(Third of four articles)
Lawrence or not, Kansas’ vast First congressional district will swell eastward in yet another legislative reapportionment. The district, once an unalloyed block of the agricultural west, now runs to the Shawnee County line ten miles east of the state capital. As new boundaries expand, western suspicions are rekindled, particularly in the southwest, a region closer to three other state capitals (Santa Fe, Denver, Oklahoma City) than to Topeka.
Continued shifts of legislative boundaries have pushed the First District eastward to gobble up cities (Manhattan, and Junction City among them) while the far southwest becomes an afterthought. The current fracas over including Lawrence has placed this region in quarantine, a seclusion apt to heighten resentment among its people.
The last widespread uprising happened 30 years ago, a brief but memorable protest of the state’s school finance reform. Among other things, the 1992 law had tapped pockets of southwest Kansas wealth – oil and gas, and agriculture – for a central revenue pool to finance aid to poor school districts, urban as well as rural. In protest, nine southwest counties voted to secede from Kansas.
At the time, the spirit of grievance and isolation seemed to channel through Don Concannon, a prominent Republican attorney from Hugoton. Concannon (who died in 2013) was amiable, lively and eloquent, a former GOP state chairman (1968-70) who came within 600 votes of winning the party’s nomination for governor in 1974 and was state chairman for Ronald Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. He was an independent conservative, but one who also believed in tax increases. For many establishment Republicans, he was a large pain in the hind-quarter.
In 1992, Concannon was a chief advisor for the secession movement, a role that fit his maverick independence. The issue of education funding had not escaped his cross-hairs. A new 35-mill state property tax was to finance a state fund for aid to local public schools (It’s now 20 mills). In mineral-rich southwest Kansas, local taxes were less than half the proposed levy; this was seen as a raid on local pocketbooks.
School consolidations in 1963, legislative reapportionment in 1966, court unification in 1974, and state severance taxes on oil and natural gas in 1983 were denounced as attacks on the sovereignty of rural communities. The school finance proposal of 1992 had reignited anger. Even Democrats, including State Sen. Leroy Hayden of Satanta, were among critics.
Although Concannon advised secessionist counties at a convention in Grant County that September, he was one of the cooler heads at that heated event. And he would advocate a different kind of tax.
“The argument isn’t just about money,” he said before the meeting. “Are we short of dollars or are we being shorted on education? We (southwest Kansas) must be able to offer the same courses with the same quality so our children can compete with students from urban areas…”
He believed that all wealth ‒ not just property values and taxable income ‒ should determine a community’s ability to pay for schools. For Concannon, this meant repealing the protection of business inventories, farm equipment and livestock from property taxes. It meant eliminating tax exemptions for the sale of livestock, farm machinery and all utilities. It meant a state tax on intangible savings and investment income.
It meant eliminating tax abatements as a lure for new business or a treat for existing factories.
“The argument isn’t less taxation, it’s equal taxation,” Concannon often said. “Let’s put all the sources of wealth in the pot. We’ve created so many exemptions and protections that there isn’t anything left to tax except real estate.”
But at that time, in 1992, repeal of the exemption on livestock sales, for example, would have meant $215 million in new cattle taxes.
“There isn’t a farmer anywhere who would complain if everybody were taxed equally,” Concannon said. “I’m not trying to be popular, I’m trying to be fair.”
Concannon’s intangibles tax would have replaced the few local intangibles taxes in force at the time. (All have since been repealed.) It exempted the first $10,000 of investment earnings. Revenues from the tax were then estimated at $35.5 million.
Concannon had offered a personal example of the “skewed system”. He said he had sold a farm of irrigated cropland for $500,000 to a man who made a 20 percent down payment. “That man put $100,000 down but pays taxes on $500,000 in property. But I have $500,000 in intangibles and don’t pay a dime in school taxes. I’m not paying my fair share. I’m taking advantage of the very system I’m complaining about.”
(Next: Alone today)
