Rural Kansas remains the power source of Republican veto-proof majorities in Topeka. The vast spaces of farm country may hold a minority in population but they provide the legislature’s dominant majorities in the State Senate and House of Representatives.
The number of Democratic and Republican House members is split evenly in the state’s five metropolitan counties. The other 100 counties elect dozens of rural Republicans who furnish domination for their bosses in Topeka. Rural Republicans are also the source for the party’s huge Senate majority.
In this odd way, rural Kansas has a central role in the 20-year sidetrack of $1.5 billion in relief for property taxpayers and ordered by state law.
This revenue-sharing law dates to 1937 and the state’s early liquor taxes; the sales tax framework was enhanced in 1965 (KSA 79-2959) and later in the 1990s.
The law, known today as a “demand transfer,” requires that 3.63 percent of state sales tax revenues be consigned to a Local Ad Valorem Tax Relief Fund, and returned to local governments in two transfers ‒ in January and July. Distributions are based on local population (65 percent) and property valuation (35 percent).
The idea was to stabilize and reduce local property levies, a reward for cities and counties collecting state taxes. That city-county tax relief, routinely ignored, has been estimated at more than $100 million annually in recent years.
In 2019, the League of Kansas Municipalities estimated that the legislature’s long snub had cost cities and counties $1.3 billion. State budget estimates since then have put annual sales tax collections at more than $2.6 billion ‒ this year, $2.8 billion and the city-county percentage at $101.64 million.
The legislature, dominated by Republicans, shrugs. It has grown deaf to pleas to honor its obligation for local tax relief and restart the transfer. For 20 years, the answer has been no. In recent years, rural Republicans were the deciding majority.
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Here’s how: Five metropolitan counties elect 61 percent (76 of 125 members) of the House of Representatives. In 2022, Republican and Democratic results in Johnson, Shawnee, Douglas, Wyandotte and Sedgwick were an even match: 38 Republicans, 38 Democrats.
The state’s other 100 counties elect 39 percent ‒ 47 Republicans and two Democrats.
With the urban counties split evenly, rural Kansas and its farm cities provide the large House Republican majority, 85-40.
The pattern holds for the 40-member Senate, its members with 4-year terms. In 2020, Democrats came only from metropolitan counties. The Republicans’ 29-11 majority includes ten rural Republicans who tilt the senate’s power balance.
The will of both chambers is at the command of urban leaders from Johnson and Sedgwick Counties, but rural members propel Republican power.
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In the first years of the Kelly administration, Democrats and Republican moderates worked to bring Kansas back from the deficit-ridden Brownback years (2011-2018). Solvency was restored, local schools fully funded, and the state treasury began to build reserves, now at nearly $2 billion; in addition, the budget surplus next year is estimated at $2.6 billion or more.
Republicans are eager to spend much of this money, mostly in tax cuts for business and wealthy individuals. There is yet no inclination to address $1.5 billion in local tax relief shoved aside for 20 years.
Cities and counties continue to face pressures on property and sales levies, their only sources of revenue. They wrestle with the occasional arbitrary mandates from Topeka ‒ handcuffs on taxes, chains on valuation, and never a nod to returning or sharing revenue according to law..
Rural legislators, muscle of the majority, seem numb to a practice that rebuffs law and denies funds long owed to local governments, especially their own. They have the power in numbers to provide relief but the will to act is missing ‒ along with all that money.
