Riley County commissioner Bob Boyd didn’t mince words when it came to his displeasure with the state legislature and ultimately his own party during Monday morning’s county commission meeting.
Sunday night the state legislature narrowly passed a tax bill in the Senate and will look for passage in the House Monday afternoon, though reports from Topeka indicate that there’s no certainty that will happen. Governor Sam Brownback, however, said he’d sign the bill if it makes his desk. The proposed bill bridges the $400 million deficit the state was facing but does so by raising sales tax across the board — even on garage sales, rent, gasoline and utilities.
Still, Boyd doesn’t hold much optimism for greener pastures ahead, no matter what budget ultimately gets approved.
“It’s a pretty bare-bones budget, but they don’t have the revenue sources to develop it,” he said. “We’re going to be under a lot of pressure here.
“We have dire needs. We have a lot of issues that the state is supposed to be funding and assisting us with, and they’re not. And it’s going to fall on the property owners of Riley County to fund these things… and that’s not fair. That’s just simply not fair.”
Boyd said Riley County also faces challenges a majority of other counties don’t have to when in it comes to its tax base. With much of the property owned by Kansas State University — and thus tax-exempt — Boyd said only 30 percent of citizens in Riley County own taxable property.
“That’s not a good prescription for a healthy economic environment,” he added.
Boyd said a lack of income tax revenue coming from the state — which he said counties haven’t seen in nearly a decade, even before Brownback slashed them in 2012 — forces counties to make up for the money elsewhere, such as mill-levy increases.
“They are taking it to the real extreme with these current cuts,” he said.
Boyd, a Republican, had harsh words for his own party, which dominates both chambers in Topeka — not to mention the governorship.
“We’re going to impact our society and I think we’re impacting my party’s reputation,” he said. “We’re proving, here in Kansas, that we are not effective leaders, effective governors. We’re just not developing the right approach in funding our government and promoting economic activity, promoting growth.
“All the stats indicate that we’re lagging behind all our neighboring states in our region, and most of the U.S.”
Commissioners Ron Wells and Ben Wilson, who fill out the rest of the commission, are also Republicans and were just as critical of the legislature’s handling of the budget.
“They’re talking about putting sales tax on city and county construction projects,” Wells said. “I just don’t understand that.”
Wilson, the newest commissioner who turned old enough to legally purchase alcohol last year, said seeing how local government works from the inside has been an eye-opener.
“That’s something I guess I didn’t realize as much when I was campaigning, how much we depend on the state and how much the state has been passing down costs to local government, and that that has been responsible for a lot of the local government tax increases in recent years,” he said.
While the state grapples with the final stages of approving its budget, Riley County commissioners are just beginning the formation of its budget for next year. Commissioners have heard budget and appropriation requests from department heads this month and will continue to hear them into July.
A final budget for the county is expected to be approved in August.
All county commission meetings are open to the public and held every Monday and Thursday morning inside the Commission Chambers inside the Courthouse Plaza East Building.
