The State of Kansas requires local counties to provide an array of services from health and safety to road maintenance to overseeing elections. The lawmakers at the State House are applying scrutiny to counties for the property taxes that largely pay for those services. I'm Sherman Smith at the Kansas reflector, and I'm here to talk about this with Bruce cladney, the Executive Director of the Kansas Association of Counties, and Jay Hall, the deputy director and General Counsel for the Kansas Association of Counties and the inherent kind of conflict between state and local government on this issue. Welcome to you both. Thank you very much.
Glad to be here. Thank you
great. Thank you so much. It's great to be here, too. Sherman, we really appreciate the opportunity to visit with you today. Thank
you, Bruce. Let's just start by talking about the role of county government, and what is the job of county commission and the county government?
Yeah. So counties are responsible for a number of different things. Counties serve as the administrative arm of the state, so they really handle a lot of those administrative services that the state provides, they're also responsible for providing certain services that the state requires them by law to provide. And then, obviously there are some local services that Counties also provide, that they choose to provide, because those are the things that their residents want. So there
are, I think people may not realize 18 services in state statute that county governments are required to provide. And I think Bruce is going to name them all by memory
Exactly. I've got them all committed to memory because they are things that we have to focus on every single day.
Let's run through the list, just so people have an understanding what we're talking about. You're required to maintain public health program or department. Every county has a health agency. There's you have to provide emergency management. Excuse me, emergency management operations in response to disasters. I know, as of this recording, I'm getting emails from the Shawnee county emergency management about a winter storm that's about to come dump maybe nine inches of snow or something on us. Solid Waste planning. You have to provide waste services. If none are available. You need law enforcement. So everybody has, I think, a Sheriff Department, Sheriff office. You have to have a jail to put the people in after the sheriff's office arrests people. You've got to maintain county roads and bridges. You have to administer a noxious weed eradication program. You're in charge of administering elections. Therefore, the four largest counties have an election official. Everybody else, it's the county clerk. And, you know, the Secretary of State has a little bit of guidance over that, but it's up to the counties to actually carry out the elections, to operate the elections. There's property tax collections, property registration and record keeping, criminal prosecution, coroner services, I think some counties have their own coroner on staff. Others do this by contract through a company. Have to operate the district courts or have a district court, even though it's up to the judicial system to run those courts, you still have to provide them. You have an obligation for mental health services. What does that involve? Exactly?
Well, mental health services are definitely one of the more prevalent issues that we're dealing with right now in our communities. A lot of folks are suffering from mental health or need mental health services, and we don't have a good, strong, you know, system to provide the services that we do need, but counties are required to come up with a plan to pay for some of those services. Most of the time, they partner with other organizations to provide those services. But in the end, in the end, local governments, county governments, are responsible for making sure that there's a plan to address the mental health needs in our communities.
You're also on the hook for flood control. I think some people still recall the legacy of the 51 flood and how devastating that was for Kansas, but it's an ongoing issue that I think people will kind of take for granted now, right?
That's for sure. Yeah, you know, the spring rains are going to be honest here shortly, and it's up to the local governments to, once again, create a plan and work with FEMA and other federal organizations to make sure that the flood waters are handled properly and deal with low lying areas and things like that issues places that are going to become an issue as the spring rains fall.
There's also requirements for property valuation. That's why we have county appraisers, and then I think some various licensing issues, marriage licenses are the most prominent, maybe some others. You know, that's a lot of stuff that the state requires you to do. I think a lot of people take these services for granted. They know these services are happening, but you know, you don't see, generally, 100 or 1000 people lining up at the county commission to pay attention to the nuts and bolts of this. I've covered county commission meetings. They are very dull for the most part, where people do pay attention, it's because one of these services is not working all of a sudden that they've depended on the bridge is out, and why didn't we fix this years ago, or maybe some sort of local zoning issue they're upset about. But that's the world that you guys. Then, right?
Absolutely. One of the things that I have to remind myself and others as well is that if it's boring, it's probably because it's necessary. And that's what we see with a lot of these services, is they are boring. They're easy to ignore because most of the time they're working very well, and we just kind of let that exist in the background, rather than really worrying about it, because our elections run smoothly. Taxes are collected, roads are taken care of, and so when those things are happening, when, when the when we call 911, and somebody picks up on the other end, we don't really think about what it takes to run those types of services. Now, if we called 911 and no one picked up, everyone would be upset, but that's because we have the expectation, and counties consistently fulfill the expectation that there will be somebody on the other end of that line, when you call 911 that the sheriff will come and take care of things, that the county roads and bridges will be maintained. Those are just the natural expectations, and so people are only upset if those things actually aren't happening, right?
It's, you know, the the irony here is the state is requiring you to provide these services, and people want these services, I think, for the most part, at least. But there, you know, we're seeing legislators increasingly place the scrutiny on counties for how you pay for those services. State says we don't want to give you any money to pay for this. You have to do all of this, but also you shouldn't charge so much on your property tax rate because there's a lot of strain on people. So just provide these services. We're not going to give you money. You don't need to raise the money for it. Just make it happen. That's to be very frustrating, right? Bruce, well,
it is. And a little history about that. Sherman, a couple of legislative cycles ago, one of the state senators had reached out to Jay in our office and said, Hey, what services are you guys having to supply us? Because we were going to the to the to the state legislature and asking for permission to do a few things. And it came out that, okay, Jay went through all the statutes and identified these 18 services. And so it was imperative that we started looking at that and going, Wait a minute, we have to provide these and quite frankly, the only true mechanism that we have to pay to fund those services is through the property tax structure. And so every year we keep getting, you know, like you were saying, it's been pointed out that property taxes are going up, but at the same time, the cost of these services is going up as well.
And over time, the state has actually withdrawn some of the funding. I mean, we we were here not too long ago, I think talking about the local ad valorem tax reduction fund, which used to, you know, pump 10s of millions of dollars into local governments to lower property taxes that had not been actually funded in like, 20 years or something. And now it doesn't even exist anymore, thanks to some legislation over the past summer. So you're trying to provide these services actually with less support.
That's exactly right. And so what we had, what we did was we went out and we surveyed our local governments, and we put together a questionnaire asking, how much do they actually spend on providing these 18 services? So there's 105 counties across the state. We currently have the data from 34 of those counties, but we're going to continue to try to get those data points and find out exactly how much those counties are spending on providing these services. And what we find is is the counties are budgeting about 56% of the money they collect is being spent on providing these 18 services. So that leaves 44% to fund other facets of the government. But I mean, when you start looking at the overall cost of doing business, 18 of these services are costing 56% of the county budget is quite a lot. What are some of
the other sources of revenue that counties have.
So counties really only have a handful of sources of revenue. They collect fees for some services, but those fees are very limited by statute, so they only collect fees for certain things, and in some cases, those fees don't even actually cover the cost of those services.
This would be like registering a title for a car, or something like, Absolutely, that's
actually one of the one of the fees that doesn't actually cover that service. So if you are registering a vehicle in Kansas, chances are your county is actually supplementing the budget for that fee by using property tax dollars to pay for those services at the local level. So when we talk about not having or putting a strain on property taxes, when we don't collect enough in fees to actually operate a certain service, we have to supplement that with property tax dollars, which is the largest source of county funding we also collect. Sales taxes, but not every county has a sales tax. And then on top of that, not every county collects the same amount, obviously, in sales tax, and
people don't like sales tax either.
Well, I will say this, though you're right, Sherman, but at the same time, and this was something that one of our colleagues shared with us, and I didn't even realize this, and I live in Bonner Springs, but he was saying that the local government there, the unified government, is now saying that they actually, for the first time, are collecting more in sales tax than they are in property tax to fund local government. And it reflected on my on my property tax bill, my property tax went down by 2.1% that I need to the county. I
think it's, it's unique, I think based on different counties, right? Like, I know exactly from being in Shawnee County when I was at the local newspaper here, a lot of discussion about turning to sales tax, because Topeka is a destination for a lot of outlying communities. You know, people who are in adjacent counties will come here on the weekend to buy things out on wanna make or at the grocery store, perhaps. And so it was a way to get a share of revenue from people outside of the county coming in. But in some of these rural counties, I think the burden is especially on on property taxes, there just aren't enough sales to really offset it. That's
That's definitely true, and particularly now that we don't have that we have more people going to certain destinations to buy their larger items. And when you think about purchasing the larger items, especially that generate a lot of sales tax, things like cars and larger bedroom sets and those kinds of things you're seeing those sales take place mostly in the larger metropolitan areas, as opposed to in some of our smaller counties, and so they aren't collecting that larger portion of sales tax, which means that they're relying even more on their property tax collections.
Is there still just a little bit of funding coming from the States or being shared with counties at this point. So there
are some ways that counties do receive some fees from the state for providing some of these services. In some cases, there are funds that come from the state to provide those specific services, but that funding, again, doesn't always cover all of the expenses that are related to that specific item. And so when that funding doesn't cover that, the county oftentimes has to return back to property tax to make sure that those those things are paid for.
I think I saw a number here somewhere that that was like less than 10% of the total revenue the counties get are coming from those inter government shares, right?
And I think probably the some of the more prevalent ones are more ones that people might relate to are local health departments. They get a small stipend from the state, and then also the emergency management folks. There's a small amount of money that trickles into the local governments to help with those services. But, but like Jay saying, the bulk of that is on the burden of the local taxpayer for their own local government to
do that. And so we've talked about these things that the state requires you to do, but counties do a lot of other things that people want. It's not necessarily the same in every county, but if you think about some counties have a hospital or a nursing home, some housing projects, maybe a Parks and Rec Department that people rely on. It could be a library or a museum, a youth center, any number of services that Counties also provide, because people here want this, and those have to be paid for some way as well,
absolutely. And I think probably even more prevalent is we have to remember that when we talk about the 56% of the budget that's going to these 18 services that doesn't include the infrastructure necessary to provide those services. So things like a county courthouse, where all where a lot of these services are provided out of that building that's not covered in the 56% so just maintaining the county courthouse, doing things like making sure that the water pipes are maintained, making sure that the roof is maintained. That comes out of the other part of the budget. And so that's an important note, that even when we talk about the 56% we're not talking about the county maintaining their buildings as part of that.
So we'll talk about some of the legislative priorities you guys have. And I think a lot of this has to do with educating legislators and also the public about these services you're providing and how they're paid for. I mean, everybody is howling about property taxes they don't like this is coming out of their their pockets, but there is something that's coming in return for That's right. I mean, how, how are you approaching educating the public about this?
Well, I think one of the things that's important is just making sure that the public is aware that it's actually the county that provides these services. When you get your property tax bill, you see that it is from the county. And so you're you're aware of the fact that the money is going to the county, but you don't necessarily always see that. Oh, elections are actually paid for through the county that, oh, the Public Health Department that does inspections for different restaurants and things like that, that's coming from the county. Oh, personal property taxes are being collected by the county. You don't necessarily associate snow
removal and, yeah, trash collections and you don't necessarily
associate those things with being county services. So you for a lot of people, they wonder, Well, where is my money going? Because they see that they have to write the check to the county, but they don't realize that, in turn, the county actually distributes most of that money out to other entities for their own purposes, and then they still have to provide these services with what's left. I always
wondered, when I get my tax bill every year, the valuation notice or something, what? Why don't counties put on there the breakdown of what this is going for? I mean, are there counties that do that?
There are definitely counties that do that, and we're trying to encourage our members to do that. We've seen different things, like pie charts, and we've also several counties will take $1 and they'll actually do two things with that dollar. They'll slice it up based on how much that dollar is going to the city, how much that dollar is going to the school district, how much going to the Sewer District, Fire District, drainage district, extension Council, library district, so they'll show you where all those that dollars getting divided. Then they'll take another dollar and they'll split it up for their county government and say, Okay, this is how much we're spending on law enforcement. This is how much we're spending on snow removal. This is how much we're spending on on district courts and things like that. To kind of give the taxpayer an idea, okay, yeah, we kept like Jay is saying 40 cents of the dollar, and now that 40 cents is getting divided by this way to pay for, you know, the roads and bridges and the infrastructure and things like that, keeping
somebody in the county jail while they wait six months for the state to provide the mental health evaluation exactly,
you really know your stuff.
You throw the legislature long enough, it's just a continuing education course, and that's exactly
what this is all about. Sherman, this is all about trying to educate the consumer, the public, that local government is there, and like Jay is saying, we provide these services, and most people don't realize a, that we're providing them, and they don't realize B, how it's getting paid for. So that's what we're trying to do, is raise that awareness.
One of your priorities is decreasing the reliance on property taxes for these required services. How do you do that? And are legislators eager to get on board and provide that funding for, you
know, as you had mentioned, one, one piece of it that we were here about a year ago talking about LA BTR, local ad valorem tax reduction, and there's a whole host of those types of programs that we used to have years ago. You know, the machinery, tax and and Register of Deeds fees for that, and the list kind of goes on and on and on, and we used to keep track. And it's in the billions of dollars that local governments have not been able to to rely on from from state, you know, state partnership. So we're kind of at that point of, we're trying to have conversations with the state. They're open to having conversations with us, but quite frankly, we don't know what that magic formula looks like. We don't know where do you get money from out of nothing? They have
their own priorities about tax cuts and, you know, things that they want to spend money on. And it's all part of the I guess everybody's trying to get their share Right,
exactly, exactly everybody's trying to get their share and and we're hoping by, you know, getting the word out that this is how we spend our share, that people be a little bit more understanding and supportive of, okay, hey, I value what the local government's doing for us,
and It also goes to just the education part that we talked about before, because a lot of people aren't aware of these types of services coming from the county locally, they realize, Oh, if these services are coming from the county, and that's what my tax dollars are going towards, I don't want to not have my roads and bridges maintained. I don't want to not have Sheriff services or 911, services in my community, because that's what my local tax dollar is going towards. And so it really is about educating both the public and also making sure that the legislature is aware that that's actually where the tax dollars are going. One of
the ideas here is to restructure the the vehicle registration fees that just like about making sure people are paying the actual cost of providing that service.
So what it is is that several years ago, they changed the way the system works, and so more of that work takes place at the county level than it does at the state level. Now. So because more of that work takes place at the county level than at the state level, the county has more employees. They also have to pay for more more computer equipment and software, things like that, to take care of that. However, the fee split stayed the same, so the state still receives the bulk of that fee, even though more of the work is being performed at the county level. And so a bill has been introduced, and we'll have a hearing this week, actually, tomorrow morning, to take care of hopefully adjusting the fee split so that we avoid the situation where the county has to supplement that fee with property tax dollars, which put more pressure on the local government through property taxes. So
that's a hearing scheduled for February 11, for since by the time this comes out, the hearing will have already passed. One of the priorities is maintaining the Home Rule authority, meaning local control. You know, the legislature doesn't like it when the Feds tell them what to do if they love telling cities and counties what they're allowed to do. I think we've touched on some of these principles. There have been efforts, I think, in the past, to tell you what you have to do if you want to raise property taxes, or to consider putting a lid on how much you can raise property taxes. We just had a constitutional amendment clear the Senate that would cap the increase in property appraisals from year to year. There are a lot of ways they like to tell you guys what to do, right? What are some other things that they want to impose on counties? So
one of the one of the big ones, is just there are always a lot of different types of things. We saw a bill last last week about about guaranteed income, which would essentially be guaranteeing that every resident in your particular county had a certain amount of income every month or every every year, or whatever it was. And while it may not work, counties give incentives for a variety of things to help with economic development. This would essentially be an economic development type of program for individuals rather than businesses. Whether it would work or not is really not the dispute. It's more of a would this be something that a county could use as a potential tool to increase the amount of residents that they have in their community? Again, it's not about whether it would work or not, but by telling counties that you can't do that, you remove that as a potential tool.
I mean, do we think the legislators know what's best for a local community, and not the local officials who are elected by the people in that
community. Well, I'm gonna get on my soapbox for just a second. Sherman, it's just a loaded question, not necessarily, but I will say this, I think their intentions are sometimes in the right spot, because a lot of times, some of these bills that we see come out of a complaint or a received sheet. So you know, they might be addressing a single issue, or you're assisting with a single problem. But in the grand scheme of things, you start tinkering with the system, and all of a sudden you're impacting 2.9 1000 or 2.9 million residents, not just the one or two that came to you to say, hey, I need some help with this issue that I'm dealing with.
And that's that's a classic problem that you may solve the problem for the one person and then create a problem for 1000 other people, because oftentimes the average person isn't necessarily paying attention to every single bill that is going through the legislature, so they know that things in this in a particular area are working fine for them, then a new bill is passed, and now all of a sudden, those things aren't working fine. They weren't involved in the discussion because things were fine. But now that the legislation is passed, now they have a problem, and so we try to keep an eye on those types of things so that we don't create problems. Some
of them you can't even anticipate, right? It becomes an unintentional consequence.
Yes, we use that word all the time. Unintentional consequence. Yes,
there's a buzzword bingo we can play over there, like nose in a camel's tents and the other priority that you guys have deals with this requirement that local government places legal notices in in the newspaper or publication in that community. So I'll start by saying Kansas reflector is a member of the Kansas Press Association, which is on a very different side of the spectrum from you guys, but make your pitch for why you shouldn't be required to put notices in newspapers. Well,
we're now, let's, let's step that back just a second and say we're not necessarily saying you don't have to use newspapers again. What we're asking for is permission to change the law so that you could use a public web. Site. So we've been working with an organization called Information Network Kansas, and there's models of this type of system being used across the country, and it's basically a website that local governments, cities, counties, municipalities could use to publish their legal notices. So it would become another avenue for a local source of legal notification.
Sounds like the website that The Press Association already maintains with all the legal notices. Well,
now that I'm not aware of but I do know that the fact of the matter is that the law restricts us from using websites to meet the legal requirements, so it has to be published in the paper, and that's where we're running into some of the issues.
And I think a good example of this is what happened out in Greeley County. Last year, Greeley County had a sales tax or a bond issue for their schools, and the bond issue passed. Unfortunately, one of the requirements of the law was that the bond issue the notice be published on the county website. Well, Greeley County is a very small county. They don't actually have a county maintained website, and so because of that, they are currently working through legislation to hopefully get access to those bond proceeds that the school district can
use. Yeah, we've written about that, but it's, you know, it's not an issue of not being able to publish it in the newspaper. That's just like the county not having a website at all, which I think is one of the concerns that the Press Association has, where the potential, you know, first off, for people to report on themselves, like you don't have a third party publishing this in a newspaper, and so you're trusting a local government to report on itself, basically, which is a transparency concern. But also, there are counties like like that that maybe don't have a website, and also, a number of times where a city or county website has been hacked, isn't that a concern to have another entity keeping a check in balance on local government? That
is a concern, and that's one of the reasons that, as Bruce mentioned, we're working with information network Kansas for a to create a third party site so that there would be that transparency. We would give counties the opportunity to essentially submit their information to this other website, where that website would then post that information. There would be an audit trail, so you could see when that information was actually posted. You could see if that information was ever changed, if a new post was ever put up on that same document, or anything like that. So we could, because we are very well aware that there are trans transparency and audit concerns with that. So we want to make sure that our local governments are being as transparent as possible by having that outside of just their own website. But in order to do that, we need legislation. I'd also point out that this does not would not restrict counties from utilizing their county newspaper. It would just give them another option. Because we understand that obviously county newspapers, local newspapers, are important, and so we want to make sure that there are options out there that do not preclude the use of a local newspaper.
It does seem like when this has come up from time to time around the state, that there's like a retribution contingent to this, where a local government is upset with how a local newspaper is covering them, and there's a recognition too, that I think if, if this were to go into place, perhaps half the newspapers in the state could disappear Within a year, right? So it would be a convenient way for local government to say, we can get rid of these people who are trying to hold us accountable to the public by taking their primary funding away from them, right? I mean, I think that's a real concern. Well,
I wouldn't argue with that at all. Sherman, I would say that. But then on the flip side, if folks are saying my property taxes are too high, how do we cut costs? You know, what cost do you cut? Is the cost of legal publications, one of those items that could potentially be caught. You know,
the percentage of the budget this is, we really
don't know. We've not gone down and collected numbers like we're starting to do with these required services. But I will say this, once we get down that road, we will start to look at those numbers and find out just how much counties are spending. I mean, you know, as well as I think, the city of Wichita recently said that they were no longer going to use the Wichita Eagle as their publication of
medicine, as city council members were complaining about the way Wichita the Wichita Eagle was writing about their meetings. They they made the change, and then their website was immediately hacked.
Was it? Yeah, but they said it was a cost savings of $120,000 to taxpayers. So I don't know. Yeah, where we, where we land on that, but that's it's good discussion to have, Sherman, and we appreciate your input as a as a person in the know, too, because. Is, all we know is that our local governments are looking at everything they possibly can do to become more efficient, more transparent and more accountable. And
I think this will probably be a discussion that comes back every year, even if it doesn't advance this year. I think you know, as the media landscape is changing too. I think there are a few newspapers out there and how people consume their information, I think is changing, right
exactly, without a doubt, without a doubt. I appreciate you
guys taking time to talk about these issues with me. With any final thoughts before we sign off here,
all we can say is thank you for the opportunity to come and share with you and listen to you talk about your perceptions of local government as well. I think I've learned just as much as I shared with you, so thank you.
So I think I'd leave off with just the reminder that I try to remind people that at the local level, dollars equal services. We don't operate on debt at the county level, so your property tax dollars, your sales tax dollars locally, turn directly into the maintenance on your roads and bridges and the payment for your 911, services. And it's
not like anybody is making a profit off these are the actual costs of the services. Your
dollars go directly into the services that you utilize in your local community.
