Interview of Eber Phelps, July 26, 2024
Interviewed by Chris Courtwright
Eber Phelps' interview covers the 18 years he served in the Kansas Legislature. Phelps paints a picture of the changes in the political culture and environment that occurred during his tenure. He blamed his loss in 2012 on the Brownback tax cuts, and his win in 2016 on the Brownback tax cuts. He lost because he voted against the tax experiment; he defeated Sue Boldra because of the problems the tax experiment caused in the Kansas economy and her insistence that nothing was wrong. The interview covers how Phelps became interested in politics, and the work he did on education and economic development. His work on the Insurance committee with chairman Bob Tomlinson stands in stark contrast to the current mode of work in the Legislature. The description of how the Mayor and city council found a way to solve a pressing water problem reveals his belief in community engagement. The interview closes with a discussion of how state government changed during his tenure. He noted there were 18 Democratic legislators elected from west of Salina when he was sworn in in 1996 and tax returns were filed on paper. Today, everything is online, and the makeup of the legislature is completely different.
Highlights -- short excerpts from the interview
Abortion; Bipartisanship; Brownback tax experiment; Hays Water Crisis; Income tax; Leadership style; Local Ad Valorem Tax Reduction Fund (LAVTRF); Political culture; Political philosophy; Population density; Public schools; School finance; tax cuts; Tax Experiment of 2012; Tax lid; Water conservation; Water management; Wildlife Management
Eber Phelps served in the Kansas House of Representatives representing Ellis County and Hays America for a total of 18 years. He was first elected in 1996 to the 111th district and served sixteen years until 2012 when he was defeated in the 2012 election. He ran again in 2016 and won, to return for the 2017-18 biennium. Phelps then lost a very close 2018 election (by 32 votes) after which he ended his legislative career. Prior to his election to the Legislature, he also served as Mayor of Hays and on its city council. During Eber Phelps tenure as Mayor of Hays and a State Representative, he was known for being an advocate for education, a leader on economic development, a champion of infrastructure improvements and an engaged public servant. A graduate of St. Joseph's Military Academy and Fort Hays State University, Phelps also served as an ambassador for the US Army Reserve Corps for six years. During his legislative service he was elected by his colleagues to the position of House Minority Whip. Over the years Phelps was heavily involved with the Fort Hays State Alumni Association, the Ellis County Historical Society and the Knights of Columbus. The City of Hays honored him in 2000 with its Citizen of the Year Award. In conjunction with his legislative duties, he worked for many years in sales and marketing for the Glassman Corporation and a mechanical contractor in Hays.
Chris Courtwright: Good afternoon. Today is July 26th, 2024, and we’re here in the historic House Chamber of the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka, Kansas. I’m Chris Courtwright, who served for thirty-four years working as an economist in 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 am privileged to interview former Representative Eber Phelps, who served as a Democrat in the Kansas Legislature representing Ellis County and his beloved city of Hays for a total of eighteen years in two different stints, serving the 111th District, and has enjoyed a long, distinguished, and very fascinating career in the public sector. He was first elected in 1996 and served through 2012 and subsequently returned for another two-year term during an especially critical time that we will get to here in a few minutes, the 2017-2018 biennium.
Prior to being elected to his House seat the first time, he had served as mayor of Hays and on the city council. A graduate of St. Joseph’s Military Academy and Fort Hays State University, Ebert also proudly served as an ambassador for the US Army Reserve Corps for six years. A former House Minority Whip, he was known during his legislative career as a tireless advocate for all things education including K-12, higher education, and vocation and technical.
A longstanding community asset for Hays and the surrounding area, Eber has been heavily involved over the years with the Fort Hays State Alumni Association, the Ellis County Historical Society, and the Knights of Columbus. The city of Hays in fact honored him in 2000 with its Citizen of the Year Award.
Outside of his legislative duties, he served for many years in sales and marketing for the Glassman Corporation, an important regional mechanical contractor located in Hays. Did I get most of that right?
Eber Phelps: Absolutely. Very good.
CC: This interview with Mr. Phelps is 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 served during the 1960s and subsequent decades. The interviews will be accessible to researchers, educators, historians, 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.
During your time in the legislature, you served on quite a number of committees, including the Education, Appropriations, Transportation, Taxation, Higher Education Budget, Local Government, and Aging and Long-Term Care Committees to name just a few, and you were a former ranking member on LEPC, the Health Care Stabilization and Overnight Committee, and the House Insurance Committee, the latter of which we’re going to delve into here in just a minute if that works for you. Did I cherry-pick most of the highlights there?
EP: Absolutely. I remember thinking back over the years. It’s kind of hard to remember all those committees, but every two years, a lot of times, you’d pick up a new committee. Just last night, I had forgotten all about the fact that I was on Agriculture, Tourism, and the Environment, and that was in my first session. Those were really good committees to be on at that particular time.
CC: Definitely a jack of all trades. Before we jump into your legislative career and committee work and big issues and whatnot, let’s briefly go back in time and fill in some of the prior history we mentioned and get some additional background. You are a native Kansan who in fact was born in Hays. Is that correct? Were you parents from the area?
EP: Actually, an interesting thing there is that my father was actually from England and came over to the United States when he was about twenty-five years old, I believe. And my mother was local. She was a Volga German. She was born and grew up in a little town south of Hays called Schoenchen, or as the Volga Germans said, Schoenstatt.
So it was kind of an interesting thing with my dad being British and ending up in that German community. He was born in 1901. When he was twenty-seven years old or whatever, that was when, it was post-World War I, and I think a lot of the young men from England came over to the United States seeking a better life. He came over with four other gentlemen.
Unfortunately, when I was young – he died when I was nine years old – there were a lot of questions I didn’t think about asking him. And then when I became high school age and all that, I was really curious. As I got into college, I was even more curious. I ended up going to England and looking up relatives and all that, who I’ve kept in contact with to this day.
CC: Fascinating. Tell us a little bit more about your time at the military academy and also Fort Hays. What were you majoring in? What kind of career were you interested in pursuing?
EP: Well, of course, the military school was established in Hays back in I think like 1938. They actually even had a junior college there, a two-year college. My mother was definitely fascinated with the school because of the military program. She was a single mother, widowed with four kids, and the youngest was myself. I think she thought, “This military school will really be good.” Not that I was out of control or anything.
At any rate, I went there. That was a great experience, lifelong friends because they had a resident program there. I was a day student, a day dog, and we had people from all over the United States and Central and South America. So it was a real eye-opening thing as far as meeting people from different cultures and so forth.
And then at Fort Hays, I started there right after high school and was pursuing a major in psychology. I really enjoyed that and wasn’t sure exactly what direction I was going to go with that, but as I mentioned, I was curious about where my dad was from and so forth. So I took a break from college, at least after one spring semester, I had gone over to Europe and did the whole backpacking trip around Europe and went to England and traced from old letters that I had from my dad from his sister, I found out where all my relatives were that were surviving at least.
I think it might have been on that trip where I suddenly realized, I said, “I’m not sure I want to be a psychologist.” And subsequently, I did come back to school, and the wanderlust was still there, and I ended up going back overseas for a real long time, about ten months, and traveled. When I got done with that, I came back and ended up getting into private business and then subsequently sold that business and went overseas to work in the Middle East.
CC: Where did you work in the Middle East?
EP: My main duty station, I guess you could call it was where I was working was in a little country called Qatar. I worked there and did training there and also went to school and trained in Bahrain. Then along the way, I mainly worked there in the desert. I did a little offshore work, off the coast there of Bahrain.
Then I ended up later on doing a little stint on the west coast of Africa off the coast of Angola. That was out of my region. So it was kind of a special assignment. I went down there and worked. When I was done with that, I went back to the Middle East.
CC: And you worked for one of the big oil companies, is that correct?
EP: Actually, an oil field service company called Halliburton. They were huge. In those days, they were in about eighty-eight countries. They had a camp in Hays. I never did work for any company like that in the United States. My first foray into working in that kind of work was over in the Middle East, a little bit of baptism by fire.
CC: How long were you working for Halliburton in these different countries abroad?
EP: Oh, probably about six or seven—I think a little over six years.
CC: When you came back to the US, you apparently not too long thereafter got into public service. So I guess I would ask, did you have a favorite professor or mentor or anyone who encouraged you to get into public service, and had anyone in your family been in the political arena or public sector before you?
EP: I can answer that in several different ways. For one thing, if you can believe this, my father being British settled in Hays, and he eventually became a policeman, and then he was encouraged to run for sheriff of Ellis County. So he was elected—this was pretty amazing—elected sheriff on a write-in ballot and won in a landslide over an incumbent.
CC: Wow.
EP: I had the articles where I read that. It was pretty amazing. I always thought about that because I grew up—back in the day, I don’t know if it happens anymore, but they used to have the sheriff’s living quarters right in the courthouse. So when I grew up, I lived in the Ellis County Courthouse on the lower level. It was just an incredible experience to live there and going out and going to all the offices and just kind of hanging out in the Sheriff’s Office with my dad.
So that kind of was a—I don’t know if that encouraged me to run for politics, but my mother was always involved in the election ward and always stressed how important it was to vote and so forth. And then as time went on, I really didn’t have any college professor or anything that encouraged me to run for office, but there was a, interestingly enough, a gentleman that was an instructor at Fort Hays that was on the city commission. One day he mentioned to me that I ought to consider running for the city commission. And then you kind of mention that to one person, and it just kind of snowballs. So I ended up running for city commission in Hays.
CC: What year was this?
EP: 1990.
CC: 1990. How many years did you serve on the Hays City Council before you became Mayor Phelps?
EP: Well, our form of government there was a commission city manager. So the mayor was not elected at large from within the commission, and it’s based on your vote total. So every two years, there was an election, and three people would get elected, two to a four-year term and one to a two-year term. So that first election, I got elected to a four-year term. I was a commissioner for two years, and then that third year in 1993, I became the mayor.
CC: When you were mayor: water, streets, infrastructure, what were some of the big issues?
EP: Well, you hit on it there. Obviously, water was paramount. I always tell this story that as I was running for city commission, we had the other people running that ended up getting elected. We were always talking about the importance of water and maintaining that resource and looking at ways to increase our source of water. We had a very complicated water delivery system because we had wells on the Smoky Hill River and also on the Big Creek alluvium, and then we also had drilled some Dakota wells. We were talking about the importance of water, increasing our population, economic development, a lot of the usual hot-button issues I guess you could say for somebody running for office.
And lo and behold, we get elected, and I think it was at our first meeting, we’re all sitting there. We’re excited about being elected, and lo and behold, our city service director, I think that was his title, informed us that two of the wells on the Smoky Hill River were literally sucking air.
CC: Oh, my gosh.
EP: And so that kind of—oh, yeah, I know, when we were all around, we were all talking about being proactive. So this thing comes up with the water, with the wells there. But one of the things they did was reconfigure the wells because they were too close together, and when they pumped real hard, that caused issues.
But then we transitioned right into water conservation mode, and we brought a gentleman in. I know he’s from California, and he was from an area that was land—I want to say “landlocked”—but they had big places around them. Any time you hear about water shortage in west Kansas, right away, a community will ban outside watering. Well, he came to us and said, “That’s fine for three months out of the year.” He said, “We use water every day?”
So his thing was to stress water conservation inside the home. We embarked on a program where we distributed 6,000 low-flow showerheads to anybody who came in and brought their old showerhead in. We restructured our water payment system and gave away aerators for the kitchen sinks and all that.
And then we did an educational process whereby the theory was you go teach the kids, and they’ll go home and teach their parents. So each commissioner was assigned a couple of schools, and we would go to the schools and do a visual where we had gallon jugs tied together to show what a cubic foot of water looked like, and we went around and talked about conservation and said how much water you’d save by having a low-flow showerhead and all that. And the kids would go home and tell their parents. I had parents come to me who said, “My son sits outside the shower with his watch telling me, ‘Dad, it’s time to get out of the shower’”
So it worked. The city of Hays reduced its water consumption by half.
CC: Wow.
EP: And that was unheard of. At the very beginning, communities around us were laughing at us. “Flush your toilet twice. Hays needs the water” or “Save water. Drink beer,” things like that. And then this gentleman from California told us, he said, “If you do all this and you’re successful,” he said, “you better have somebody on staff that just answers the phone and answers questions because everybody is going to be calling up and saying, ‘How did you do that?’”
And that goes on to this day where they say, “How did you do that water structure thing? How did you do the giveaway and all that?” And you say, “Get a good deal on low-flow showerheads and tell people to come in and bring their old showerhead in and trade it.”
CC: Really interesting. I have to tell you that I went to school at KU with a guy from Hays who always got a kick out of calling his hometown Hays, America. My impression was that that was something that the locals had come up with from a travel and tourism standpoint after someone had discovered there was no other city in the US named Hays and spelled exactly the same way. Is this ringing any bells for you? Was this clever branding attempt part of the local civic pride?
EP: Well, I kind of researched that a little bit, and I don’t know if this is true or not, but I was told that during World War II, a lot of young men from the Hays area answered the call, and they said there were several of the men who wrote home and they would just address their letter, “Hays, USA” and mail it and somehow it would get to the parents or whatever. Maybe some of them actually put “Hays, America,” I don’t know.
What really got it going was there was a rather energetic entrepreneurial gentleman in Hays that had a big furniture store and probably some other businesses. But he would always do his advertisements, he’d go, “Shop at my store,” and his byline was, the tagline was, “the big store in Hays, America.” His name was Wyler, and it was Wyler Furniture Store, and he’d go, “Wyler, it’s the big store in Hays, America,” and that just caught on. He was doing that I think back in the fifties.
Now locally it’s Hays, America, but the locals will say Hays. It sounds like H-a-c-e. You still hear it to this day. I always send birthday notices online, and I’ll go, “Wishing you a happy birthday from Hays, America.”
CC: So you’re part of the local civic pride in this regard then.
EP: I believe so.
CC: What made you decide to run for the legislature initially in 1996? Your predecessor, of course, had been Delbert Gross, also a Democrat. Were you approached by him or the party as he was opting to leave the stage, or were you just more generally getting concerned with the way state government was treating your fair city such that you decided mostly on your own ticket it was time to run for the House?
EP: There really wasn’t a single state issue that brought me into wanting me to run. I actually enjoyed being on the city commission very much. I’ll even look back to this day and have fond memories of being in city government. Anybody who’s ever served on city government knows that a lot of times when you do something, you can see the immediate result. You have a discussion at a meeting and pass that ordinance or whatever. You’ll see it going into effect and so forth. We saw that with our water conservation efforts.
CC: Sure.
EP: But also I really hadn’t thought about the state government, but I did hear, and it was confirmed that Delbert had planned not to run again. So I kind of gave it some thought, and a couple of people mentioned it to me. So I just went down to the courthouse and filed.
I filed real early. I remember Martin Hawver called me. I didn’t know who he was, but he called me up, identified himself, and he goes, “So what’s the deal?” and I said, “Excuse me? What’s the deal?” He goes, “The election is not until way off.” He said, “You’ve already filed.” I said, “Well, I just figured I’d better get me name out there. So I went ahead and filed.” And that was to run in the ’96 election.
CC: So this might have been late ’95 when you filed?
EP: I believe it was, yes.
CC: Tell us a little bit about your first House campaign. I’m guessing it was different from what you had experienced running for election as a city official just within Hays. Was there a lot more door-to-door public forums, media questionnaires, and interest group surveys to complete? And certainly I’m guessing that there must have been a larger set of voters to interact with, presumably within much of the broader Ellis County. Did you run radio ads? Were yard signs a big thing? Without naming names, do you have any amusing stories about eccentric people you may have met on front porches the first time around? Front porch campaign stories, many of them involving dogs by the way, are always some of my favorite things to ask about.
EP: Well, the short answer is yes. The fact of the matter is back in those days, I believe, it was always stressed for me by people in elective office that preceded me and it was the importance of going door to door. That was a necessary thing to do in those days was to put out a few yard signs, go door to door extensively. Back then, you didn’t have any kind of voter—you’d just get a voter list, and then you just went down the street and knocked on—I would knock on every door.
Back then, the radio and newspaper was fairly affordable. You didn’t have to really raise a lot of money. So you’d put a couple of ads in the Hays newspaper and then on a couple of local radio stations, and then you’d put your yard signs out and went around and had your phone cards and handed those out. That was running for city government.
When I ran for the state legislature for a couple of campaigns it was just like that, where you just got key locations for your yard signs and just went out. I always said it was really hard to get started going door to door, but once I got started, it became part of your routine. You get off work and go knock on a few doors, stop when it started to get a little bit dark, and then get out there on the weekend as well.
Now, an interesting story. I don’t think I really got chased by a dog, but one of my fond memories of campaigning was driving down a street, Allen Street in Hays, and it was raining. I went by this house and did a doubletake. There was an elderly lady that had one of my yard signs, and it was raining, and she was out there, and you know, the cleaner bags you get when you take your clothes to the cleaners? She was out there in the rain, putting that over one of my yard signs. And I pulled around the corner. I said, “Mrs. So and So, you really don’t have to do that.” She was worried that my sign was going to get wet and ruined. So a good story there.
I had another one time when I was out running for the legislature, and all those years of going door to door, I never really had anybody get nasty with me, but I was walking away from a house, and a guy came out on the porch after I’d given him the card, and he just started yelling at me about what a terrible job I was doing and all that. I can’t even remember exactly what he was complaining about, but the interesting thing was, a couple of years later, I went back to that house, and the guy came out and was telling me what a wonderful job I had done as a state legislator, and he was really hoping I’d get elected again. I walked away from there, and I said, “Thank you.” I didn’t want to say, “I’m the guy that you were screaming at two years ago. What’s the deal here?” I just let it go.
CC: You must have had a very effective term that time.
EP: Evidently.
CC: When you entered the legislature for your first session in 1997, this was an era where there was some strong internal disagreements within the Republic legislative majority across the aisle from you. With Democrats on occasion being able to work more closely with moderate Republican Governor Bill Graves and some of his similarly moderate allies, especially across the rotunda from us over in the Senate. The state and national economies for much of the mid-through-late nineties were doing quite well, as you will recall, and tax collections were strong. Tax relief was a priority for policymakers, especially for many of the conservative Republicans, as you may recall.
During your first term, there were several reductions ultimately enacted in the statewide mill levy for public schools as well as a smorgasbord of other tax cuts. Before we get into some of your work on the Insurance Committee, what can you tell us about some of the overall legislative dynamics and key personalities of your first few years here in Topeka? What do you recall about Graves, about Speaker Tim Shallenburger, Senate President Dick Bond and some of the other major players? Did Graves and his staff maintain a good working relationship with the minority party in the House, for example?
EP: I would say yes. I think as you talk to a lot of legislators that came in before me back in the seventies and eighties and early nineties, they will all tell you kind of a similar story about just working to get things done, and it didn’t really make any difference who got credit for it or anything like that. So that was the way it was when I first entered the legislature in 1997. I always tell the story that when they had the freshman orientation, they used to tell us to go in and get a seat anywhere in there, and I sat next to a gentleman from Johnson County, the late David Huff. He was a real jovial, humorous guy.
CC: Yes, he was.
EP: I think we had an orientation for about two days or whatever. We sat there, and then when the session started, and you’re assigned seats, I’m sitting there, and I’m trying to figure out where David Huff was, and he was on the other side of the aisle. Honest to God, we had never even discussed anything about—
CC: Democrat or Republican.
EP: Affiliation. We were kind of looking forward to the end of the legislature and going through all of the orientation stuff like that that happened that week.
Well, then as the session started, and you kind of get through those first couple of weeks of committee hearings and all, and you start getting bills on the floor, there was a nice coalition that developed between the Democrat Caucus and the moderate Republicans.
In the first couple of years I was here, I think we had forty-eight Democrats, and there was always about seventeen or eighteen moderate Republicans. I think you’ve interviewed several of them. Especially on the education issues, back then, education funding was an issue every session because you had to keep up with the finance formula, and there was always a pushback about some people wanting to cut taxes and not continue the funding for special ed or for K-12 education. So we’d get together with that moderate coalition that was formed and would do different things.
I’ll never forget whereby we’d be doing the budget, and somebody would have an amendment to add $50 base state aid funding. And somebody that didn’t like that would get a calculator out and figure out how much money that was, and they would say, “That’s a lot of money.” And I said—well, back then, we had nearly—I think we had 400,000 K-12 students. As a debate right here, I remember going to the well there. I said, “You know, of course, it’s a lot of money. We have a half a million students. You put a dollar in the base. That’s a half a million dollars. So naturally if you put $50”—and I remember in those debates, they’d start with $100 in the base, $75 down. So it was a real effort to try to get funding on the base state aid.
But needless to say, that coalition that we talked about, and I got a little bit off the track here, I think it made a good working relationship, and we got a lot of good policy down. I mentioned the camaraderie there I had with a few like Dave Huff. There were others. We parked outside here around the Capitol in those days. So you’d go to lunch, and everybody would run out to their cars and said, “You can go with this,” and you might get in a car, and there’d be three Republicans and two Democrats and whatever. All you were trying to do was go over to the Ramada Inn for a reception.
That’s just the way it was. I don’t think there was much bitterness in the debates and all that. Everybody seemed to kind of come in here, debate, and leave it in the chamber and go out and wait for another day to come about.
That’s what I always liked when I was in city government. You’d have a debate, take the vote. If it came out you’re in favor of the way you were, fine. If not, that’s the way it goes. You move on to the next issue. And just like in state government, that next issue comes up about an hour later.
CC: Yes. I want to ask you, you made I think an important observation. As someone who served on a city council myself, it was like you can see when you’re at that level in government when you take an action as a governing body, you can see it implemented over the next week or two before your next city council meeting. How frustrating must it have been for you to get here to this body when things are more amorphous, and you’ve got broader policy concepts. If you’re trying to enact public policy, it may take many, many years. You may not see the direct results. Was that at all frustrating for you, having been such an effective—and led the showerhead initiative for example in Hays. Was it a different deal once you got up here?
EP: Definitely. I can probably speak for a lot of people that have come into the legislature. You may have had a particular issue you ran on or you have a certain area that you have an interest in, whether it be agriculture or education. I think you come down here with the feeling of “Okay. Let’s go get it done” or as they say now, “Get ‘er done.” But you come down here with the idea that you’re going to get things done, and then there’s this slow process, the committee hearings, and so forth, and I’ve seen a lot of legislators get really frustrated by that. I’ve seen a lot of people often not come back because they just didn’t like that pace.
So I would probably advise any new person coming in, you’d better exercise a little patience, or this is going to be a very frustrating experience for you. In the House, you’ve got 125 different opinions. A lot of times they match up. Over in the Senate, 40 people, so you’ve got to grind through that and try to get everybody on the same page and get the wording right and see how to fix your district and so forth and then move on from there.
So I would say that I kind of—I got the impression that’s the way it was going to be. So my frustration level didn’t get too bad. There was a lot of things I suppose along the way that kind of took—had that effect on me. I’ll tell you this, the first session, I remember my seatmate was Gwen Welshimer from Wichita, and she said to me, she said, “You might want to co-sponsor this bill with me,” and I said—I was so new. I was like, “What do you mean, co-sponsor? What’s this all about?”
She had a bill, this was 1997, and it was a bill to eliminate the sales tax on food, on groceries. She said, “This would be good for your district.” She goes, “This will help a lot of people.” I said okay. And then near where I sat, a gentleman also from Wichita, George Dean signed on. So there were three co-sponsors on that. In 1997, we filed that legislation. Now, 2024, and it has not been eliminated. So in answer to your question about frustration, if I had been frustrated, I don’t think I would have lasted here very long.
CC: Understood. I know that as ranking Democrat on Insurance, and please remind us when in your career that was when you were the ranking D on Insurance, you also seemed to have a good rapport with your Republican colleague, former Representative Bob Tomlinson, who chaired the House Insurance Committee before he would later move on to become Assistant Kansas Insurance Commissioner. Can you talk a little bit about that working relationship across party lines? You already mentioned some of this, and maybe that kind of interaction between Republicans and Democrats seemed to be occurring less frequently by the time you ultimately left the legislature in 2018?
EP: The first part of the question, that would have been my second session. So that would have been ’99 and 2000. I remember when the committee assignments came out, I was the ranking member of Insurance, which my knowledge of insurance at that point was car insurance and homeowner’s insurance, whatever. I really didn’t have a lot of background. It’s like anything. You just got to get on the fast track to learn about it.
And then as far as working with Bob Tomlinson, that was a very good experience because of the way Bob handled that committee. I always tell this story about we’d have a hearing on a bill or something or give testimony, but if we did pass a bill out of committee, the Vice Chair—I’d either go to his office or he’d stop by mine, and we’d write up a bill brief while it was all fresh in our mind.
But let me back up a little bit before that. I forgot to mention though that prior to the session starting, Bob Tomlinson and I and then Don Myers, the Vice Chair, we would meet with Sandy Praeger. Sandy Praeger was the Chair of the Senate Insurance, and I’m thinking the ranking member on that committee I want to say might have been Janis Lee. The Vice Chair escapes me. But the point is, we’d go there and one of the things we’d do is we met with the Governor and went over the bills. We’d discuss it, and they’d say, “Well, we’ll start this one in the Senate, and this bill will start in the House, and this one in the Senate, and this one in the House. These were the Governor’s initiatives, and so you take these two. We’ll take that two.”
So it was just input from everybody. I remember Bob Tomlinson looking at me and saying, “What do you think? Which ones should we take?” I said, “I think you’re a little more qualified to answer that than me. If you want my opinion, let’s do this one here.”
But my point there is that there was input from everybody that was at the table, and then you went to your committees and did the work. As I mentioned, Bob always wanted my input on something, and he’d even stop by my office and say, “Next week, which of these do you think we should run?” He always wanted to get my opinion on that: which bill we’d start with at the beginning of the week and which hearings we’d have. I dare say I don’t think that happens nowadays.
CC: Understood. As we’ve noted earlier, you have always been an unapologetic champion for education at all levels. Can you share with us if it was how you were raised or whether some of your own experiences honed that sort of fierce advocacy for you?
EP: I believe that was instilled in me, not only my mother, but a lot of her siblings because they grew up in that Depression era and the Dust Bowl and everything, and there was a whole generation there that would have loved to get more educated than what they were. A lot of the men had to stay home and work on the farm. So they were lucky. A lot of the folks in that era were lucky to have an eighth-grade education or maybe even a couple of years of high school. So that was my mother’s emphasis all the time was to do good with my education and so forth. So I think from that, I realized obviously the importance of it.
And somewhere in my readings, I remember reading that, and you’ve heard it, it’s kind of a cliche where they say, “The best workforce is a well-educated workforce.” If that’s ever true, it’s true today because you’ve just got to be able to read obviously, and you’ve got to be able to write, and a well-rounded education I think makes you a lot better person.
So with that in mind, I had a—two of my sisters were educators, and I know I had a couple of other relatives who were. So I knew how dedicated they were and I knew how dedicated a lot of the teachers that I had along the way. So if I could support them in any way, that was something I wanted to do.
CC: I would like to get your reaction to an important change in state policy in late 2002 and early 2003. In the wake of the 9/11 recession and the budget crisis it was causing, outgoing Governor Graves and incoming Governor Kathleen Sebelius both felt that they had no choice but to recommend that transfers earmarked for property tax relief and revenue-sharing programs with local units be suspended temporarily. These, of course, were the local ad valorem tax reduction fund and the county and city revenue-sharing fund transfers as well as several others. I gather the loss of those monies may have upset many of your former colleagues and other local officials back in Hays and Ellis County?
EP: To a certain degree. I believe, and it’s probably a worn-out statement, but, you know, communication is key. I always felt that what I did down here, you needed to go back and talk about it, write about it, whatever the case may be. So, during a legislative session, whenever it was possible, during the break in the session, it was to go back and go before the city commission and the school board and kind of brief them on what was going on.
So I think with regard to what we had to do there with the local tax thing, I just explained it to everybody. Just like the state had to tighten its belt, they realized they had to do the same thing. So I didn’t get a lot of grief over that. Obviously everybody would have liked that not to have happened, but the fact of the matter was, it was what had to be done.
CC: What are your recollections about how Governor Sebelius interacted with you personally, with the full House Democratic Caucus, and with the legislature writ large? Did any of that seem to change much relative to how things had been under Governor Graves?
EP: I would say that I guess because of her party affiliation, she came to our caucus a little bit more often and would interact I think with the legislators, especially of her own party. But I would also mention that Governor Graves was a little bit like that as well. I had my office on the second floor west wing, and Governor Graves would a lot of times I think just – to clear his mind, he’d go walking up and down the halls, and then he had that tie to Hays. He worked in the summers as a young man because his father owned Graves Truck Line in Hays. So he’d stop in my office and just chat and ask about certain people in Hays and so forth.
Interestingly enough, a little story on his administration, his appointment secretary was Judy Krueger-Nelson. Her father was a physician in Hays. She grew up in Hays. When the governor had to do his appointments, he needed like a Republican insurance agent to be on this committee or something like that, she’d go, “Can you tell me a Democrat farmer in your area that might want to be on this committee” or whatever.
So I’d always call back and get a name or two for her. I remember one time going in with pages to get pictures taken with Governor Graves. And he looked at the parents of the pages and he goes, “You know, your community is over-represented.” He was alluding to the fact that every time he needed to make an appointment, Judy would give him a name, and he’d go, “Hays, Kansas, Hays, Kansas.”
CC: Or Hays, America.
EP: Hays, America. So he always said, “You’re over-represented there.” So we had a little fun with that.
But I thought Graves made a genuine effort. I remember he came to the Democrat Caucus a couple times and addressed some issue that we had supported, and he came to thank us. Then Governor Sebelius was the same way.
Now, if you recall, I used to do a radio program. I didn’t want it to be me talking all the time. So I’d interview other legislators, and I remember going down. I think I did it with Graves. I went down and said—it was at the end of the session. I said, “Any chance I could interview you for five minutes?” Sure enough. I did that with Kathleen Sebelius as well.
CC: The relationships you built here at the Statehouse, you mentioned the one with Governor Graves, even though you were in different parties. I wanted to ask you something else. You told me one time that as Hays is, of course, a pretty far drive from here, you were a books-on-tape fan back in the day. Is that correct? I remember some story about how you bonded with another legislator from across the aisle who was a big books-on-tape fan. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
EP: Absolutely. That’s a two-and-three-quarter hour drive from here to Hays. After a while, I got tired of listening to the radio or got tired of listening to music, and I never thought I’d enjoy listening to an audiobook, and I don’t know how I came about it. Somehow I got a hold of—the very first audiobook I ever listened to in the car was The Horse Whisperer. I was so fascinated with that and so absorbed in it, I kind of equate it to where you’re reading a book, and you say, “I’m going to read to the end of the chapter.” When you’re listening to an audiobook, you don’t know where the end to that chapter is.
So I would get so engrossed in a book on the audio CD, I’d be driving and I’d say, “I’m going to stop at Abilene and get a cup of coffee” or something like that, and all of a sudden, I look over, and I’m driving past Salina. I totally missed Abilene.
Now it gets worse than that. Twice it happened to me, I drove past Hays, and I had to go to the next exit and turn around. “Oh, for god sake,” I had to turn around. You just get wrapped up in it and kind of forget about “Oh, there’s my exit.”
But as far as bonding, when you’re in there looking for CDs—
CC: This is here at the State Library.
EP: Yes, the State Library. Senator Les Donovan was one of them that I’d meet up with in there, and he’d go, “Have you listened to this?” I’d say, “No, I haven’t listened to that.” So we’d get to talking all of the time. He’d stop me in the hall and say, “By the way, on my trip over, I listened to such and such book. I just turned it in.” He goes, “You need to listen to that. It’s a really good book.”
If you recall, when they were remodeling the Capitol, the library was moved out from its third-floor location. It was out here on the west side in kind of an annex. That was when you could still walk out those west doors. So Les would come in. He saw me in my office, and he’d come in and show me what books he had and asked me what I was listening to and so forth.
There was somebody else that really got into that. I knew Dennis McKinney down in Greensburg listened to it all the time. It actually is something I do to this day. I’m always at the local library or I’ll get it on my phone and just listen to it on my headphones. When I was in the hospital at the KU Medical Center, I would just lay there in bed and listen to a book, try to forget about what I was going through.
CC: Were you at all upset or surprised when Governor Parkinson opted not to run in 2010? You may recall Governor Sebelius had left in 2009 to join the Obama administration and Lieutenant Governor Parkinson became governor, and there had been some speculation that he would then run himself in 2010. He opted not to. Was that a shock to you?
EP: I would definitely say yes. You always think about who’s going to run, whatever party it is, you always think the Lieutenant Governor might be interested in that step. And the fact that he actually transitioned into the Governor’s Office, it just seemed to me like it was going to be a natural thing for him to do. He was very sharp. I think he had a good rapport with both sides of the aisle, both chambers. So I really kind of looked forward to him running for Governor.
So when that announcement was made, I was actually just shocked. I think I asked the same question of a lot of people. I said, “Was he not asked that when he first was on the ticket as Lieutenant Governor? By the way, if we’re successful, you might run.” I’m not sure what the actual reasoning was, but I definitely shared that surprise like most people did.
CC: Let’s talk about some of the years under Governor Brownback who, of course, gets elected in 2010. You were here in 2012 for the launch of his self-described “tax experiment” wherein he rather famously proposed some dramatic changes to the state income tax code, many of which ended up getting enacted. You and most Democrats were all but unanimously opposed to a lot of that. What are some of your memories from 2012? Arthur Laffer, the famous economic, was flown into the state as a special consultant for the administration, if I remember that correctly.
EP: That’s correct. I’m not sure if I got to sit in on a committee where he was testifying on the tax issue, but I remember him during I think the Augenblick and Myer study on Education Funding. I remember him testifying at the Senate Education Committee, and I was listening to him. What he was saying did not really jibe with what I thought about education funding and the whole finance formula and so forth. I didn’t really adhere to a lot of the things he was saying. What was the first part of that question?
CC: The Democrats were so unanimously opposed to the Brownback Tax Experiment, just your memories of that era.
EP: The thing I always said, and I don’t want to accuse everybody on the other side about this, but it was explained to me early on about out-year spending and understanding that. I said to many people that somebody was explaining this to me, and they used a tax cut as an example and said, “Look at that as an expenditure,” meaning that you’ve got this many in your ending balance or in your state fund, and if that goes out of there as a tax refund or a tax deduction, that’s actually money that’s not going to be there. So in a sense, it’s been spent. Therefore, you need to figure out a way to get that money back in there.
So when the Brownback administration came up with their whole tax program, I’ll give you credit. I remember asking you a lot of questions about that. I think I might have interviewed you. We kind of went over that, and it was just exactly like I had just mentioned here about the out-year spending. That tax cut that first year was—I always heard that the tax cut the first year, say it’s a million dollars, the second year it might be like 1.2 million, the third year, it gets up a little more like 1.5. Then the fourth year and fifth year, it really balloons. With the Brownback tax program, everything I would hear from the economists was that that was going to go up like the second or third year, and that’s exactly what happened.
Now that’s kind of a non-economist explanation, but that’s the way I looked at it. I said, “Well, this isn’t going to be good because we’re going to be scrambling then to come up with that money later on,” and obviously it did happen real soon, and the Democrats had started realizing that there’s a bad thing happening here. [Working] with people on the other side of the aisle – that’s why we were able to get that fixed.
CC: The fix, as you say, and we’ll talk about it in a minute, happened in 2017, but during this time, your electoral history shows that you were defeated by Sue Boldra in 2012, but then returned to your seat by returning that favor, knocking her off in 2016. So I’m guessing that in that 2016 campaign, the status of the tax experiment and perception of the state’s ongoing fiscal crisis may have contributed here to your return to the Statehouse. Is that correct?
EP: Absolutely. I always pointed out that I lost an election because of one vote, because I voted against the Brownback tax bill. I lost that election because everybody was saying that I didn’t want to lower your taxes and so forth. But then I won my next election because of that same vote because as things were going—not coming in, working out with that tax bill, I had not really thought about whether or not I was ever going to run again, but I was literally driving in my car, and I heard Sue on the radio. I believe it was on an interview, and she was saying that everybody needed to be patient, that the Governor’s tax bill was starting to work, and it was going to come into play, and I was like, “No, it’s not.” Then I heard her again, and I just said, “She’s forcing me to run again.” So I went ahead and filed. By then, by the time the campaign started, there was not very good—it wasn’t getting good press on that, and I always said I won that election because of her stand that it was a good thing, and it wasn’t.
CC: So when you returned for the 2017 legislative session, there must have seemed to be a mandate among people in both parties—that additional surgery on the tax code was going to have to occur especially since backfilling tax hikes enacted in both 2013 and 2015 and any number of smoke-and-mirrors fiscal gimmicks and painful budget cuts since 2012 had not prevented the crisis from becoming seemingly ongoing and institutionalized as you just mentioned.
The 2017 legislature in fact approved Senate Bill 30, which repealed the controversial non-wage business income exemption and also restored the individual income tax to a three-bracket system after it had been reduced to two brackets for the prior four years. Governor Brownback was not enthused with this action and vetoed that bill. But the legislature by this time had simply had enough and rather remarkably rounded up two-third majorities, which of course included both Republicans and Democrats in both chambers and overrode his veto.
This must have seemed a fascinating environment for you to return to compared with the partisan perceptions of tax policy and its implications from the time you’d last been here in 2012. I would note you also served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee during 2017-18 biennium so you had a front-row seat to some of the stress that the public sector and the state’s economy had been undergoing. Can you tell us anything else you recall about the dynamics in play during the 2017 session, and how all that occurred on both the revenue side and the expenditure side of the equation?
EP: Well, with that whole thing of the tax program that Governor Brownback had, I knew that all over the state, you were hearing the same things, and everybody was saying, “This isn’t working.” So it didn’t surprise me when I got back here that there was a feeling that we needed to address that right away.
I’m trying to—I don’t have the recollection like some that you’ve interviewed, but to get on the Appropriations, that was such a learning curve. I hadn’t been on that. I had been on a number of budget committees, but I hadn’t done a lot with the Appropriations or even sat in on their meetings very much. The agencies were all coming in there. Obviously everybody was unhappy with the revenue streams that were out there. I think even on that committee, that was a very—it was a big committee, but it really seemed to be pretty bipartisan on that committee as well. We were really working to understand all those issues as far as funding and how we’re going to take care of this. So it was a good two years on that committee, and I enjoyed that. The Chair was Troy Waymaster from the county next to me. I thought he did a pretty admirable job on chairing that committee and getting everybody’s opinion in there.
CC: I take it that, speaking of you and Troy, I take it some of your constituents in western Kansas were not happy during this era when all the money was being swept from the so-called Bank of KDOT to backfill the State General Fund. There was a great deal of concern over what was happening to the state’s highway program. Is that something you guys would hear when you’d go back with your constituents?
EP: I don’t know if I necessarily heard it always with constituents, but I never did like that because I think—I’m going to allude back to being a city commissioner. I always told somebody, I said, “If you don’t think roads and streets are important,” I said, “serve in city and county government, and you’ll find out just exactly how important that is.” Interstate 70, driving down glass, you get in an area there where it starts to get a little bumpy—I went to Salina the other day, and my god, you know, and in Hays, the same way. A lot of people don’t say anything. All they’ve got to do is call you up and draw it to your attention. But as one commissioner said, “So many of you just seethe.” They’re just mad about it all the time.
I had a gentleman in my old neighborhood who was like that about his street out there. I said, “Have you called anybody?” He goes no. I called up the city service department and said, “There’s a little side street here. Can anybody check that out?” The next thing you know, they resurface his street.
So with that in mind, I never did like that idea of taking that money out of KDOT because it did—you mentioned the Bank of KDOT. Right up here at the well here, when people offer their amendments, you go, “Well, how are you going to pay for that?” That was always the follow-up question when anybody offered an amendment that had a fiscal note, and they said, “We’re going to get funding from the Highway Fund.” Well, that got carried away, and that’s not a good thing.
CC: Your former House colleague from Topeka, Jim Gartner, who was first elected in 2016 told us recently that the newly-elected legislators in that class of 2017 somehow felt bonded enough by this rocky situation we were just discussing they were entering that they formed a bipartisan freshman caucus and ended up building a lot of cohesion and important relationships across the aisle moving forward. It may be an odd question, but out of curiosity, were you invited to be part of their freshman caucus gatherings since you were in one sense a freshman but, of course, in reality, not, given that you were more a returning grizzled veteran at that point.
EP: Grizzled veteran? I believe that when that came about, I just don’t recall. I think I went to their first meeting or something like that, and I’m going to use the excuse that I was on Appropriations, and we always had meetings, and I couldn’t go.
No, I think I went and realized that they were going through, learning a lot of things that as a grizzled veteran, oftentimes in a new session, I would actually give talks on some of the things to the freshmen members in the caucus. So I guess—
CC: You were more of a faculty member than a student at that point.
EP: It never hurts to have a refresher, to go in there and talk about what a call to the House is or how to carry a bill and so forth. I guess I found other things to do. No offense to that freshman class that year. I figured Jim could take care of everything in there.
CC: Absolutely. I also want to ask you about some of the challenges relative to staying in touch with your constituents in Hays and some of the techniques you would use. You mentioned this earlier, but I know, for example, that you used to record an interview in your office here at the Statehouse and distribute it back to your local radio station and maybe post it on a website. I know this because I would occasionally be asked to talk on that broadcast when you could not find a more prominent or polished guest such as Governor Graves.
EP: That’s absolutely true.
CC: My sense is you were way out ahead of others doing this kind of thing and were in fact doing what amounted to podcasts before podcasts were cool or even a thing. You were a bit of a trailblazer in this regard. Is that correct?
EP: Nobody else in my caucus was doing that. I would point out that the late state representative Jim from Colby—
CC: Morrison.
EP: Jim Morrison. Jim used to sit up here in the corner, and he had quite an outfit there, and he would broadcast back to KXXX in Colby, and then I had like KAYS in Hays. Compared to now or even my last term, I used to have to hook up to a phone. If I did an interview and somebody’s offsite, the Governor and all that, I would take my little thing in there and hook it into their phone, and then there was a certain time I had to call in, and then the guy would say, “Let me get”—at the station, the disk jockey would say, “Let me get things ready.” They’d hook it up, and I’d do my program.
Later on, what I could do then is just I had my phone on a little tripod, and I would broadcast and just send it that way. I could do those the night before or the morning of, but back in the day when I had to do it pretty much live with their time frame, sometimes we were on the House floor. So I did many a broadcast or interview right here on the House floor.
CC: Oh, really? Okay.
EP: A legislator would come and switch seats. We’d kind of duck down and try not to make too much noise and try to wait until the furor was over and then do the interview.
CC: Beyond the podcast and newsletters, I assume you also did your share of Saturday morning legislative coffees and forums to meet and greet your constituents in person when you’d go back on the weekends and whatnot?
EP: The chamber director back then was very active. We had a number of those Saturday morning coffees, as you mentioned. I always enjoyed those. I enjoyed doing those I remember with Senator Lee and the late Representative Dan Johnson. We would do those and just have a really good time. I remember Janis one time referenced Dan Johnson as “the Liberal member of the Ellis County Coalition.” Dan always got a kick out of that.
All three of us I think could talk about education. Dan obviously wrote the book on agriculture. He could talk about all that. I think we all three had done work in environment committees, and then Janis was always real strong in a lot of that tax issues as it pertained to agriculture and so forth. So we had a nice group there. And, as I mentioned, we did those coffees. Dan and I would go out to Colby every year for the Kansas County Government Association.
I think things were more active then as far as legislators. I always did the radio broadcast. I did a newspaper article and a newsletter. And then you had all of your service groups that would want to come in and say hello, and then your county government and city government. So you were always getting the word out. I don’t know if that’s as prevalent now.
CC: You served in the House during quite a few years when future Governor Kelly was a member of the Senate across the rotunda here. As fellow Democrats did you interact with her much over the years? Were you at all surprised when she opted to run for Governor in 2018?
CC: I didn’t really interact with her a lot. We weren’t on any kind of a joint legislative committee. She did have an office right next to Senator Lee. Of course, I’d always go to Senator Lee’s office to talk about the upcoming coffee or a call from a constituent. So, at those particular times, a lot of times I’d get there and Janis wasn’t there. So I’d visit with Senator Kelly at the time. I really didn’t have a lot of communication with her on a day-to-day basis, but often enough where I knew her pretty well.
When she ran, I had no idea that she was going to run for Governor. It came as a bit of a surprise to me. But as I always knew of her, she was very bright and very astute to the budget and so forth. So I think she had a lot of the attributes you need to be a good Governor.
CC: Given what you said about the highway program and KDOT, I gather you agree that she should be proud to have said one of her big accomplishments was in fact closing the so-called Bank of KDOT. The state budget is now at the point where that money is not being swept any longer. I gather that’s something you support.
EP: My personal opinion is that I think it needed to be done. Somebody needed to just make that decision, and obviously she did because as I mentioned, roads are important. It’s not only important for our comfort as a citizen driving down the streets in Hays or whatever. I mean, it’s important for commerce.
There’s a multiplier, I guess you could call it or a formula that the highway people tell you. You’re doing a road project near a community, there’s a factor there that you can talk about how much revenue that brings to that community. So a lot of the smaller communities, that’s somewhat of an economic development feature, short-lived, but nonetheless, it does a great job for that local community. And not to mention all the jobs that we have in our state due to highway.
Now I’ve heard it many times where we rank as far as how many miles of highway we have. We’re a big state. It’s a safety issue. You’ve got to keep on top of that. And the other thing is, it’s really one of those “pay me now, pay me later” things. I learned this in city government about maintaining infrastructure like that.
The science has changed. I guess the technology as well whereby they used to just let a road get to a certain deterioration, and you’d go in and redo the road. And now they’ve got all kinds of products where you have a street that you can come in later and do crack sealing to keep water from running in below, and you come in and you can do a slurry seal. You can do an overlay. You can take an asphalt road and make it last many, many years longer than it did back in the old days. It’s just a money-saving thing by having that money there to maintain those roads on a regular basis, and I kid you not. Roads are important. You don’t want to fall back on your maintenance.
CC: Pay me now or pay me later, indeed.
EP: Absolutely. Yes.
CC: Looking back over your many years in Topeka, which lobbyists do you recall being the most effective at their jobs? Are there any you hated seeing show up in your office?
EP: I can’t think of anybody that I hated seeing. We had issues out there where I guess you could say people that knew how to lobby weren’t the ones. Organizations or people come in, and they would just—you’d step foot out of the office, and they would swoop down, and they’d kind of, as I put it, over-lobby to where they just kind of got to be annoying. God bless them, they were trying. They thought they were doing the right thing, but I saw—there was one issue where a lobbying effort actually just hurt the issue.
But as far as the lobbyists, I kind of learned early on that lobbyists didn’t have that connotation that they do I think in Washington where a lot of people thought of them as—not a high opinion of them. Here in the Statehouse, I always looked at the lobbyists as kind of an asset. So, a case in point, as I mentioned when I got—I was named ranking member of the Insurance Committee, I didn’t have a big background in insurance, and a lot of insurance fields were complicated. I’d read them, and I’d have one idea of what that bill did, and I would then hear discussions about it, and I’d go, “Hmm, that’s not the way I did it.”
There was a former lobbyist, the late Bill Snead, and I remember I would—even if it was an issue that his county wasn’t pushing or whatever, I’d ask him, “Can you explain this to me?” He really did. He’d go, “Okay, you’re Insurance Company A. I’m Insurance Company B.” Then he’d go through that little scenario.
So I always would look him up and ask him about bills, not only him but a number of other ones—Brad Smoot comes to mind because so many people had that, state employees and so forth had Blue Cross insurance. A lot of times if somebody had a question, I’d just ask him. He’d say, “What’s that person’s name?” and he’d give them a call. He was very good at following up on things like that. John Watner was very helpful during the whole gaming discussions and everything that we had here when we were passing the casino bills and so forth.
At any rate, I should have thought of that a little more. I never really—there’s just a whole bunch of lobbyists here, especially the long-term ones . They do well, and they’re effective because they’ve established themselves as somebody that will give you the facts and not lead you off in the wrong direction.
I do recall, I remember one time, there was a lobbyist that did just what I was saying about telling one person something and another one or saying, “By the way, Chris is going to vote for this” and things like that. That gentleman didn’t last very long. He was gone. I can say that we have a very above-board, straightshooter type of lobbying here in this building, at least when I was here.
CC: It sounds like those lobbyists who were above board were a valuable resource.
EP: Absolutely.
CC: For you during your career. What about state employees and agency personnel? Were there any that stood out or were particularly helpful to you during your long tenure here?
EP: On the top of that list would be Dale Dennis who I sought his input on so many education issues, and I jokingly one time said, “Dale,” I had a question, I asked a question. I said, “You’re going to explain this to me.” I said, “I’m going to come back here tomorrow, and you’re going to have to re-explain it to me.”
But Dale, obviously anybody in this building would know that when it came to school finance, he was the go-to person, and I always enjoyed going and asking him for input, especially really, really getting an understanding of the school finance formula. As you know, he helped develop it, was here at the very beginning. So he knows every little angle on that.
I always also—and I would advise any new legislator coming in, you’ve got really learn the resources that are available to you, and that can be legislative research, the revisor’s office, the library, or just the Supreme Court and so forth. Those were people you could go to, and they’d give you a good explanation.
A neat thing—I was a frequenter to the library, and there was a little lady in there years ago named Rita Haley. I’ll never forget one time going in and asking her, I said, “There’s a Russian delegation in here, and this one gentleman made a comment that I read, and I said. “It was either in the Wichita Eagle Beacon or the Cap Journal. I can’t remember what newspaper it was.” I go to my committee. I come back, and there are all these newspaper clippings lying in the middle of my desk, and she had that.
I would oftentimes go and ask her or there was another lady up there, I’d ask them different questions and all that. And Dennis McKinney was the one that told me this. We’d make comments during a debate, something like that, and he said one time the Speaker, I think it was, one time said, “Where are you guys getting that information?” and Dennis said, “We just researched it.” We didn’t want to give our little secret away. We just went to this little lady all the time, and that was her forte, researching. Nothing was beyond her. She always provided whatever information I needed.
CC: What was your relationship like over the years with the Statehouse press corps? The Fourth Estate? Did you get along well with the folks in the media?
EP: I think so. I’m trying to think, obviously Martin Hawver is in the building every day. He’s always just—you never knew whether he was doing an article or just happened to walk by and say, “By the way,” this and that, and the next thing you know, he’s quoting you. The Cap Journal was always here. I think as a legislator you want every opportunity for information to get out there. If they ask you a question, and you answer it or they go and it leads them to go find the answer or whatever, it’s what you need to be doing.
CC: You served during periods where there was a good deal more geographic diversity in terms of areas of the state that your party represented in the legislature. You mentioned you and Senator Lee came from western Kansas, but there aren’t as many Democrats out that way in this current era. Certainly there are far fewer than there were back during the 1990s. Do you have any thoughts about this trend and what may have brought it about? And also whether demographic changes now or currently in the western part of the state could end up swinging the pendulum back and bringing more seats back into play for Democrats?
EP: Several things there that are puzzling to me. I think when I first came to the legislature, there was eighteen Democrats west of Salina. And as I was here for a number of years, I remember I was the furthest west Democrat in western Kansas, and I always said what a big load that was on my shoulders to represent western Kansas. I think Ethel Peterson was west of me and somebody else.
I’m not sure why that happened other than the numbers got so small. I think where I lived, I think you had—I think when I came to the legislature, Ellis County was one of seven counties that had a higher Democrat registration than Republican. But a lot of people my age, their parents were all Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy Democrats, but those kids all moved, or a lot of them moved away or eventually became Republican.
And then in Ellis County, a lot of people moved into Ellis County from western Kansas that were long-time Republicans, and they move there in order to be near the regional medical center and so forth. I mean, there’s a lot of different theories on it, but right now, I think in Ellis County, I don’t even know if there is a—I know we don’t have a Democrat county commissioner, and I don’t know about the city. That’s nonpartisan.
When I first came in, the entire courthouse, every elected person in there was a Democrat. And now I don’t think there is any. Whether it will become, if this is kind of a cyclical thing, and maybe it will turn around, that remains to be seen. I don’t know the answer to that.
CC: Given you’ve been around so much political drama here at the Statehouse since at least the 1990s and beyond what you told us earlier about how you had such an especially cordial and productive relationship working across the aisle with Chairman Tomlinson and some others, how would you compare and contrast the institutions of state government today, especially the legislature, with the way things were back in 1997 when you first got here? What are the biggest differences? Are those differences generally positive or negative in your mind?
And everything is on the table here, whether it’s changes in technology, the overall political culture, how state agencies function and are perceived to do so by the public. Your career started during a time most Kansans filed paper income tax returns. So you’ve certainly been a witness to many twists and turns in the evolution of state government.
EP: Absolutely. The thing about it is back when I first came in, you’d get a copy of the budget, for instance, or a tax bill several days ahead. You’d have several meetings on it. Although I’m no longer in the legislature, I do follow it, and I talk to people that are in the legislature right now, and I just don’t see how you can think this is good to take a tax bill, god knows how many pages, or a budget for the state of Kansas, and give it to somebody at 11:00 at night and vote on it at midnight.
I may be a little bit off on that, but it’s pretty close to that. That’s just wrong. First of all, when I’d read a budget bill or a tax bill, you had to research some things on there. You’d go, “I’m going to check this out, see how much of this money is from my district” or whatever.
But I think this thing of, you know, I talked about earlier about a new person coming in and the session kind of grinding along real slow. I’ve noticed in the last few years, I’ll read where this session starts and committees aren’t even meeting for the first couple of weeks. When I first was sworn in, my first session, I was on the Environment Committee, and the late Steve Lloyd was the Chair. When they made announcements afterwards, the Supreme Court Justice is still here, just sworn in. They’d make an announcement and go, “The Environment Committee will meet in room whatever.” I had an Environment Committee right then.
So now these committees aren’t even passing out any bills until, gosh I don’t know, what month, and I just think that there’s a lot of wasted time. But also I think that this thing of just a really important piece of legislation moments before you’re going to vote on it is just wrong. There’s only like, you really reduce the number of people who actually know what’s in it.
CC: Anything else you want to add? I assume you’re still politically active, and you’re going to be supporting your party members up and down the ballot this November?
EP: I hope to. We don’t have that many Democrat candidates in Ellis County right now, but I will. I retired a few years ago, and one thing I said was that I still want to stay involved in the community in some way, and I wasn’t going to just watch television all day. So I got involved with a couple of volunteer efforts. One is with a dog rescue program. It’s called Hope for Paws Colorado. I guess I’m officially a dog walker.
But also I got involved with Habitat for Humanity. As I tell people, I’m the president of the board, and I was actually at the meeting when they elected board members. So many times, people miss the meeting. “Oh, by the way, Chris, we elected you president.” But, no, it’s a very active Habitat affiliate. I took over the board presidency. We have a very active board, and everybody shows up to the meetings. Everybody has input, and we’ve done a lot. We have our fundraising arm in a place called Restore, kind of like a thrift store. We have just a great group of volunteers out there every Saturday. I’m always amused when somebody talks about young people not having a work ethic or being involved. I say, “You need to come out to Restore on Saturday and watch these”—whether they be high school or college students, they’re helping carry things and loading furniture in somebody’s car or a pick-up or whatever. I’m seeing a side there that is very impressive.
CC: It sounds like you’re staying quite busy in Hays, America.
EP: Absolutely.
CC: Thank you so much for your time today.
EP: Thank you.
[End of File]
October 17, 1951
Democrat
Member, House Government Efficiency and Fiscal Oversight 1997-2000
Member, House Environment 1997-1998
Member, House Agriculture 1997-1998
State Representative, Kansas House of Representatives 1997-2012
Member, Tax, Judicial, Transportation Budget Comm. 1999-2000
Member, House Insurance 1999-2006
Member, House Education 1999-2012
Member, House Transportation 2001-2002
Member, House Health & Human Services 2003-2006
Member, House Higher Education 2003-2006
Minority Whip, Democrat Caucus 2003-2006
Ranking Minority Member, House Insurance 2005-2006
Member, Legislative Budget Committee (Joint) 2007-2010
Member, House Veterans, Military and Homeland Security 2007-2010
Member, House Aging and Long Term Care 2009-2010
Member, House Insurance 2011-2012
Ranking Minority Member, House Higher Education 2017-2018
Member, House Local Government 2017-2018
Member, House Appropriations 2017-2018
State Representative, Kansas House of Representatives 2017-2018
Member, House Taxation 2018-2018
Member, House Transportation 2018-2018
111
Statehouse, Topeka, KS
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