Kansas Independent Could Be Wild Card in Senate (Or Not, We’ll See)

AAccording to Huffington Post polling, there’s a 79% chance the GOP takes control of the U.S. Senate today (and The Washington Post contends there’s a whopping 98% chance). No surprise it’s likely to happen if you’ve been following along.

But, perhaps most interesting, is that HuffPo also calculates a 9% chance that Greg Orman, an independent in an extremely tight race against Republican three-term Senator Pat Roberts, could determine which party rules based on where he decides to caucus (should he win his race).

Read this Politico piece to find out why Republicans think he’ll actually caucus with Democrats, and what that could mean going forward. (And this may shock you, but Vice President Biden reportedly let the ol’ cat out of the bag on this matter earlier today.)

At any rate, Orman’s campaign is making for interesting theater during this mid-term election season.

We Want Your (Our) Water

It’s water war time once again — maybe. We’ve reported in the past 18 months on a number of state battles over water resources, while all the time emphasizing the need for a comprehensive Indiana plan to ensure long-term supplies for our citizens and businesses. It’s part of our Indiana Vision 2025 blueprint.

The West and South are the locale of many such skirmishes, but the latest comes from the middle of the country. Namely, it’s the Missouri River and Kansas wanting to “divert” some of the water to irrigate crops in the western part of its state.

Some details, courtesy of the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper:

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has asked Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback to back off of a feasibility study of Kansas taking water from the Missouri River to divert to western Kansas.

“The Missouri River is a resource that is vital to Missouri’s way of life and our economy,” Nixon said in a letter to Brownback.

Describing the Missouri River as the “lifeblood” of numerous communities, Nixon said the river provides drinking water and is used to ship goods to markets.

“We have worked for many years, and fought many legal battles, to ensure the River is managed properly,” Nixon wrote. “Thoughtful and reasoned discussion and cooperation, rather than unilateral plans for massive diversions, must be the guiding forces in planning for the River’s use,” he urged.

Nixon’s letter to Brownback was in response to the Kansas Water Office’s plan to commission a study on a proposal to divert water from the Missouri River and transport that water through canals some 360 miles to irrigate crops in western Kansas.

The so-called Kansas Aqueduct Project has been on the shelf for decades, but has recently been re-emphasized by water officials in Kansas.

Tracy Streeter, director of the Kansas Water Office, said the idea is to divert water at high flow or flood times on the Missouri River. That would help Kansas farmers and alleviate downstream flooding on the Missouri, he said. The water office is the state’s water agency, which conducts water planning and helps make state water policy.

But Nixon said while Missourians have suffered through flooding on the Missouri River, they have also depended on the river during droughts.

 

Governors Faced with Difficult Medicaid Decision

The Medicaid expansion decision for each state is one of several critical aspects of the Affordable Care Act, which was recently deemed Constitutional by the Supreme Court. Although federal dollars are at stake, it’s not a given that states (including Indiana) will agree to the changes to the program for low-income residents. Stateline offers a strong summary.

Although the lineup is shifting, more than a dozen Republican governors have suggested they might decline to participate in the Medicaid expansion. Governors in Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Texas, South Carolina and Wisconsin have said they will not participate. GOP governors in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, Nevada and Virginia indicate they are leaning in that direction.

Meanwhile, about a dozen Democratic governors have said their states will opt in. The rest have not declared their intentions.

According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government would spend $923 billion on a full Medicaid expansion between 2014 and 2022, and states would spend about $73 billion. But nobody is sure how many people will enroll in the Medicaid expansion. According to a 2010 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, states’ share of the Medicaid expansion could range anywhere from $20 billion to $43 billion in the first five years.

According to Kaiser, most states opting into the expansion likely would have to ramp up their Medicaid spending between 2014 and 2019, but four would spend less (Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont) and several others would have to boost state spending only slightly.

Mississippi’s Medicaid program, for example, cost a total of $4 billion in 2011—the federal government paid $3 billion, and the state paid $1 billion. Expanding that program to everybody at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line would cost the state as much as $581 million between 2014 and 2019, according to Kaiser’s 2010 study.  That’s a 6.4 percent increase in state spending compared to what Mississippi would spend without an expansion

The day after the Supreme Court ruled the Medicaid expansion was optional, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, a Republican, said: “Although I am continuing to review the ruling by the Supreme Court, I would resist any expansion of Medicaid that could result in significant tax increases or dramatic cuts to education, public safety and job creation.”

Businesses Disapprove of Incentive “Border War” in KC

When an Illinois company, for example, moves to Indiana because of high tax rates or other business climate concerns, most consider that a good thing. When Missouri and Kansas battle over Kansas City area organizations, some businesses view it as wasteful spending on tax incentives. Governing reports:

Seventeen prominent business leaders, including top officials with Hallmark and Sprint Nextel, recently wrote a letter to the governors of Kansas and Missouri, asking them to put an end to the “economic border war.”

“Because of our unique bi-state community, too often these incentives are being used to shuffle existing business back and forth across the state line with no net economic benefit or new jobs to the community as a whole,” the business leaders wrote.

The fact that the business community has come out against this practice hasn’t moved politicians to stop devoting scarce tax dollars to it. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback denies that his state is “poaching” companies and is unapologetic about seeking new employers wherever they may be found, including just over the border in Missouri.

Sly James, the new mayor of Kansas City, Mo., says it’s time his city makes a move. His predecessor, Mark Funkhouser, was opposed to using tax incentives to lure businesses. (Funkhouser is a Governing contributor.) That opposition, James argues, handed Kansas an advantage. “The days of sitting back and watching it happen are over,” James told reporters at an economic development event. “Mutually assured destruction only works if both sides are armed.”

But some residents agree that their region should be presenting a united front. When a company’s interested in relocating, says Jeff Kaczmarek, the president of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, there’s a “well worked out protocol” for banding together. If a company is moving in from Seattle or Denver, there’s no squabbling about which jurisdiction is going to try to lure it. “Everybody agrees that the best approach is a regional approach,” Kaczmarek says.

It’s only when a company is already established in the area that the bidding wars take place, it seems. “Money that goes to bribing some company to move 10 miles across some obsolete political border is money wasted,” says Richard C. Longworth, author of a book about heartland economics in the global era.

It may happen everywhere, but the practice of throwing tax dollars at companies has become so prevalent around Kansas City that it has, in fact, generated some new business. Realtors are benefiting by helping companies find short-term leases, which have become fashionable because businesses know they may be moving in the near future to take advantage of new incentives.

Appoint or Elect to Fill Senate Holes?

Indiana is among 36 states that fill what are seemingly rare U.S. Senate vacancies with gubernatorial appointments. The death of West Virginia’s Robert Byrd this week, however, means there will be six such non-elected senators serving in Congress. Several states have moved toward special elections. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

All these caretakers – representing Illinois, Delaware, New York, Colorado, and Florida – have reignited questions over whether a gubernatorial appointment, rather than a special election, is the best way to fill a vacant Senate seat. In particular, allegations of misbehavior in Illinois during the filling of President Obama’s former Senate seat spurred a move in some state legislatures to change the way vacancies are filled.

Historically, most states have given governors the right to appoint an interim senator in the case of a vacancy. But Illinois hasn’t been the only recent flash point: The awkward process by which New York Gov. David Paterson (D) went about filling the seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who resigned to become secretary of State, added fuel to the reform movement. Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President Kennedy, openly lobbied for the New York seat until she withdrew her name from contention.

Of the 12 states that considered legislation to fill Senate vacancies by special election, Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only ones that passed it in 2009, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. It also passed in Kansas but was vetoed by the governor. Legislation is still alive in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Too Many Governments … Here and Elsewhere

Indiana needs local government efficiency. It didn’t happen legislatively in 2009, but it will return next year. The Chamber and its allies won’t rest until taxpayer dollars are treated as gold, nepotism and outright fraud become relics of the past and our state moves away from a system that is now nearly 160 years old.

We, of course, are not on an island. A Kansas researcher lists his home state and four neighbors as topping the list in fewest residents per government unit. Yes, they (for the most part) share rural characteristics, but that in itself is not a valid excuse. Paul Soutar writes:

While government efficiency may be a challenge for large rural states, it’s not an insurmountable one.  Utah is very close to Kansas in terms of population and area, with 2,645,330 residents and 82,144 square miles, but has 9,761 residents per general-purpose government.

The difference is not a matter of geography or population but instead the number of governments.  Kansas has 2,084, compared with 244 in Idaho and 271 in Utah.

Read the full story.