- Coming up on IGI, Governor Laura Kelly begins the second year of her second term, and there are lots of issues for her to address.

The Kansas governor joins us.

Stay with us.

(dramatic theme music) (electronic buzzing) (cheery folk music) Hello and welcome to IGI.

I'm your host, Washburn University Professor of Political Science Bob Beatty.

Kansas Governor Laura Kelly enters her second year of her second term and is showing no signs of slowing down as she pursues her policy goals, promotes the state, and seeks to work with the legislature.

Governor Kelly, so glad you could join us.

Let's get right to it, but before we head into a number of things going on now, you were with us about a year ago.

Talk about the last session.

The Clint Eastwood movie is called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and every session has that.

When you think about last session, what strikes you as being most important?

- Well, I think the most important thing, though probably not the thing that people think about the most, is that we were able to fully fund our state water plan for the second year in a row, and we were able to add $35 million per year for the next five years to really deal extensively with the water issues that we have all across the state, both in terms of quantity and quality.

That's something that we have neglected for decades, and we can neglect it no longer.

So I'm really glad that legislature and I are both on the same page on this issue, and we'll carry forward that work this session and beyond.

- Now, you did have to issue a number of vetoes.

- I did.

- I think, give or take, half were overridden, half were not.

Is that just a part of being a governor?

It was, I dunno if it was a record, but it was quite a few, and is that just part of what you expect may happen in any given session?

- Well, I think it is a record for the number of vetoes, and yeah, it's not to be unexpected.

I mean, I think the fact that we were able to sustain so many of those vetoes and keep bad policy from becoming law is the most remarkable thing when you figure I'm a Democrat governor dealing with a super majority in both the house and in the Senate.

- Now, I've done some interviews and some extensive pieces with former Governor Sebelius and other governors, and they talked about how they have to literally, when there's vetoes or overrides, sit in a room and count votes.

Is that something you do every session?

- Yes, absolutely.

I and my staff, of course, and I've got a great staff that's out there in the trenches with a good sense of what's going on and where people are and what the outcome will be.

Yeah, so we work it pretty hard, because it's important.

I don't veto bills unless I think they're really going to have a negative impact on Kansas or Kansans.

So it's important that we do the work after the veto and make sure that we can sustain it.

- Governor Sebelius said she'd worked the phones at times, and I think jokingly said, she'd call and say, "Can I mow your lawn?

"Can I help out with the chores?"

So there are some hands-on elements to being governor, right?

- There are.

I'm not quite that transactional.

I'm not willing to trade my services, but whenever you're trying to come to an agreement negotiating with folks, you've gotta find that middle ground.

You gotta find that common ground, and we do that as we're looking for somebody's vote to sustain a veto.

Obviously, I want something from them.

I'll try to figure out if there's something within my value set that I can get for them.

- Now, when you entered your first term, actually, there were ongoing problems with DCF and the foster care system.

Now you're under your sixth year, and last year, what were the improvements you saw and what would you like to see continue this year?

- Well, I think the most substantial improvement that we've made is the actual number of kids going into our foster care system.

It is at its lowest point for decades, and that's important, because the kid's not in the system, then they're not gonna experience problems within the system, and that's due to the fact that we have really invested heavily in prevention, keeping kids out of the system, investing in their families and in their home environments so that we don't have to take them out and put 'em in the system.

So I think that's important, and then on the flip side, we've really worked on things like adoption or relative placement so that kids can get out of the system if they have to come in quickly and get into environments that are much more conducive.

- This seems like an issue from outside watching it, you're now in your sixth year, that it's not an instant fix, but it's also something that a governor has to keep their eye on and just, because you can't spot every problem and then try to keep improving it.

Is that how you view the foster care system?

- Well, Bob, there will always be problems in a child welfare system.

I mean, let's just face it.

I've worked in child welfare.

That's how I started my career many, many long years ago.

The system still has some of the same problems that I was dealing with way back then.

So it'll always have problems.

I think the issue is what do you do to mitigate the problems, and how do you respond when something bad happens?

How do you respond to that individual kid or family?

And then how do you respond in tampering with the system so that that doesn't happen again or happens less frequently.

- Yeah, it's really important.

Well, we're gonna move to more of this year and what the big issues.

Before we get into those, I wanted to show a clip from your state of the state address.

So let's take a look at that.

- Now, many of you have been fighting this fight for years, and you've got the battle scars to show for it.

I encourage you to remember the words of that great Kansan, Ted Lasso, (crowd laughs) who said, "You know what the happiest animal on earth is?

"It's a goldfish.

"You know why?

"It's got a ten second memory.

"So let's be a goldfish."

Let's all of us be goldfish and not let the divisions of the past prevent us from doing right by Kansans for the future.

- Now, I'll play the cynic a little bit, and I do know you said 10 seconds, but for people who read the newspaper or watch the news or everything, we see some pretty critical comments of you or maybe the policies you're going after, and yet that's what you put in your state of the state.

So this sounds cynical, but do you really believe that that's an approach that can work?

- I do believe that it's an approach that can work.

I think if you live in the past and you don't let bygones be bygones, then you can never start having a conversation that will move you forward.

So I do subscribe to it in the way that I operate with folks, and I was just asking the legislature to do the same, to recognize that we've had our differences.

We'll continue to have our differences, but at least let's come to the table and talk about 'em.

- And is it also a way of saying this isn't personal, this is our jobs and there's nothing personal if we disagree vehemently on something?

- That's another way that I've always operated.

I think I might've told the story before about the very first job I had when I was 17-years-old was working with kids from the inner city at a camp in New York, and it was hot times there, and the kids were really agitated, and I discovered then and there that when they were calling me names, that it really wasn't about me.

It was really about issues that they were dealing with, and so I learned to have that thick skin early on and not let that influence what I was able to hear and how I was able to relate to them.

- One specific issue is special education funding.

Some Republicans wanted to dissolve the task force and the committee and focus, actually, on possibly rewriting the entire funding formula.

Do you think that more money may be able to get to special education in the next year or two?

- I certainly hope so, and I put in my budget pretty much the same thing that I did last year, enough money to get us on the path to fully funding in four years.

I'm hoping that the legislature will finally see the value in that.

I think people have made it very clear that special education services are a mandate.

It's not like our school districts don't have to provide those services, and in order to do that, if we're not funding them fully, they just take money from other programs that they offer to provide the mandated services.

So we're hurting all of our kids by not expanding or fully funding special education.

- Let's move to Medicaid expansion.

Interesting, because the republican leadership has been pretty clear they don't want it, and yet this last, before this session in 2023, you toured the state, you talked about it a lot, and I got calls from reporters saying, "Why is she doing this?"

I'm like, well, I don't know.

You could ask her, but I was trying to speculate.

We can talk about it, but you said you talked about it in your state of the state, but why do you think Medicaid expansion is so important?

And when you have to make your pitch to a legislator or somebody who's maybe on the fence or wavering on a vote, what's the key points?

- Yeah, I don't think a whole lot of legislators are on the fence anymore, but I think there are a lot of legislators who would welcome the opportunity to debate and vote on Medicaid expansion.

They fully recognize how important this is to their constituents, particularly those legislators in our rural areas where the hospitals are closing down.

They get it.

The problem has been that legislative leadership has not given them the opportunity to vote on Medicaid expansion.

For the ones who still oppose it, there's probably nothing I can say or do, because there is no good reason to not expand Medicaid anymore, and the only reason there is objection is strictly ideological.

This all goes back to when the Affordable Care Act was passed, Obamacare, and there were so many people so adamantly opposed to that, and they've just dug in ideologically and stayed there.

So there's really not a lot more I can argue or debate with folks about it.

So that's why one of the reasons that we've taken a very different approach this year to getting Medicaid expanded, and it's less the negotiation and the listening to what is it you want?

How can we make this work for everybody?

And it's just, they've made it political.

So I'm dealing with it in a more political way.

- Well, let's hear from Dan Hawkins.

I don't want to put words in his mouth.

So let's hear what he had to say about Medicaid expansion.

- Republicans also favor lasting solutions that work for our vulnerable populations.

Things like higher medical reimbursement rates, support for community mental health centers, eliminating the intellectual and developmentally disabled waiting lists, and increasing access to care with support for charitable healthcare clinics.

These steps actually provide better care without growing the welfare state and dependency.

Limited resources should be reserved for the truly needy instead of siphoning them away to able-bodied adults who don't want to work and who have access to other healthcare options.

- So your reaction.

- Well, this kind of rhetoric has been used for, now, six years, and it always gets back to that this will entitle able-bodied, lazy adults to get access to health insurance.

That's not at all the case.

There are 150,000 Kansans approximately out there who would be eligible for Medicaid expansion.

We know at least 73% of them are working.

They're the folks working at the fast food places.

They might be working in the daycare, taking care of your kids while you go to work.

They might be taking care of your elderly parents at the nursing home.

These are folks who are working, working hard, but don't have employer-based insurance to fall back on.

They're the ones who need this Medicaid expansion, and it wouldn't just help them.

It also would help their employers, because they'd have healthier workers who would show up, and obviously, it would help our rural hospitals, because they could be reimbursed, help all of our hospital, actually.

They can be reimbursed for what now is uncompensated care.

The hospitals are having to eat those expenses.

They could get some of this Medicaid money coming in to help with their bottom line, and the idea that we should make sure that we eliminate the IDD, that's intellectually disabled waiting list, before we do this.

Those are two completely separate issues.

If the legislature thought that by putting a whole lot more money into the waiting list line item, they could do that.

That has nothing to do with Medicaid expansion.

They have not done that to the extent necessary to end the waiting list, and quite honestly, I'm not sure that putting that much money in would eliminate it.

We're putting some money into, we can decrease it, but until we deal with the workforce shortage, which would also be helped by Medicaid expansion, because those people who are providing those in-home services for the IDD population also usually don't have health insurance coverage themselves.

Medicaid expansion could get that for them.

They'd be better able and more likely to take a job, taking care of our IDD kids.

- Yeah, that was one of the original arguments years ago after Obamacare was passed.

It was the waiting list and the able-bodied term.

So it has been a few years that we've been hearing that.

We have to move on to taxes.

It's fun if it's a tax cut, especially if it's the grocery sales tax.

I'm not advocating for any sales tax, but that's the one, when I go to Dylan's, I really like to see, but, okay.

So we have a number of different tax cuts and the Republican leadership presented a tax plan that included number of tax cuts that you're in favor of, as well as a flat tax and then called it a compromise.

A, do you see this as a compromise, and obvious, I don't, many people may not have be up on the news.

So I was gonna say, I don't need to ask if you're for the flat tax or not, but you might want to explain why you prefer your plan without the flat tax.

- Well, I vetoed the flat tax plan, and essentially what they did was they took my plan, which is a bipartisan plan that we introduced on the very first day of the legislative session.

They essentially took my plan and then slapped the flat tax into it, and that did two things.

One, they put a poison pill in there, because I had told leadership that absolutely not.

There's no way.

I'm not compromising on flat tax, because it would ultimately undo all of the hard work we've done over the past five, six years to undo the damage created by the Brownback Tax Experiment.

I had no intention of letting us do that on my watch.

So they knew that I would veto that.

So it was not a compromise.

It was just a setup, and honestly, I mean, I do believe that leadership believes in that flat tax, but what they're not doing is looking at, or what they're not recognizing, is what it does to the state ultimately, even though we showed them profiles.

When you get out to fiscal year '29, which isn't all that far away, their plan had us going underwater by half a billion dollars.

My plan has us above water by about 680 million.

- Now, the Senate President Ty Masterson said in an interview that you have internal reasons and external reasons for being against the flat tax.

I didn't quite know what that meant, - I don't either.

- But did you know what that means?

I don't know if you saw the interview.

- No, I have not personalized it, and I don't have any internal feelings about the flat tax.

I just know from the work that we've done.

- So what you just said is why you don't like the flat tax.

- Yeah, I don't like the flat tax.

I am cautious about tax cuts, period, but I have offered tax cuts for the past three years that the legislature leadership has rejected, because it didn't have what they wanted in it.

When I put together my proposal, I do look very closely at the numbers and make sure that this is sustainable.

I know, and they should want tax cuts.

The bill that we've presented this year and last year and the year before do provide pretty substantial tax cuts for folks, but it's sustainable over time.

I know that I'm not running the state into a ditch.

- We're going to shift gears a little bit, and before we do that and talk about it, let's look at a public service announcement that you taped with the governor of Missouri.

(inquisitive orchestra music) - Hi, I'm Laura Kelly, Democratic Governor of Kansas.

- And I'm Mike Parson, Republican Governor of Missouri.

- We probably don't agree on much.

- And that's why I ordered Kansas City, Missouri Barbecue.

- And I ordered the good stuff, Kansas City, Kansas Barbecue.

- But regardless, we're committed to disagreeing better.

- Like in 2019 when we came together to end the Kansas City economic border war, which at its heart, was just bad policy.

- And wasn't in the best interest of Missourians or Kansans?

Is that correct?

- That is.

- Well, we'll just call you neighbors, and like any good neighbor, we'll continue to disagree on plenty of things.

- Like barbecue, tax policy, or who's the bigger Chiefs fan.

- As the 2024 election cycle heats up, we hope to speak for the entire country in saying-- - We don't always have to agree, but we can learn to disagree better.

- Now, I grew up in Oregon.

So we were Oregonians, but we talked about at the beginning of this program about your philosophy of governing.

So that's what this PSA is about.

So I'm actually gonna go into the Chief's part, who's the bigger Chiefs fan?

Six years as governor, four Super Bowls, coincidence?

Some say yes.

Some say no.

- I don't think so.

- Yeah, so talk about enjoyable to be a governor and then also win all those bets with the other governors.

Did you get the crab cakes from Maryland or?

- Crab pies is - Crab pies.

- what Governor Moore calls them, and they're on their way, - On their way.

- from what I've heard.

- We have the added element, element, it's too small a word, of Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift, and Taylor Swift, a global icon, showing up in Kansas and, of course, at Chiefs games.

So are you now a Taylor Swift fan or what's your favorite Taylor Swift song now that she's part of our lives here in Kansas?

- Well, Taylor Swift is not of my era, (chuckles) but certainly she is of my staff's era, and so they have made me a Swifty, an honorary Swifty, a real Swifty.

So yeah, I'm all in at this point, and I do have a favorite song, the "You Need To Calm Down", which I first came to know really, because my granddaughter, who's about 17-months-old, can actually sing along to it when it goes uh-oh, and so it just attracted me immediately.

So yeah, it's my favorite.

- Okay, so, very quickly, I was in Iowa for the presidential candidates, and Nikki Haley was doing a forum, and she was asked about Taylor Swift, and she basically said, yes, I'm a Swifty.

So yeah, it's quite a phenomenon, but I did have a hint that was your favorite song, 'cause you'd mentioned it before.

So the lyrics you may want to really learn and be able to use in the capitol.

So the lyrics, "I ain't trying to mess "with your self-expression."

That could be used.

"I've learned the lesson that stressing and obsessing "about somebody else is no fun, "and snakes and stones never broke my bones.

"So you need to calm down."

- You need to calm down.

It's perfect, and I haven't said those things exactly that way, but over time, I have said things that-- - well, yeah.

"You're being too loud.

"You need to just stop.

"Like, can you just not step on my gown?"

I think there's a lot - It's great.

- of good things, but the World Cup, it was sports, it's big.

It's good for Kansas, briefly, a big deal.

It's in your budget.

Is someone in rural Kansas gonna say, hey, why are we spending money on this?

Why are we spending money on it if Kansas is gonna do that?

- Well, we've been asked to participate in this.

This is a bi-state event.

We worked very closely with our friends in Missouri with all the Eco-Divo folks over there with the governor's office and whatnot to be able to attract the World Cup here in 2026, and that's phenomenal.

We are the smallest city.

- It's huge, it's huge.

- It is absolutely huge that we were able to do this, and it takes money to make money, Bob, and that includes in something like this.

Yes, I hope that we will invest the 20 million that we've put in this year's budget.

We did invest 10 million last time for them to work on the stadium.

I hope that we will do that, because we will reap rewards in multiples of that with the economic force that's gonna come into our state for that very extended period of time when the World Cup will be impacting.

- I'm not kidding.

It's a little bit like Taylor Swift.

I don't think maybe some people Kansans don't understand the impact of the World Cup.

I mean, it's global, and going back to Taylor Swift, she has a song called "Karma", of course, I think there's that multiplier effect, and it's probably similar to Panasonic and economic development that when a state attracts things, that then can bring in more and also gives the state a good reputation.

Have you found that to be true?

- Well, I know that to be true.

Success begets success, and for instance, we did bring Panasonic in, and that's great, but now we have suppliers who are interested in locating in and around the Panasonic plant.

So that's more jobs, more capital investment that are coming in, and I think when we look at what's happening with the Chiefs and with Taylor Swift, I mean, already the economic impact has been huge, and that will only continue to grow, and then as we bring in the World Cup, it just will continue to grow on itself.

- Yeah, it's really-- - Yeah, we're on the map.

- Yeah, that's really cool.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been an enjoyable conversation.

- You didn't ask me about my Swifty bracelet.

- Oh, well, tell us about it.

- Well, I went to the Chiefs game in Frankfurt.

I was on a trade mission over in Frankfurt, Germany when the Chiefs were playing over there, and one of the fans saw me and said, "I've got something for you."

And so she gave me a friendship bracelet, and it's got the Reputation album.

- Reputation, very cool.

(upbeat theme music) We'll have to let Taylor Swift know about this.

Okay, that's all time - Do that.

- we have for this episode of IGI.

If you have any comments or suggestions for future topics, send us an email at issues@ktwu.org.

If you'd like to view this program again or any previous episodes of IGI, visit us online at watch.ktwu.org.

For IGI and the governor, I'm Bob Beatty.

Thanks for watching.

It's been a great program.