Interview of Bruce Larkin, April 12, 2024

Interviewed by Chris Courtwright

Bruce Larkin

Interview Description

Larkin's interview focuses extensively on his involvement with tax issues during his 20-year tenure in the legislature, and after, at the Board of Tax Appeals (BOTA). He tells lots of funny stories in the interview, particularly about legislative strategy. Larkin got interested in the legislature because of the American Agriculture movement in the mid-1980's. He joined the Department of Revenue's Use Value Advisory Group at a time when appraising farm ground was difficult. Larkin was a small family farmer who farmed ground that his great grandfather had bought in 1878. Larkin was also interested in education; particularly how small rural communities were faring under the school finance formula. But his consistent interest was in taxation. He was involved in almost every tax issue that surfaced during his 20-year involvement with the legislature, and afterward, as a staff member at the Kansas Department of Revenue or on the Court of Tax Appeal as a judge or as Chief Judge. His discussion of issues surrounding classification and appraisal is very informative. He described changes in the use value appraisal of agricultural land. Interviews with many of the people mentioned in this interview can be found on this website by using the Search box, or by going to the Statehouse Conversations Collection.

Interviewee Biographical Sketch

Former State Representative Bruce Larkin had a lengthy career in public service including eight years on his local school board, nearly 20 years in the Kanas House of Representatives, a short stint at the Kansas Department of Revenue where he handled tax appeals. This career was capped off with an appointment by the Governor to the Kansas State Board of Tax Appeals. While he was there it was changed by legislation to the Kansas Court of Tax Appeals. He served as Chief Judge until his term ended in 2012. Larkin was a successful farmer and active Democrat. Bruce was a longtime champion for agriculture and was heavily involved with the National Farmers Union and other similar groups. One of his local newspapers observed, on the occasion of his leaving the legislature in 2006, that "Larkin was one of the best, most thoughtful legislators geared to improving education, especially in small schools, and working to improve life generally in Kansas." He is a 1973 graduate of Washburn University.

Transcript

Chris Courtwright: Good afternoon. Today is April 12, 2024, and we’re in the historic House Chamber at the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka. I’m Chris Courtwright who served for thirty-four years working as an economist for the Kansas Legislature in its nonpartisan research department before retiring in 2020. For full disclosure, Governor Kelly appointed me shortly thereafter to her bipartisan Council on Tax Reform.

Today, I’m privileged to interview former Representative Bruce Larkin whose lengthy career in public service included eight years on his local school board and nearly twenty years in the Kansas House. A stint at the Kansas Department of Revenue would follow, and it was capped off with an appointment to the Kansas State Board of Tax Appeals – which while he was there became the Kansas Court of Tax Appeals, where he would serve as its Chief Judge with his service on that body lasting until 2012.

His long and distinguished career here in the people’s House from 1987 to 2006, representing constituents from the Baileyville area dovetailed with many dramatic changes in Kansas state government associated with new technology, evolving demographics, and wild swings and changes in the political culture and issues facing policymakers here in Topeka.

A successful farmer and Democratic Party stalwart in and around the Statehouse for many decades, Bruce was renowned as a longtime champion for agriculture and was heavily involved with the National Farmers Union and other similar groups. One of his local newspapers threw him a nice bouquet when he left the Legislature in 2006, observing that “Larkin was one of the best, most thoughtful legislators geared to improving education, especially in small schools and working to improve life generally in Kansas.”

I should also add Bruce was Assistant Majority Leader from 1991 to 1992. A longtime resident of northeast Kansas, you are a proud Ichabod who graduated from Washburn University in 1973. Did I get most of that right?

BL: You got it correct.

CC: This interview with Mr. Larkin is being conducted on behalf of the Kansas Oral History Project, a not-for-profit corporation created for the purpose of interviewing former legislators and significant leaders in state government, particularly those who had served during the 1960s and in subsequent decades. The interviews will be accessible to researchers, educators, and the public through the KOHP website, ksoralhistory.org, and also the Kansas Historical Society and the State Library. Transcriptions are made possible as a result of the generosity of KOHP donors. Former Kansas House Speaker pro tem David Heinemann is our videographer here today.

During your nearly two decades in the Legislature, Bruce, you served on quite a number of committees, including Taxation where you were its Vice Chair during an especially critical time we will be getting into here in a few moments. Also Agriculture, Education, Interstate Cooperation, Transportation, and a special Select Committee on School Finance. Hopefully—I cherrypicked a lot of the top ones, but are there any others you might want to highlight that I might have missed?

Bruce Larkin: I think you’ve pretty well hit the major committees that I served on through the years. I also served on an advisory committee to the Department of Revenue on the use-value of agricultural land. I was appointed to that in the early nineties.

CC: Before we jump into your legislative career and committee work and big issues, let’s get into some additional background. One question we always ask former elected officials is whether they are native Kansans, and if not, when did your family move here?

BL: My great-grandfather purchased the farm that I still own in 1878. We have been in that location since that time. Most of my ancestors all came to the country back in the 1800s.

CC: I see that you were on your local school board from 1978 to ’86 before you first got elected to the Legislature. What was your motivation in 1978 for getting on the school board? Had you been approached by other parents or community members?

BL: I was discussing with a good friend of mine some of the issues that were going on at the school. He suggested, “Why don’t we both run for the school board?” I said, “Okay, let’s do it.” So we put our names in.

Now, to run for the school board in a community like Baileyville where everybody knows you, you don’t go campaign. You just put your name on the ballot and wait for the vote. So I served two terms on the B and B School Board.

CC: It does seem like the public service bug had been in your bug then from a fairly early age. We’re of course now curious about the next step in 1986, when you decided to run here for the House. Can you tell us if your family had any kind of history in politics? Maybe you had a mentor or favorite college professor or anything who encouraged you to start down this very interesting career path? Also, if you were approached by Democratic Party officials or others in and around Baileyville who encouraged you to run, or whether you just decided on your own ticket it was time to throw your hat into the ring, perhaps even because you were frustrated about how your schools were being funded. I guess what motivated you to jump into this particular political arena?

BL: First of all, my grandfather was county commissioner in Nemaha County from 1918 to 1922, I think was the timeframe. And my dad was always interested in politics and read the paper every day from front to back. He discussed things a lot. I always had that interest as well.

What got me into politics though was the agricultural depression of the early eighties and trying to get some policy changes made to improve the situation in agriculture. As we worked with different organizations, we set up some meetings in the area. We went to Washington, DC and lobbied and pushed for certain issues.

The person who was my representative at that time was chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Lloyd Polson. We visited with him, and he didn’t seem to have any concerns about the problems that we had in agriculture. So I just decided that I want to run for the seat and see if I can’t win. I think I wound up with something like 56 percent of the vote that year.

I drove from every farmhouse to farmhouse in the district. We walked every town in the district and handed out things. We went to every parade. I had my kids helping me. I lost my one younger son. He was only about twelve years old at the time, and we lost him in the one town, couldn’t find him. Some little lady invited him in for milk and cookies. He finally showed up a half hour later. As a family, we pretty much campaigned the whole district that way. I wound up winning the election in ’86.

CC: So you knocked off a powerful Republican incumbent who in fact had chaired the Agriculture Committee at that time.

BL: Yes.

CC: So agriculture obviously being a big issue, what else do you recall about that ’86 campaign? Was it focused on some social issues as well as economic issues? Also, were there any debates and quorums that the two of you attended? Was the campaign fought—you mentioned the parades and going door to door. Were there radio ads, yard signs, those kinds of things? What can you tell us about what else happened in that campaign?

BL: Besides doing all the legwork and the door to door, we did a lot of radio ads, newspaper ads. We had one radio ad where my one son came on the radio. He starts in, “Well, let me tell you about my dad.” And everybody remarked about how cute the ad was. Like I said, we pretty much did it as a family, and I had a lot of supporters and backers in the area because of what I had been involved with the agricultural issues.

CC: And the school board.

BL: And the school board. Really education didn’t come up much. I can remember one debate that year, and it was mostly over agricultural issues.

CC: Okay. Certainly it sounds like the campaign for the Legislature was an all-hands-on-deck approach that was far different from your school board re-election campaigns and that sort of thing.

BL: It was much more intensive and a lot more work. I’d spend every day from 7:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night out driving door to door or house to house out on the farm, and on the weekends, we’d walk the towns. It was very intense.

CC: You win that election, and you show up here as a freshman for your first legislative session in 1987. You party has just lost a close race for Governor, and Democrats are now dealing with Governor Mike Hayden in Cedar Crest and GOP majorities in both legislative chambers. Can you tell us what that experience was like for you when you arrived here in January of 1987 and maybe how you went about learning all the legislative procedure and nuances? Who were the key stakeholders and lobbyists? Were any of the more senior members of the House Democratic Caucus helping to mentor you or anything? It must have been a new experience for you to be plugged into a body with 125 people in it.

BL: Yes, it definitely was a new experience, but because I defeated the Republican Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, my punishment for doing that was the Speaker of the House would not allow me to be on the Agriculture Committee. They actually gave me a plum committee by giving me the Education Committee. I served on that. I was on that for a number of years.

But when I got here, I made friends with Robin Leach and Don Rezac and George Teagarden, and, of course, Joan [Wagnon], and a number of others. Of course, Robin Leach kind of took me under his wing. He was about as smart a guy as I’ve ever been around. It was interesting for him to kind of help guide you through the policy issues.

CC: Sure. Jump in and talk about any and all other legislative matters you would like to from the late eighties. You and I, of course, spent so much time together over the years dealing with tax issues. I thought we might start there. A lot of the drama in the late 1980s in your early years involved a big debate about how much of the state income tax windfall attributable to enactment of the Federal Tax Reform Act of 1986 would be retained by the General Fund or in fact would be returned to Kansas taxpayers. Governor Hayden had a huge battle with his own party here in the Legislature, as a number of the more conservative members accused him of lowballing the federal windfall estimate and not wanting to cut taxes as much as they had wanted.

Where were the House Democrats in all of this drama? Were you and Speaker Barkis and Joan Wagnon mostly sitting on the sidelines eating popcorn and enjoying the Republican infighting? Or were there specific tax-cut parameters that you recall pushing for from the minority side of the aisle?

BL: At that time, of course, I was still fairly new, I can’t really remember there being a party position on that. Maybe there was, but I don’t know of any coordinated attempt to try and promote a certain package or anything at the time. It was kind of whether you were for returning the money or whatever or against it. I can’t even remember what my position was at that time. That’s been a long time ago, Chris.

CC: The history books, of course, say that maybe the dominant issue for lawmakers altogether in the late eighties and early nineties – and certainly the biggest tax issue – would have been implementation of property tax reappraisal and classification. Just to set the stage, we recall that Kansas had a badly outdated and endemically corrupt property tax valuation system that was about to be thrown out by the courts for violating the uniform and equal provision of the Kansas Constitution and likely even the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. A lot of values had not been updated since the 1960s.

So legislators in the mid-1980s passed a mandatory statewide reappraisal that was going to update all values as of January 1, 1989, giving the counties and the Property Valuation Division several years to get everything up and running. Cognizant of the fact that this was going to potentially cause massive shifts between and among classes of property, lawmakers also placed on the 1986 ballot the first property tax classification amendment. That measure, which was in fact adopted by voters, amended the prior constitutional requirement that all property be assessed at 30 percent its fair market value to instead bring in a number of different levels depending on the class of property, whether it be residential or commercial or ag land or oil and gas or state-assessed public utilities and so forth.

The classification plan was designed to minimize the tax shifts that would have otherwise occurred in 1989 on a statewide basis, but I do want to emphasize the word “statewide.” Because of course, there was no one size fits all adjustment that would have been possible to head off massive tax shifts in any given county or jurisdiction even if the shock absorber was being applied somewhat successfully on a statewide basis.

So when the new system comes online in tax year 1989, there were in fact massive winners and losers relative to prior law. As with anything like this, the winners don’t necessarily send anyone thank you notes, but losers tend to be enraged and energized at the ballot box. All of this long-winded history hopefully jogs your memory enough to tell us what you recall about the so-called property tax revolt, and maybe the December 1989 special session, and how everyone here at the Statehouse tried to respond.

BL: I think this was probably the issue that got me most interested in the tax policy because with the implementation of classification, it became very apparent to me from the beginning that the classification rate on commercial property was too high in comparison to other classes. Agricultural [land] came out fairly well with the use value. Residential was in good shape, and so we began pushing for a new constitutional amendment which would change that classification rate on commercial.

We eventually a few years later got that done. I think it pretty well put things back in line. But mainly it was how it affected the small businesses in my area. Most of them were mom-and-pops. It just in a lot of cases doubled and tripled their property valuations. It was difficult for them to absorb.

CC: Due in part to some of this political fall-out and angst, as well as other frustrations with Hayden, Democrats in 1990 take control of the House, albeit with a slim margin for the first time since the mid-seventies. Democratic Governor, Joan Finney, a self-described populist, and a bit of a political outsider, is elected at least in part because both of her predecessors, Governors Carlin and Hayden, had been blamed for the property tax reappraisal and classification upheavals we just discussed.

Before we get into what it was like serving in the majority, and as we noted, you were in fact Assistant Majority Leader, can you tell us what your reaction and your caucus’ reaction was a day or two after the 1990 election, when it became clear this kind of tectonic political shift had occurred. Others had told us they thought that most House Democrats never really saw this coming.

BL: I don’t think we probably were prepared for it. But I said we kind of scrambled and got ourselves into position. We elected new leadership, and actually we thought things went fairly smoothly with the leadership that we had, even though we had a slim majority.

Another issue that I wanted to bring up, prior to the 1990 session, Mike Hayden had a special session. He called for highway improvement.

CC: In 1987, sure.

BL: There was a whole group of Democrats that met at Joan Wagnon’s house one night, and we were having a good time discussing issues and discussing the highway program, and how it was raising every tax under the sun. We started writing songs. We put together a number of songs based off of, well, like, “Three Blind Mice,” “Tax Hike Mike, never met a tax he didn’t like to hike.” The Beverly Hillbillies, “Come and let me tell you a story about a man named Mike/He never met a tax that he didn’t like hike.”

We came up with like five or six of them. John Solbach and Anthony Hensley and Joan and I and Kathleen [Sebelius], we were all there, and were contributing to this. Somehow or another, the Democratic Party got a hold of it and made it into a songbook. Anyway, I’ve got a file some place at home that still has all that stuff in it. That was kind of an interesting, funny time that we had, just having some fun, getting together.

Going into the ’90 session and being the majority was definitely a shake-up for us, but I think we handled things fairly well until we got this ruling come down from the judge on school finance.

CC: We’re going to get into that in just a second. I want to spend a good bit of time going over the early nineties school finance debate. But first I wanted to ask you just generally with so many newly elected Democrats having arrived in 1988 when your party picked up seats and as we just mentioned, 1990, by the ’91 session when you do now have the majority, you suddenly find yourself even after only four years as maybe on some level one of the grizzled veterans of the caucus because there had been so many new faces. You’re named, besides being Assistant Majority Leader, you’re named Vice Chair of the powerful Taxation Committee during this very key time when policymakers are dealing not just with the property tax fallout we’ve mentioned, but also with accelerating pressures to ensure that the state’s K-12 schools would be at once adequately and equitably funded.

We’re going to talk about school finance in just a second, but can you tell us what you recall from your days as Vice Chair of maybe one of the most visible committees. I would note that panel had a really impressive leadership roster in those days with Joan Wagnon as Chair and Keith Roe as the ranking Republican member alongside you as Vice Chair. Do you recall that era, those days in the House Tax Committee?

BL: Yes, I do. I also just want to make the comment about being elected the Assistant Majority Leader. When I first came in, Joan was the person that ran the morning caucus that we discussed bills and the activities for the day. They put that job on to me as Assistant Majority Leader at that time because she took over the Chair of the Tax Committee. I did that two years, and then after that, we called that a Caucus Chair, which I did it for about another eight years or nine or ten or something like that.

Getting back to the original question, Joan Finney had proposed this tax proposal that she wanted to eliminate sales tax exemptions in order to raise revenues, and Joan appointed me as chairman of the subcommittee, and we spent days. I think you sat in on most of those meetings, as well. Bob Vancrum, I can’t remember who else was on that group, but anyway we went through every sales tax exemption in the book, and we could only come up with just a handful of things that we could agree on that we could repeal. And eventually they got adopted, but a few years later, most of them got overturned anyway.

CC: They got restored, yes. Before we dive into the K-12 weeds, let’s do a biopic prominent person question. I have always thought Governor Finney was such an interesting figure politically. Sometimes it seemed like she was from a third party, at least from the standpoint that she was not at all shy about clashing with legislative Democrats on occasion, any more than she was with legislative Republicans. Can you talk about your own personal interactions with her as well as those in her administration, and how would you characterize her relationship with the House Democratic Caucus as well as the full Legislature? Do you have any funny or fascinating stories about her to tell? I also seem to recall that she had lobbied legislators to place initiative and referendum constitutional amendments on the ballot, but nothing ever came of that.

BL: It was discussed, but there just wasn’t the will from the Legislature to do the initiative and referendum. I knew Joan Finney before she was elected governor. We were involved with some of these agricultural issues through the mid-eighties. I got along well with her on those types of issues.

But when we got into leadership, I didn’t feel that same friendship that we had had prior to that. I still remember the time that she came into a meeting with our leadership and Marvin Barkis turned his chair to the wall and put his back to her the whole time that she was there, just because he couldn’t get along with her, and we couldn’t come to an agreement on a lot of the issues that we were dealing with.

We were struggling to get things done within our caucus, but then we had to struggle to get things done within the Governor’s position as well, even though she was a Democrat.

CC: History, of course, shows that in 1992 the Legislature at Finney’s urging passed arguably the most significant piece of public policy in the last fifty years, the historic K-12 school finance law, a measure which was designed not just to comply with constitutional mandates regarding adequacy and equity, but also to dramatically reduce property taxes in most areas of the state.

But getting there was a long and winding road during this very interesting and dynamic 1991 to ’92 biennium we’ve been discussing, where Democrats narrowly held the House, Republicans narrowly held the Senate, and you had the populist Governor who was ofttimes marching to her own drummer, all the while the courts were overseeing it all.

In fact, the Legislature sought to pass a modest tax increase with additional K-12 earmarks in 1991, but that measure was not enough of a rewrite of the entire funding system for Governor Finney, who vetoed it, and that really set the stage for the drama of the far more major legislation in 1992.

As staff, I honestly don’t know how many thousand different options and plans and runs that Dale Dennis, Ben Barrett, Steve Stotts, and I may have prepared for your consideration during the 1992 session, but as you will remember, there were more than a few late nights in this building. Please tell us what you recall, including anything I may have gotten wrong or may have overlooked.

CC: Having been in leadership, I was in on the Tax Committee and Education Committee both. I was involved in all sides of this issue, the tax portion of it, the education portion of it, the formula, and every day at 3:30 or something like that, we had leadership meetings in Marvin Barkis’s office, and we’d go in there and start hashing this stuff over, and they’d come back with runs, and we’d look at them. He said, “Oh, this isn’t going to work.” I said, “The first one I’d seen just decimated rural schools.” I said, “It wasn’t a few days later that Dale Dennis and them guys came back with a weighting system.”

Well, we started applying weighting systems to different things within the formula until we finally got to a point where we had something that we thought could work. It took a long time. There were a lot of meetings on that. I said, “Like you said, you’d done probably hundreds of different runs on tax policy issues that went into that, and the mix of taxes that went into it, and the fact that we were limited on how much sales tax because Governor Finney wouldn’t sign it if it was above a certain threshold.”

We eventually got that formula passed, and Joan did yeoman’s work on that. She would have meetings day after day at noon, bringing Republicans into her office and explaining the different things within the tax structure, and why we needed this three-pronged stool approach.

We eventually sold enough people on it that we were able to get it passed. Yes, we had to go back in and revisit it in 2005 because the Legislature didn’t follow through with the court’s directive, and we had to make corrections again. But that formula is still in place yet today. It survived a long time and has been very successful.

CC: As we have discussed, the Governor felt she had a mandate to roll back property taxes, given the results of the 1990 election. So the way the final version of the ’92 school finance law came out was that there was sales and income tax increases enacted to pump that new money back through the new K-12 funding formula and decrease property taxes in most areas of the state.

In 1991, school district general fund mill levies ranged from nine to ninety-eight mills. Under the new law in 1992, all of that was replaced with a single mandatory statewide levy of thirty-two mills. So in the vast majority of school districts, I think it was some 290 of the then 303 districts, there were property tax cuts that were in some cases huge.

On the sales tax component you just mentioned, Finney had insisted the rate could not be raised beyond a certain level. If memory serves, it went from 4.25 to 4.9 in that 1992 law. But she wanted additional sales tax revenues that were going to have to come from base expansion, basically as you noted, repealing exemptions.

You talked a little about this when you chaired the subcommittee. We both know how well defended many of those exemptions are by our friends in the lobbyist community. And you in fact were up to your neck in controversy, chairing that subcommittee, trying to figure out which ones may not be as well justified as some of the others. Is that sort of a fair description?

BL: That’s correct. In order to come up with something that we had consensus on, you could get people on both sides of the issue to agree to it, as I said, we came up with four or five sales-tax exemptions that we could agree to repeal, and that was what we went with because there just wasn’t the possibility of getting anything else through.

CC: All right. Staying in the early nineties, we recall that during the 1992 election, even though Democrat Bill Clinton is elected president, Republicans locally did take the Kansas House Chamber back by a few seats, moving you back to the minority side of the aisle starting in 1993.

During that ’93-’94 biennium, Joan and Keith switched seats as Chair and Ranking Member of House Tax, but many of the same familiar faces were still around. I think we should note that you had served during the entire 1987 to ’94 period with one of those familiar faces, future Governor Kathleen Sebelius before she ran for Insurance Commissioner in 1994. What are your recollections of her as a lawmaker? Did you know she had a bright political future?

BL: I always thought she did. In fact, I sat by her for four years, I believe, here on the House floor. There were three desks here at that time. Anyway, I sat in the middle. Delbert Gross was here, and Kathleen was on the other side of me. She was very knowledgeable and very bright. Of course, she had been a lobbyist before she came into the Legislature. She also had a last name of Sebelius, which statewide, especially in the First District, had a lot of resonance with people in that area. I always thought that she could win a statewide race, and she did, not only for Insurance Commissioner, but for Governor as well.

CC: For Governor, twice. Let’s get into the ascendancy of the conservatives in the mid-nineties, when we will recall that Tim Shallenburger became Speaker in 1995. That starts with the 1994 election, which was a wipe-out pretty much up and down the ballot for your party. Governor Finney had decided not to run again in Kansas. Secretary of State Bill Graves, a Republican, was elected after defeating Democratic Congressman Jim Slattery in the gubernatorial race. Graves was a moderate Republican, but a great many Republicans elected to the House that year in particular turned out to be more conservative than their new Governor.

So starting in ’95, all of this set up an interesting new dynamic for a number of years where there were internal disagreements within the increasingly dominant Republican legislative majority, with Democrats on occasion being able to work more closely with Graves and at least some of the people in the GOP. During this period, the state and national economies for much of the mid and late nineties were both doing quite well, and tax collections were strong as you may recall. Tax relief was therefore a priority for policymakers, especially for many of the conservative Republicans.

In your universe, what had happened was that many moderate Republicans like David Adkins and Kent Glasscock were removed from the Tax Committee by Shallenburger, and the panel in 1995 was suddenly being chaired by young Phill “two L” Kline who had never served a day on it before. The Vice Chair, Clay Aurand was a freshman, I think. You were still there as the ranking Democrat with all of the institutional knowledge. Can you tell us what that was like for you, dealing with this very conservative and very new group of Republicans who were suddenly feeling their oats but had only very limited experience on tax policy?

BL: First of all, let me say I like Phill Kline as a person. Him and I are diametrically opposed on most issues, but we got along. I would fight him on a lot of stuff. Of course, he was going to take his position. I remember a number of the new people coming into the committee that year. We’d have a tax bill that we were talking about cutting taxes on something, and they’d make this argument that “We just need this dynamic scoring. If you cut taxes here, it’s going to flood the treasury with more money than you’d ever lose.” I said, “Well, if that’s the case, let’s just go to zero. We’ll have more money than we’ll know what to do with!”

Anyway, we heard that argument a lot. We disagreed on most everything when it comes to the tax policy, but we got along personally. That’s different than what we see with a lot of the legislators that we have today. They can’t get along personally.

There’s another issue I wanted to go back to. In about 1992, I talked to you that I was appointed to a special select committee, an advisory committee to the Department of Revenue. I can’t remember what the issue [was] that came up, but there was anyway a challenge to the use-value formula. The Department of Revenue had a gentleman over there—I think his name was Bob Walters that put the entire agricultural use value system in place. I mean, he traveled the state. He gathered all the information. He had it all in books and papers. I think he retired somewhere in about 1990.

Somehow or another, all that information disappeared, and we had nothing to back up what the ag values were based on. They set up this committee and advisory group, and we met monthly for a couple of years with Barry Flinchbaugh and different people from Kansas State, and we recreated all the information that went into the agricultural use value formula at the time.

But then there was another issue that came up because the agricultural use value formula is based on a multi-year average prices and yields and expenses with a two-year data lag. Any data that went into the formula is two years behind schedule.

When Sebelius was elected Governor in 2002, it was brought to her attention because the cap rate had dropped. It was going to increase the agricultural values fairly significantly statewide. Sebelius wanted to know—Janis Lee and I were both in this select group, the advisory group. She wanted to know what we could do to maybe keep the values from increasing like they were supposed to.

So Mark Beck and I got together and we started working on a proposal. We came up with a cap rate that was different than what we were using. We were using an average of federal land bank rates. Somebody had commissioned a study on our use value formula, and one of the things that they suggested was that we establish a set cap rate and not allowed to change from year to year.

CC: To float, yes.

BL: Well, to do that, if we were to use the historical average, it actually would have dramatically lowered the property value for that year. So we decided that we would set that cap rate with about a 4 percentage difference and allow it to float. It couldn’t go above a certain level; it couldn’t go below a certain level.

By doing that, it kept the ag land values from increasing dramatically that year. There may have been some slight increase, but the problem with that was, after that, interest rates had dropped so far that nobody ever expected we’d ever see interest rates that low. So it kind of distorted that whole issue because the cap rate was much higher than what it should have been. The lower the cap rate, the higher the land values are going to be. The lower the interest rate, the higher the property values are going to be.

We’re probably back in that range again now with interest rates where they are now, but for a number of years, ag land probably was somewhat undervalued. I know Mark Beck when he was still alive came to me one time and said, “We probably should revisit that,” and I said, “I don’t disagree with you, but you’ll have to get the Legislature to change that.” Nobody ever did anything with it.

And Mark Beck I thought was a good guy. He was appointed by Graves as Property Valuation Director. I worked with him on a number of different issues, and when Joan got to be Secretary, she asked me about Mark Beck and what I thought of him. I said, “From what I could tell, he’s pretty much nonpartisan.” I said, “I think he’s somebody we can work with,” and she kept him on as PVD director, and I appreciated that.

CC: He served as PVD director under both Graves and Sebelius. Kansas lawmakers during these years ended up enacting a major car tax cut package in 1995, several reductions in the statewide mill levy for schools in 1997, and a broad smorgasbord of tax cuts in 1998. Beyond what we’ve discussed already and some of the personalities involved, do you have any more stories or recollections about tax cut battles in the late nineties, or is my characterization of this period fairly accurate.

BL: Your characterization is fairly accurate. One thing I did want to bring up though was there was a huge discussion in the late nineties. Jack Wempe had offered an amendment that would eliminate school property tax and replace it with sales and income. I think we called it Senate Bill 41, something like that. We had a lot of discussion on that. It actually, I think, passed the House, but the Senate balked on it, and the Governor didn’t want it passed.

So he set up a Special Committee to study it over the summer months, and we did. We met in several different places and heard different testimony. They had legislators involved, private industry people, Jack Dicus[1] from Security Benefit Life– I remember him being in on that. Crazy Phil. What was his last name?

CC: Phil Martin.

BL: He was on it. Him and I. They came to the conclusion that they didn’t want to make any changes, and him and I wrote a Minority Report for it. That was kind of a key issue back at that time. I had always pushed for trying to reduce reliance on property tax, mainly because I said it wasn’t tied to any person’s ability to pay. That’s where agricultural use value comes into play and is very attractive because it is based off of income-producing capability. It may take a long time to get to where it’s supposed to be because of the averaging. It does a pretty good job of that.

CC: That would have been the 1995 Tax Equity Tax Force that Governor Graves set up.

BL: Yes.

CC: My next question you’ve already anticipated. I was going to ask you since you were one of the top experts on our tax system, you were always such a fierce advocate and defender of the use value for ag land for property tax purposes. As we discussed, that of course provides that ag land is to be valued according to its productivity or its use instead of its fair market value.

That concept, of course, as we’ve discussed, has always been of great importance to the agricultural sector here in Kansas. Anything else you want to add relative to what you’ve already said?

BL: I think I’ve discussed it pretty well. I think that formula is working pretty well at this point because the interest rates have gotten back within range where they’re more reflective of values, but you still see some minor ups and downs in ag land valuation. A couple of years ago, we were seeing 15 to 20 percent increases, but that was kind of due to the fact that we had some fairly high prices and a lot of income on the farms for a few years.

CC: We should note that you also had future U.S. Senator Jerry Moran working just across the rotunda over in the state Senate until he first got elected to Congress in 1996. Different parties and different legislative chambers, but did you have many interactions with Jerry when he was here? Were you at all surprised when he ran for Congress?

BL: No, I wasn’t surprised when he ran for Congress. I always thought Jerry was a common-sense, respectable guy. Of course, Delbert Gross used to sit here. He used to tell me what a good guy Jerry Moran was. I got along with Jerry. I even would call him up a few times after he’d been elected and discuss some issues. The only comment I’ll make is I’ve been just a little disappointed in the last few years in the position he’s taken on some of the things in the Senate, and I won’t go any further than that.

CC: Fair enough. Let the record show your legislative career also overlapped with future Governors Mark Parkinson and Laura Kelly. Similar question: Do you have any amusing anecdotes or recollections about them or how effective they seemed to be when they were legislators?

BL: Mark Parkinson came in after I left. I knew Mark. He was in the Legislature when I was here.

CC: He was Governor after you left, but he was in the Senate when you were still in the House.

BL: I really never had much to do with Mark. I can’t really say much about him. I remember Laura Kelly serving as the ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate. She pretty much was on top of everything over there when it comes to appropriations. I didn’t have a lot of issues with her because my issues were tax and education and agriculture.

CC: And she was the budget guru in the Senate.

BL: Yes. But I also knew she was very bright and knew what she was doing.

CC: Moving along on our timeline into the new millennium, we of course recall the crippling impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent recession quickly became apparent for the state’s economy and tax collections. At the very least, the salad days of the late nineties just a few years earlier must have seemed a distant memory.

If I recall, lawmakers in 2002 had to enact both painful budget cuts as well as a tax increase just to keep the General Fund out of the red ink for fiscal 2003. Anything of note about getting a multi-pronged tax hike and budget cuts across the finish line in 2002?

BL: I remember the discussion, and I was involved with all the various parts of the tax bill, but when it comes down to the final analysis, the Senate pushed for some proposal, and I just couldn’t go along with it. I thought it was too extreme on one issue, and I wound up not voting for it. But it had the votes to pass. I wasn’t arguing against the bill. There were certain things that I disagreed with and couldn’t vote for it. It was something we knew that had to be done.

CC: Staying in 2002, Kathleen Sebelius defeats Tim Shallenburger in the gubernatorial race and would be on second floor for the balance of your tenure here in the Legislature. Once she was sworn in in 2003, I am assuming the access that you and others in the House Democratic Caucus may have had to the administrative branch of government and its thought process maybe changed somewhat relative to how it had been under Graves?

I know that your former colleague Joan Wagnon was quickly installed as Governor Sebelius’ Secretary of Revenue. Tell us anything worth mentioning during the 2003 to 2005 period, which would be your final years serving here in the Chamber. I know there was a somewhat dramatic if brief special session during the summer of 2005 you already mentioned to again shore up the state’s K-12 school finance.

BL: I’m thinking, if I can rack my brain here for just a second that maybe there’s some other issues that I wanted to talk about from earlier in that timeframe, but right now, I’ve kind of lost my train of thought. Ask me another question.

CC: One very important piece of legislation enacted some twenty years ago involved the multi-state Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement. Do you have any interesting stories about getting that legislation across the finish line?

BL: A very interesting story on that. The Department of Revenue had been promoting this issue, and they went to the Senate and got the Senate to pass the bill. So it was sitting in the House Committee, and I can’t remember why we didn’t take it up, but when we got to conference committee, we had told them that we’ll just agree to their position on this bill. The Senate conferee says, “No, we’re not going to do that.” We had come to find out that the Senate President had made a promise to some lobbyist that he’d make sure that bill would never see the light of day.

Well, we got into a fight at the end of the session. The Senate President had kind of kept us here an extra two, three days over some minor issue. I think it was on school finance. Everybody was upset with him. So a group of Democrat and Republican leaders, Doug Mays was Speaker, and we met in his office, and we were trying to come up with, “What can we do to get to Dave Kerr?” We were kind of racking our brains.

I said, “Well, now wait a minute.” I said, “That sales tax bill that was going to cause Amazon to be taxed”^[2], I said, “was a Senate bill.” I said, “All we have to do is pull it from committee, pass it out of here, it will go directly to the Governor for her signature, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.” “All right. We’re going to do that.” I think John Edmonds, if I remember right, made the comment, “This is the Stick It to Dave Kerr Bill.”

So we passed that bill, and I said—it caused a little upheaval on the other side, but we got a little revenge.

CC: This was the ’03, ‘4, and ‘5 era when Sebelius is here on second floor, and Joan is over at Revenue, your final sessions here in the Legislature. Anything you recall about some of those years?

BL: Well, we had a good working relationship with Kathleen, but I wanted to go back to a timeframe, back when Shallenburger was Speaker.

CC: This would have been the late nineties.

BL: I think it was a tax bill that we were working on. We were working with Kent Glasscock and the moderate Republicans to come up with a proposal we could agree to. We had basically come to an agreement on a certain tax package that I think we put into another shell bill or something that came to the floor. Everybody in our caucus had been told this was the package deal. This was what we were working on with the moderates. We couldn’t put any amendments on this bill.

We were working that bill, and everything was going smoothly. We were this close to basically forming a coalition government here in the House with maybe joint leadership from Republicans and Democrats, both. It fell apart when somebody came down with an amendment to put the $10,000 exemption on property tax for schools. We had three of our members who bailed, and it [the amendment] went on.

The whole coalition fell apart. Not only did we not—every year when I was here when Graves was in office, we basically controlled the major issues that went through the House through the coalition. But after that, we were out in left field. Nobody would work with us because they couldn’t trust us because we couldn’t follow through with the promise that there would be no amendments that went on this bill. So it was over. After that, we may as well not have been here.

CC: But you’re saying had that not have happened, there might actually have been a shake-up in the leadership of the House.

BL: There might have been a real shake-up in state government in general because I think we could have had joint leadership from both parties.

CC: Early in 2006, you announced you were resigning your legislative seat to take a position under Secretary Wagnon over at the Department of Revenue where you worked a lot in the Tax Appeals Division. That turned out to be some especially relevant service for you, given that about a year or so later in 2007, you would be appointed by Governor Sebelius to the state Board of Tax Appeals. Was all of this something that the two or three of you had cooked up, go to Revenue for a year, learn about the tax appeals system, and then get on BOTA?

BL: It was something that had been discussed. The BOTA position, you had to meet certain qualifications for each one of the positions that came open. That was the goal, the position with BOTA, but I had to wait until that position came open in order to be filled. In one case, one of them had to be an accountant. One of them had to be a lawyer, and the others were at large. It was more the at-large position that I got at the time.

Joan decided that it would be good for me to oversee the Tax Appeals Division at the Department of Revenue to get some handle on how tax appeals worked. While I was there, I got a bill pushed through the Legislature to change the way tax appeals were filed through the Department of Revenue.

That made some lobbyists and some other people mad. At the time, after the Governor appointed me before I was confirmed, I had the state chamber of commerce and a major lawyer out of Wichita that were fighting against me getting on the board.

CC: About a year or so after you get appointed to BOTA, the Board of Tax Appeals, the Legislature in 2008 finally passes a major overhaul regarding your new location in state government that they had been batting around since the 1990s, transforming it into the state Court of Tax Appeals, an actual tax tribunal of sorts where you would go on to become its Chief Judge.

Do you recall anything about why they wanted to change BOTA to COTA? This is something I’m especially curious about since policymakers maybe eight or ten years ago undid all of that, and we now in fact have BOTA again.

BL: From the people that I was involved with—I wasn’t involved with the legislation that changed that, but I know that their goal was to try to make it a more professional board with attorneys and lawyers and judges. Anyway, they basically make it as judges. I was grandfathered in because I didn’t meet some of those qualifications, but that was their goal, make it more professional so that the decisions that were made would stand up better down the line in court.

And when they made us a court, we tried to operate as a court. We went by the Code of Judicial Conduct. We did everything that a court would do in that realm.

CC: You served on the body through 2012 while it was still COTA. I know not just the judicial ethics that you just mentioned, but you’ve told me that you and fellow members got into the spirit of things by actually wearing judicial robes during hearings.

BL: We did.

CC: Can you tell us what it was like, dealing with so many tax appeals during your five years on the board and the court? I’m guessing that the majority of cases always involved property tax valuation appeals. Any funny stories you can tell us about your days conducting these hearings? I know you would travel around the state and not always make people come to Topeka. Is that correct?

BL: That was correct initially. Then because of budget cuts, we were forced to gradually just keep reducing the travel. We eliminated the travel all together. Then we also had to put a fee on anybody that wanted to appeal. Well, most of the residential cases were not major cases. Most of the people weren’t going to pay a $25 fee with the Court of Tax Appeals on their property tax valuations.

So that changed over time, and the number of property valuation cases we got, especially residential, dropped dramatically. But, yes, during the initial few years, we would travel. We would travel to Wichita. We’d go to Leavenworth, Kansas City, Johnson County. Of course, we’d have to hear cases in Topeka. Once in a while, we’d even show up in Dodge City.

But the most interesting case that I was ever involved in was in Wyandotte County. This little old gray-haired lady comes before us, and she was furious because she had a rental house that was right next to the house where she lived in, and her daughter had lived there for a while, but she had moved overseas for some work. It was only like three foot apart from her house and this rental house. They had raised her valuation from $25,000 to $27,000 that year, and she said, “It’s just time to put your foot down and say enough is enough!”

Of course, as you’re aware, a $2,000 valuation increase doesn’t amount to that much tax dollar wise, but we went on to listen to her story, and she told us about how she had spent a lot of time overseas. She was kind of like a Jane Goodall, lived with the apes in Africa. She had got a conditional use permit from Wyandotte County, and she was taking care in her house right next door to this other one, she was taking care of five handicapped apes.

Anyway, she was just asking that her valuation be left where it was at, that it wouldn’t increase. After she left, we discussed it, and we decided that maybe that house next to her maybe not be worth anything to anybody. Who would want to buy a house living next to a lady with five handicapped apes? So she won her case.

That was probably the most interesting or the funniest one that I was involved in over the years. We had a lot of major cases that a lot of times we’d get appealed on to the District Court or at higher levels.

CC: When aggrieved taxpayers would come in particularly upset over valuation increases or whatnot, would you have people berate you? What were most of these hearings like? I’m sure some of that must have been pretty interesting.

BL: Well, a lot of them were interesting. People were just complaining about “Our valuations went up, and we can’t understand why.” Most of them were what you would call unprofessional when they came. They really didn’t have the documentation or information to prove why things had happened. They’d just make their case. I think it was just something to get it off their chest.

Another interesting case we had was out of Johnson County was in the Mission Hills area where this guy was determined that his house was worth nothing. He had done nothing to fix it up. You could tell where the roof was leaking, and the ceilings were falling down. He had taken pictures of all of this. The only problem was people were buying houses like his, tearing them down, and paying more for the lot than what he was appraised at. So, consequently, you couldn’t give him any relief because just the land underneath of his zero-value house was worth more than what his appraisal value was.

It was interesting. He’d come in every year. But he couldn’t understand that because his house was rundown, his valuation wasn’t dropping. I said it had nothing to do with his house. It had to do with his land.

CC: Our mutual friend and your longtime Senate Democratic colleague on tax conference committees, Janis Lee, joined you on COTA in 2011 after she left the Senate. Was it fun for you as former policymakers to reconnect in your new roles on tax tribunal?

BL: Definitely. Of course, Janis came in as the Executive Director. We had worked together on the Tax Committee. We had been on the Use Value Committee over the years. It’s definitely good to have a friend there with you. She also was allowed to sit in on hearings as a replacement for one of the other board members that couldn’t be there or judges that couldn’t be there at the time.

CC: One thing I have to ask you about because you told me one time, I don’t know if they still use grey envelopes for floor amendments out here on the floor of the House, but I recall you telling me one time when you and other Democrats would want to irritate Republicans, you would take empty grey envelopes and march up and down the aisle so they would think floor amendments were coming. We had a mutual Revisor friend who did not think you guys should have been doing this. Am I misremembering this? Is that something you may have been involved with?

BL: I’m not sure it was floor amendments or just amendments for something else that looked like this here. We’d start walking up and down the aisle and talking to people about it. It made it look like we had an amendment coming. Yes, occasionally you do things.

CC: Turning our attention back to a few final questions involving your nearly two-decade legislative career. Can you tell us which lobbyists you worked with the most often, and which ones you thought have been the most effective? Which ones did you respect the most, and maybe which ones did you dread seeing the most coming into your office, regardless of how effective they may have been?

BL: Well, into the office or in the committee room, whichever it happened to be. Probably the lobbyist that I had the most connection with was John Bottenberg. Of course, he kind of sided with the Democrats a lot. A lot of them that I respected—I’m forgetting his name, former Speaker.

CC: Mike O’Neal?

DH: McGill

BL: Pete McGill. I always liked Pete, Linda. They had a lot of events at their house and a lot of discussions with them. Don Peterson, Tom Tunnel. Tom—what was the transportation, trucker?

CC: Whitaker?

BL: Whitaker, yes. These were all professional people. There’s a lot more that I’m not even thinking of. I didn’t have a whole lot of use for Peterjohn. What was his first name?

CC: Karl.

BL: Karl Peterjohn. I didn’t get along very well with the state chamber of commerce lobbyist, but for the most part, most of them were, you know, even people I may have disagreed with, didn’t mean that I couldn’t get along with them. I saw Jim Allen after he quit the Legislature. I never got along with him on issues here, but I got along with him fine when he was a lobbyist.

There are a lot of good people, and then there are some that are a little on the shady side that you just have to be aware and be careful what’s being said and how it’s being accepted.

CC: The same sort of question for state officials. You worked with so many different Secretaries of Revenue, Transportation, SRS, Agriculture over the years. Any particular memories regarding those relationships or of working with their staff?

BL: I had a good working relationship with the Secretary of Revenue from 2002 to 2008. I can’t remember the name of the guy that was Secretary under Mike Hayden for Transportation.

CC: Horace Edwards?

BL: We tried to do a major transportation bill at that time. I liked him. He was a straight shooter and good to work with. Most of the people I probably had contact with were more in the Revenue Department, the Education Department. Dale Dennis was just top of the line. He was a walking computer. And Verle Peters was good. I don’t know. Is Dale still around?

CC: Actually, he is. I heard he’s back over there.

BL: Is he? There’s a lot of good people that you work with that stay. A lot of people have the perception that everybody there is out for themselves, and they’re evil and all the rest of that. No, there are a lot of professionals that do their job and are good quality people. I found more of that than not.

CC: If I could make an observation, I always thought that your strong suit was working with others regardless of policy differences to get things accomplished. But now that I’ve complimented you on this, comes the trickier question to think about. Given that you’ve been around the policymaking whirlwind in one form or another since the mid-eighties, how would you compare and contrast the institutions of state government today, especially the Legislature with the way things were almost four decades ago? What are the biggest differences? Are those differences positive or negative in your mind? Please feel free to talk about anything you want from changes in technology to increased political polarization to changing perceptions about the role of the public sector to the accelerating influence of powerful special interest groups.

BL: Probably more than anything, I want to talk about just the Legislature itself and how things have changed over the years. When I came into the Legislature, there were a lot of social issues. You’re always invited to some organization’s dinner, whatever, every night. You met at these places, and you met Democrats, Republicans, and you became friends with both sides. You’d go out in the evenings. You’d discuss things. Policy-wise, you may not agree with people, but you could get along with them.

The thing that I’ve seen happen, and it kind of started with the advent of the Tea Party is that there’s a group of people that have come in that have taken the position that the other side is evil, and you can’t deal with them because if you deal with them, you’re the devil. So consequently, there’s none of that interaction between people. You can’t work out disagreements to come to a decent policy position on things.

The other thing, and people may agree or disagree with me, but when Brownback got elected Governor, he brought Washington politics to the state of Kansas, and that created more division and more partisanship. In fact, there were certain positions that the state for years had set up that no more than two people can be of the same party. Brownback just ignored that. He’d find somebody to switch to independent, and he’d select them to a certain board so that he had control of two or three or how many people was on these different boards.

That wasn’t the way we operated prior to that. You followed the letter of the law and what the legislative intent was up until that point. But what I’m seeing now, there’s so much polarization. There’s so much hatred because one side or the other is evil that nobody can seem to work together. It’s my way or the highway. Consequently, we have a difficult time getting things done, especially at the federal level.

CC: Regarding this polarized political landscape, I recall actually playing pick-up basketball on Wednesday nights during legislative sessions in the early nineties with you and other legislators in both political parties alongside lobbyists, various state officials, and even members of the media. Setting aside the time you ran over me like a dog in the lane and I did not even ask for the basket to be waved off because of your charging foul, I guess it would be hard for us to imagine those kinds of outside-the-Statehouse interactions occurring nearly as much today. Is that a fair assumption?

BL: I would say that’s a fair assumption. Like I said, you don’t see the social activity amongst the different people like you did back in those days. We used to have a bipartisan basketball team. We even played the Oklahoma team that came up and brought a ringer that was a college player. We played them over at KU before the KU game.

“We used to get together every Wednesday night.” Of course, I forgot to mention Dave Holthaus. He was the lobbyist, KPL [Kansas Power & Light] then went on to be at the rural electrics. I said, “Yeah, he was a good guy. He always kind of put it together. We played at some Catholic school out there in the southwest part of town.” We had a good time, and I was as competitive at that as I was at anything else. If you got in my way, you were in trouble.

CC: I seem to recall that. Anything else you want to add about what the future holds for you? I assume at this point the chances are not high that you would ever re-enter electoral politics yourself, but do you maybe plan to campaign for Democrats up and down the ballot this fall? Or are you glad that a lot of that stuff is in the rear-view mirror at this point?

BL: I still try to help out with certain campaigns in the area. I don’t get that terribly involved. I don’t have any intention of running for any position in the future at this point. I’m getting to that stage where I kind of enjoy my quiet time, enjoy my family and the kids and grandkids and great grandkids, just taking it easy.

CC: Understood. Listen, thank you so much for your time today.

BL: Thank you, I appreciate it.

[End of File]

[1] Dicus was actually President of Capitol Federal Savings and Loan, not Security Benefit.

[2] The issue was to force Amazon, an out -of-state company, to collect sales tax on sales to Kansas customers.

Interviewee Date of Birth

August 25, 1950

Interviewee Political Party

Democrat

Interviewee Positions

Member, Use Value Advisory Committee of KDOR
Member, House Education 1987-1998
Member, Kansas House of Representatives 1987-2006
Vice-Chair, House Taxation 1991-1992
Asst. Majority Leader, House Democrat Caucus 1991-1992
Ranking Minority Member, House Taxation 1995-2006
Ranking Minority Member, House Transportation 1999-2000
Member, House Agriculture 2001-2006
Board Member, Kansas Board of Tax Appeals 2007-2009
Chief Judge, Kansas Court of Tax Appeals 2009-2012

Interview Location

Statehouse, Topeka, KS

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Bruce, Joan, Chris after the interview

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Interview of Bruce Larkin, April 12, 2024

Interviewed by Chris Courtwright