Senator Marci Francisco plants garlic in the garden outside her home on Nov. 6.

Sen. Marci Francisco knows gardening is a lot of work — her front yard is an organized chaos of dozens of fruits and vegetables.

But there are some plants that are easy to handle, Francisco explained. Take garlic, for example.

“Get some dirt, get some garlic, stick it in the hole, and then come back and see it,” Francisco, 69, said.

In early November, Francisco was doing just that.

She broke garlic she had saved from last year into pieces and stuck them in small holes she had formed in the dirt. She then refilled the holes and watered her planted garlic with rainwater she had collected in a bucket outside her home. It only took her about 20 minutes.

“So, was that easy?” she asked with a big grin.

Senator Marci Francisco carries a pail full of rainwater and a bucket of dirt as she does garden work outside her home on Nov. 6.

Since 2005, Francisco has served as the District 2 representative for the Kansas Senate. The Democratic leader has had a passion for the environment for most of her life. It’s not surprising that this upcoming session, she’s looking forward to working on the agriculture and natural resources committee, of which she is a ranking member.

Francisco is especially interested in helping with the state’s energy study, which will look at ways Kansas can reduce electricity costs.

In January, the Kansas Corporation Commission found that Westar Energy and Kansas City Power & Light, now combined and known as Evergy, spent billions in the past decade on coal-fired power plants. They also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on wind farms, in order to comply with a now-repealed state rule that 20% of energy must come from renewable resources by 2020.

Francisco said the energy study will also look at electric vehicles and charging stations, and that Kansas can “be ahead of the game in terms of electric vehicles.”

When Francisco served on the Lawrence City Commission from 1979 to 1983, she proposed numerous changes directed toward environmental concerns that residents may today take for granted. Because of Francisco’s proposals, site plans must include bicycle parking requirements, the commission largely stopped granting exemptions to the sidewalk policy and the city created the right turn lane onto Massachusetts Street off 23rd Street so cars aren’t required to stop.

“That’s mine, so that we could have automobiles not use up precious fossil fuels while they are idling,” Francisco said.

Francisco was mayor of Lawrence her last two terms on the commission, and many of these environmental issues — such as sidewalks and bicycle parking — were especially important to her because she lacked a driver’s license. (She eventually got one when she turned 37 or 38 years old, she said.)

As she washed off sweet potatoes from her garden in preparation for lunch, Francisco said the biggest issue the Legislature will face this upcoming session is balancing the budget:

“We dug ourselves in a hole and we spent all kinds of money that we didn’t have.”

Now, Francisco said the Legislature must balance its budget so that state agencies will have the funds to deliver their services. She specifically mentioned a great need to fund transportation, broadband expansion efforts, the state water plan and K-12 and higher education.

Francisco’s proudest accomplishment thus far in the Senate was introducing a bill in 2010 that raised Kansas’ minimum wage from $2.65 to match the federal level — currently $7.25.

When Francisco introduced the bill, people originally sought to delay it.

“I was advised that we should wait and perhaps we could have an interim committee, and I’m going, ‘We’re going to pay ourselves $88 a day to find out if somebody else should make more than $2.65 an hour?'” she said.

Francisco spoke with conservative members of the committee and ended up getting enough support to move the bill through that year.

This year, Francisco said she would be excited to support a bill that would place a 10-cent charge on plastic bags. She said she believes environmentalists can work together with farmers to get this passed.

“If a plastic bag is wrapped up in a hay bale, it can do harm to animals,” Francisco said. “To have support from members of the livestock association could be really helpful in making that change.”

Another area legislator, Democratic Rep. Eileen Horn, mentioned this bill at a Kansas farming convention earlier this month.

In the Legislature, Francisco is heavily involved in different committees, boards and councils.

“People like me because I show up at meetings,” she said.

Currently, Francisco serves on seven committees and is a ranking member on three of them.

“The thing about the Legislature is there’s never one thing,” she said. “You deal with a broad spectrum of things, and then you can really find out how they can all work together.

“We need early childhood education so we can reduce the number of people in our prisons. We want to invest in higher education so that we keep some of our best and brightest working for us in good ways in Kansas. I just want to be there for all the discussions.”