopting new regulations. But it is part of a general public hearing process required under statute before the new rules can be finalized.

A full public hearing on the proposed changes will be held Sept. 27 in Topeka.