Interview of Edward Rolfs, September 23, 2024
Interviewed by Chris Courtwright
Rolfs served during a productive period in Kansas politics and he was a key player in tax and fiscal policy, chairing the tax committee through reappraisal and classification. and major income tax reform. Rolfs tells great stories, about his grandfather, Frank Carlson, Governor Bob Bennett and why he wasn't reelected, and leadership races. His interview discusses the rationale for sales tax exemptions, the politics of the severance tax in the 1982 election, the "booster" tax affecting Johnson County, the working relationship on the House Taxation Committee, and the simplification of the Kansas Income tax in 1988. Rolfs describes the conundrum of property tax reappraisal and classification and its resulting impacts on the 1990 governor's race where Joan Finney beat both prior governors, Carlin and Hayden. And Rolfs had several Joan Finney stories and one about Kathleen Sebelius. There is also a great story about how Rolfs, the Young Turk who wanted to cut everything was put on the Ways and Means Subcommittee for SRS and Mental Health/Retardation. Bob Harder, Secretary encouraged Rolf to visit the state institutions and it changed his attitude. The interview closes with his reflections on the state of government 35 years after he served.
Edward Carlson Rolfs had a long, distinguished, and diverse career in public service as well as the private sector. A graduate of the University of Kansas and former KU Student Body President, he served as a Republican member of the Kansas House from Junction City from 1979 to 1988 before capping off his legislative service with a stint as Revenue Secretary during the final two years of the Hayden administration. After leaving elective office, Ed returned to serve as the longtime president and CEO of Central National Bank, a prominent Kansas institution started by his family some 140 years ago and still serves as chairman of its boards. A grandson of a prominent, political family, he has remained an influential, behind-the-scenes figure in Kansas political circles.
Chris Courtwright: Good afternoon. Today is September 23, 2024, and we’re 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 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 am privileged to interview former Representative and Kansas Secretary of Revenue Ed Rolfs, who has had a long, distinguished, and diverse career in public service as well as the private sector. A proud graduate of the University of Kansas and former KU Student Body President, he served as a Republican member of the Kansas House from Junction City from 1979 to 1988 during an especially interesting decade before capping that off with a stint as Revenue Secretary during the final two years of the Hayden administration.
After leaving elective office, Ed returned to serve as the longtime president and CEO of Central National Bank, a prominent Kansas institution started by his family some 140 years ago and still serves on its board. A scion of a powerful, political family which we’ll be discussing in just a minute, he has remained a prominent, behind-the-scenes figure in Kansas political circles. Did I get most of that right?
Ed Rolfs: Pretty much. Thank you.
CC: This interview with Mr. Rolfs 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 years. 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 the KOHP donors. Former House Speaker Pro Tem Dave Heinemann is our videographer today.
During your decade in the Legislature, I suppose, Mr. Chairman, it demonstrates your jack-of-all-trades, diverse skill set that you served on so many different committees. But looking over those records and trying to cherry-pick some of the highlights that we will be delving into more in a few minutes, you yourself of course chaired the House’s Tax panel during an extraordinarily active time for that committee in the mid-to-late 1980s, which is where I first got to know you. You also chaired the Governmental Organization panel for two years in the early eighties, not to mention serving six full years on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Other panels you served on included Federal and State Affairs, Post-Audit, and Elections, to name a few. Is that a fairly good executive summary of your larger laundry list of committees?
ER: Yes.
CC: Before we jump into your legislative years and committee work and big issues and whatnot, let’s get into some additional background if we could. We normally ask people if they are native Kansans, and if not, when their family moved here. We’re going to get next into some family history that includes the fascinating career and legacy of your grandfather and how that may have influenced you, but before we do, please tell us what you can about when one or both sides of your family first ended up here in Kansas.
ER: My mother’s side showed up from Sweden in I believe 1861 or ‘2. They got to Ellis Island in New York and put money down on the counter and said, “Put us on the train and take us as far as we can go,” and they dumped them off in Concordia, Kansas. So that’s where that side of the family came from. My father’s side was more prosperous and more generous, so very organized. They planted in Junction City, Kansas with intention and shipped over here on a big ocean liner in the 1870s or thereabouts.
CC: Is it your father’s side of the family that ultimately is the one that started the bank?
ER: Yes.
CC: The other introductory question we often ask is about what gave you the public service bug and whether you had a family history that may have played a role in your decision to run for public office. In your case, let the record show that your grandfather, Frank Carlson, had a rather remarkable political career where he held elective office from the late 1920s through the late 1960s. He is the only Kansan to have served in our Legislature, where he was first elected in 1928; in the US House of Representatives, first elected in 1934; as Governor of Kansas, first elected in 1946; and in the US Senate, where he was first elected in 1950. Can you tell us the extent to which growing up with your granddad serving as a powerful US Senator who is the confidante of [Presidents] Eisenhower and LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson] and all these people, how that may have influenced your own entry into electoral politics? Were you sitting at his feet after Thanksgiving dinners? Was he clapping you on the shoulder and encouraging you to start your own political career someday?
ER: Absolutely not. Grandpa Carlson was a quiet, humble man. He would never have presumed to give anybody any advice. What I did learn from him, well, I’ll tell you two stories. After he retired from the Senate in 1968, ostensibly to spend more time with his grandchildren, my parents bought a farm out by Wakefield, Kansas, north of Junction City, and we would have lunch there every Sunday after church and then go out to work at the family farm until sunset.
What amazed me and what I learned is he would have people walk up to him at that Lakeview restaurant every week, and he would recognize every one of them. They might have been 100 miles away, just traveling through. He would know their name. He would know their family history. There was nothing fake about him. He had a knack for connecting with people. That was remarkable.
The other thing I remember, he took me to visit Washington, DC after he retired. And as a former member of the United States Senate, he had access to the floor. I was so excited because here I was on the floor of the US Senate and seeing all these people I’d seen on TV all of these years. They all were coming up and clapping him on the back and all that. But what I remember most is the elevator operator taking us to lunch, and Grandpa knew his name, his wife’s name, his children’s name, and had nominated one of his kids to go to West Point.
Then when we got to the restaurant, our waitress just fawned all over Grandpa and told me, “Your granddad is the nicest man I’ve ever met in my entire life, and I’ve met the Pope.” But I learned from that, that politics is not so much about issues as it is people, connections, and just caring for your fellow man.
CC: I think having a photographic memory and retail-level skill sets for connecting with people sounds like it was good skills to have if you’re in politics for many, many decades. Certainly it sounds like your grandfather had them. You in fact were elected as an undergrad as the KU student body president sometime during the mid-1970s.
ER: That’s correct.
CC: And it would have been five, six years after some of the chaos in campus had died down in the late sixties, early seventies. Can you recall what some of the hot issues were during your time as KU student body president maybe in the mid-seventies?
ER: I got to KU the year after the students had burned the student union to the ground. I really don’t know how I got elected. I go back to my position that nothing about politics has to do with issues, but I was an extremely conservative person leading the KU student body, which is probably one of the most liberal institutions in Kansas. I know I worked with the Chancellor and worked with Governor Bennett to expand funding for university education during that time. I had a lot of dealings. That’s probably where I got my first exposure to the Statehouse. We’d come over here and lobby legislators during that time.
CC: To improve higher-ed funding and whatnot?
ER: To improve higher-ed funding, yes.
CC: Well, you do make your first run at the House at the ripe old age of twenty-four in 1978, and you knocked off an incumbent Democrat named Jamie Schwartz in the 64th District, which embodied your hometown of Junction City, as we mentioned. I guess several questions here. First, beyond any encouragement you might have received from your granddad and others in your prominent family, it really doesn’t sound like he was pushing you to do anything like this, did you have any favorite professors from KU or other mentors who maybe played a role in your decision to jump into the fray at such an early age?
ER: Not really. I did have, I was lucky enough to get into a two-year humanities program as a freshman that was taught by three full professors, Drs. Quinn, Nelick, and Senior. It was called The Pearson Integrated Humanities Program. It was an education in the classics and Latin and things like that.
CC: A very broad-based liberal arts kind of a thing.
ER: Yes. I would say that those three professors had the biggest impact on my life. One of the things we studied was Plato’s Republic where Plato takes you through the various forms of government using the Socratic method. What is the ideal legislator? What is the ideal leader? What is the ideal form of government? And things like that.
CC: Please tell us what you recall about the first run for the House in 1978. Were there debates and forums that you and Mr. Schwartz both attended? Or was the campaign fought more along the lines of radio ads, yard signs, and postcards? Also, do you have any funny front-porch stories to tell us about the first time you were going door to door and meeting some of your more eccentric future constituents in and around Junction City? I will tell you that some of my very favorite front-porch stories often seem to involve somewhat aggressive dogs.
ER: There was a neighborhood with a lot of dogs. I would usually send my friends there to knock on the doors. I don’t know. What I remember about that campaign is sweat. I started knocking on doors in June, and by the time the general election rolled around, I’d knocked on every door three different times.
CC: A lot of shoe leather.
ER: A lot of exercise. I couldn’t do that in today’s world, but when you’re twenty-four, you can do things that you can’t do when you’re seventy. That’s what I remember the most is a lot of sweat.
CC: Do you recall what some of the hot issues from that fall of ’78 campaign were when you were trying to knock off the incumbent?
ER: There were no issues. Jamie, I loved him to death, but he was lazy, and I was energetic.
CC: Going to all the doors three times.
ER: That’s what decided the race. I don’t think it was any big issue. Maybe the death penalty at the time. I think that maybe was a big issue. But, no, I don’t think there were any issues.
CC: Putting the importance of your ’78 campaign into its historical context, we will recall that the Democrats in ’76, two years early, due in part no doubt to some residual anger at Nixon as well as some more localized grievances over the state funding of a new Kansas highway program, had taken control of this body for just the second time in state history. But thanks to a number of GOP wins in ’78, including one from a scrappy newcomer in the 64th District, your party again took power in this Chamber with sixty-nine seats during your first term as a freshman.
But even though ’78 was generally a pretty favorable year for Republicans nationally during the midterm elections that year, as well as when it came to reasserting control here in this Chamber, the pundits seemed fairly shocked when Democratic House Speaker John Carlin upset incumbent Kansas Governor Robert Bennett on that very same election night. You mentioned you’d worked with Governor Bennett when you were KU student body president.
Bennett was a lawyer who had served previously for many years in the Legislature, had been elected to the first-ever four-year gubernatorial term in Kansas in 1974. Were you as surprised as the media seemed to be about how the 1978 gubernatorial election went down in an otherwise heavily Republican year?
ER: Not at all. Bob Bennett was a good man and a smart man and did probably more to advance education than any governor we’ve ever had. But my uncle had a fundraiser in Junction City, and all the big Republicans were there, and all the boards were laid out on the hay bales out in the farm field with the hay rack as the speaker’s stand. Everyone in town was there. I’d never seen Bob Bennett campaign. But he pulls up in his governor’s limousine, gets out with pristine alligator boots, has a gorgeous leather jacket with frills on it, has a beautiful Stetson hat with a pheasant feather sticking out of it, and I knew at that moment that he’d get a lot of votes in Johnson County, but maybe not so many elsewhere. It did not surprise me that he lost, and it had nothing to do with any issues. It was just I don’t think he was comfortable outside his environment. I think that’s why he lost.
CC: I do want to ask about whether you always maintained a good working relationship with your first legislative opponent, Jamie Schwartz. He, of course, had been an ally of John Carlin and quickly landed on his feet as a legislative liaison working for the new governor before later rising all the way up to the Cabinet, serving as Secretary of Economic Development. I’m guessing your paths must have continued to cross for a number of years.
ER: Oh, yes. He and his wife, Deanna, and another person played bridge probably once a month. Maybe Joan Wagnon was the fourth. I can’t remember. And then both Jamie and John Carlin rented office space when I opened the new bank after I left as Secretary of Revenue. Jamie and I were in the lobbying business together after all that as well. So, yes, we were close.
CC: A lot of bipartisanship there.
ER: I don’t know about that, but we were close. We didn’t agree on anything, but we were close.
CC: Before we get into specific issues you began dealing with at the outset of your legislative career in January of ’79, I’m wondering if settling in here as a mid-twenties-something legislator may have been a little easier for you than other freshman legislators given that you may have had some connections in and around the Statehouse and state government circles that some of them did not necessarily enjoy. Beyond any help or contacts you may have had with powerbrokers through existing networks you had coming in, did your grandfather know people in the lobbying community or Statehouse press corps, anything along these lines? Can you tell us maybe how you went about learning all the legislative procedure and nuances here? Who were the key stakeholders and lobbyists? Were there any more senior members of the GOP caucus who helped mentor you when you got here, starting in 1979?
ER: As you pointed out, we had a very narrow majority, and there was not a person in the state of Kansas who thought I had a prayer of winning. So I had had no communication or contact with the Topeka crowd, which I didn’t know any difference. I was just a kid out knocking on doors. And all of a sudden, I became very, very popular, and I had people coming into Junction City talking about things called a leadership race. Unbeknownst to me, if you vote on the right side of a leadership race, good things happen to you. And if you vote on the wrong side, bad things happen to you.
CC: I’ve heard that.
ER: As a freshman, I landed with Wendell Lady the night before the vote was to be taken, even though I thought his opponent, Carlos Cooper, was a wonderful man as well from Bonner Springs. I voted for Wendell, and Wendell won by one vote.
Two years later comes along, and Bob Arbuthnot runs against Wendell. Bob had been a big cattleman. I had a lot of pressure from my family who were a lot of cattleman. Anyway, I wound up again—
CC: Sticking with Speaker Lady.
ER: Sticking with Wendell Lady, and again it was decided by one vote, which explains why as a sophomore, I was committee chairman and on the Ways and Means Committee and the Tax Committee and anything else that they wanted. But I was also very good friends with the staff of the leadership, Keith Henley and Sue Peterson. I think a lot of people overlook those people, and I think they have more to do with what happens in the Legislature than most people imagine.
CC: Oh, my goodness, yes. One of the notable issues approved during your very first session in 1979 was a sales tax exemption for residential utilities. Actually, residential and agricultural utilities – a measure of course designed to reduce the overall regressivity of the sales tax, given that utilities are certainly a necessity. This was a major priority of new Governor Carlin since one of the issues he had successfully employed during the ’78 campaign was to go after Bennett on the issue of skyrocketing utility bills, which were a problem in the late seventies. Do you have any recollections about the ’79 debate over exempting utility bills from the state sales tax?
ER: I remember as a kid, I had a little red wagon, and my friends and I, we always liked to go camping, and we would put our camping supplies in the back of the little red wagon and pull it to our campground. It was a mile and a half away. Eventually my younger brother, six years younger, wanted to go camping with us, and my mother and sister would take him. He couldn’t walk. He was only four years old. So he had to ride in the back of the wagon and had a great time. So the next time, he brought his friends who also couldn’t walk. They had to sit in the back of the wagon.
Eventually that wagon became so heavy that we couldn’t pull it. So none of us got to go camping. The sales tax exemptions are exactly like the little red wagon. I don’t remember a lot about the utility bill exemption, but I know just this year the state generously gave me – and I’m in top 1 percent of the income earners in this state – a very nice exemption for my groceries. I don’t have to pay for my groceries. We also have farms. I just bought a new gator to go running around and cutting down some trees. Lo and behold, I don’t have to pay sales tax on the gator that I bought.
If I sell my Lamborghini for $100,000, I’d have to pay sales tax on that. But if I sell my million-dollar house, I don’t have to pay sales tax. The whole sales tax exemption thing is just pulling…It’s like pulling—what was that, playing with kids? Pulling the sticks out and all the marbles—pixies or something like that. Eventually, it gets so narrow—and when I came to the Legislature, I think our sales tax, it was like 3 percent. Nobody hardly even noticed it. Now it’s 10 percent. If you go buy a new car, pay $50,000 or $60,000, that’s real money.
So it gets to be a compliance issue. It also gets to be an issue of: “At some point, we’ve all got to do a little bit to pull that wagon up the hill, or none of us are going to go anywhere.” I vaguely remember the utility thing. It didn’t really amount to a hill of beans in terms of—
CC: But it was another log on the fire.
ER: Right, it’s just one more—
CC: Horse unhooked from the wagon.
ER: One more little kid in that wagon. But that was a long way from where we are today because now I think when Joan Wagnon and I were in the Legislature, we got up to Exemption Z, and I think they’re in AAA.
CC: Or quadruple now.
ER: Whatever. The sales tax exemptions just exploded. The poor person that—it used to be you were lucky if you got an exemption. Now you’re just cursed if you might have to pay it because it’s highly unlikely.
CC: I have another sales tax exemption question for you a little bit later as we walk through our timeline. I can recall when you were chair in the later eighties, but yes. Everything you said certainly resonates for those of us who worked in and around the Tax Committee.
Another major tax issue that would be front and center in the early eighties was the severance tax. Carlin had been pushing throughout his first term from ’78 to ’82 to get one enacted. The issue seemed to be defined as much by geographic lines as it did political party lines. In other words, GOP House Speaker Wendell Lady, who you’ve mentioned, and a number of other Republicans in eastern and northeast Kansas also supported having a severance tax come along to join the larger mix of state taxes. Basically, politicians in this part of the state seemed to coalesce around the idea that a lot of income and sales taxes were being mined out of northeast Kansas and shipped out to western Kansas to pay for schools and highways, and the belief had been growing that oil and gas producers out west needed to start contributing maybe a little more than they had been to the state’s coffers.
By way of background and context, I would remind everyone that many of our neighboring states which produced oil and gas, including Texas and Oklahoma, had enacted severance taxes many decades earlier. And Kansas in fact had one on the books briefly in the late 1950s before the courts threw it out on a technicality. The powerful oil and gas industry had then fought off any and all efforts to see a tax reinstated throughout the sixties and seventies.
In any case, the ’82 election was widely viewed to be a referendum on the severance tax. The GOP nominee, Sam Hardage, after narrowly prevailing in a five-way primary against Speaker Lady and a number of others, went forward into November doubling down in staunch opposition to Carlin’s proposal. But Carlin rolled to re-election that November with a resounding victory over Hardage. Did you personally support a different candidate during the GOP ’82 primary? I’m guessing perhaps Speaker Lady?
ER: Correct.
CC: What were your own feelings on the severance tax? Were you at all surprised the ’82 election turned out the way it did that November?
ER: No, it didn’t surprise me, but it had nothing to do with the severance tax. It was Sam Hardage walking through a cow pasture looking up into the sky. Although I moderated, when I was a young legislator, I was quite conservative. I thought state government was bloated. I thought spending was out of control. I was opposed to any tax in any form, period. So I don’t know that for a fact, but I would guess that I voted against the severance tax. I don’t really remember even the debate.
CC: I guess you’re saying Sam Hardage may have had trouble connecting to certain segments of the electorate, not unlike Governor Bennett before him?
ER: Yes.
CC: Given that the ’82 election was at least viewed by some as a referendum on the severance tax, at least that was the claim of Governor Carlin after he prevailed.
ER: Of course.
CC: That measure quickly did get across the finish line in 1983. Anything you recall about how that bill finally was pushed through? I’m guessing that the KIOGA, the Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association, and some of the other powerful special interests may not have been too happy that that finally came to pass in 1983? Were you ultimately a yes or no on severance tax?
ER: I have no idea. I don’t remember the issue, and I can’t speak to—I’m sure they were very unhappy. It was a targeted tax on their industry.
CC: Getting back into some sticky state and financial tax issues, after the severance tax came online in ’83, Kansas also approved a so-called booster tax for ’84 and ’85 that raised receipts by limiting the extent to which federal income taxes could be deducted prior to the determination of Kansas taxable income for state income tax purposes. A number of people – especially in Johnson County, as you might imagine – were not happy with the booster tax.
So the decision was made in 1986 to let the booster tax sunset after a couple of years, and instead raise the state sales tax for the first time since 1965. This was not a small jump in the rate, by the way. The rate went from 3 percent all the way up to 4 percent after this action by the 1986 Legislature. You were chairing the House Assessment and Taxation Committee during this era. Do you recall any controversy over the equity issues that may have been associated with replacing an income-tax deduction that benefited primarily wealthy individuals with a sales tax that was instead more regressive? Do you remember any big debate about that? I’m guessing the Democrats, even though Carlin was pushing this, may not have been all on board?
ER: Oh, I think they lined up pretty well. I may be wrong on that, but it seems like they did. I know we tried to kill it in the Tax Committee and just weren’t able to.
CC: It came out anyway.
ER: As I recall, the argument wasn’t so much over income versus sales but property versus sales. I may be off on that, but typically I think what Carlin was wanting to do with the money was pump it into education, and the offset to education would be local property taxes. I think the argument was, “Would you rather pay sales tax, or would you rather pay property tax?” And if there’s one thing that’s highly unpopular I think and unfair is the property tax simply because it has no basis to income at all.
CC: More generally, can you tell us a little more about the rather remarkable legislative session of 1986? Governor Carlin had been a fierce advocate for advancing the state’s overall national perception as well as our economic development capacity and initiatives as you may recall. A number of GOP lawmakers including Speaker Mike Hayden seemed to agree. At the very least, there was a great deal of unanimity when it came to eliminating some longstanding constitutional restrictions dating from the Prohibition era and constitutional amendments were placed on the ballot that year – and subsequently adopted by voters – authorizing liquor by the drink, the lottery, and parimutuel wagering.
Beyond the property tax classification amendment, which we’re going to get into here soon, what all can you tell us about the legislative dynamics in putting so many issues directly in front of voters, which is what the ’85, ’86 Legislature opted to do? I’m assuming there must have been a good deal of opposition from groups who had kept these prohibitions in place for many decades on a lot of these so-called sin issues? Wasn’t there a group called Kansans for Life at Its Best that was rather prominent around here at that era?
ER: Yes.
CC: I’m guessing Reverend Richard Taylor must not have liked to see these things go on the ballot.
ER: He did not. He was a great man but certainly viewed alcohol as a terrible vice, which it probably is. But a lot of us believe people should be able to make their own decisions about what they want to do. If they want to drink away their life or gamble away their life, that’s fine with us. Just make sure we get a piece of the tax pie.
CC: And a lot of those issues went on the ballot in ’86 and ultimately approved.
ER: Yes.
CC: In addition to getting a lot of these constitutional amendments approved, the ’86 election saw Hayden narrowly defeat Lieutenant Governor Tom Docking who the Democrats were running. A couple questions about that era: Hayden prevailed in a five or six-way GOP primary, I think. He might have had 20 or 30 percent of the vote, but there was a lot of people running. Secretary of State Jack Brier, if I remember right, and Larry Jones. There were a lot of people running. Did you have a horse in the race? Do you remember backing Hayden or one of the other candidates in the ’86 GOP primary?
ER: I probably spent every waking moment working on Governor Hayden’s campaign for governor through the primary and the general election. It was a fun time and highly energized. It reminded me of Carlin’s first race when he ran for governor. There was just something about the chemistry that he had developed when you don’t have any money and don’t have anyone’s supporting any of it. You just run on caffeine and nerves.
CC: Run on fumes. Understood. I’m guessing things must have changed somewhat in 1987 for your House GOP caucus in terms of your ability to work more directly with the now-Republican administration on the second floor here in this building, right?
ER: Not at all.
CC: Did you have better access?
ER: I did. It was highly contentious. I mean, there were a number of Republicans that I mean just couldn’t stand Mike Hayden and did everything they could to sabotage him.
CC: We’re going to get into some of those dynamics within the caucus where there appeared to be a split developing here over the next couple of years. I do want to ask though before we get there, one of the very interesting pieces of legislation adopted in 1987, which you were very much a supporter of as House Taxation Chair, was an illegal drug tax. Minnesota and several other states had begun adopting this kind of tax, and Attorney General Stephan even came in and supported it during our hearings that year, as you may recall.
ER: Yes.
CC: The stated purpose was to raise revenue, but the reality was that it was designed to give prosecutors an extra set of charges to file against people caught with illegal drugs. Virtually no one bought and officially affixed the drug-tax stamps to their bags of marijuana and whatnot, but I think there are a few stamps every year that are even to this day still purchased sort of by the stamp-collector crowd. And if memory served, the law also contained a provision authorizing that the stamps can be purchased anonymously to get around potential constitutional problems.
This tax remains on the books to this day. I assume you were proud to have been an important part of its implementation back in ’87?
ER: Yes. We called it the Al Capone Tax. They didn’t convict Al Capone for killing people. They convicted him of evading taxes.
CC: Tax fraud, yes. I would also note that for the first time in the House rules during that ’87- ’88 biennium, the House Taxation Committee was given an added boost of prominence by being named as an exempt committee. As you will recall, the Budget Committee, Fed and State, and sometimes the Judiciary Committee had been exempt from any and all normal legislative deadlines. But that very important power had now been extended to House Tax while you were there as its Chair. Also the name of the committee was changed from the House Committee on Assessment and Taxation to just House Taxation.
I was told at the time in 1987, this was something Speaker Braden and others had decided to do to make your life in particular a little easier, given the upcoming firestorm that they were anticipating regarding the implementation of reappraisal and classification, and we’re going to talk about that in just a minute.
But please tell us about some of the key lawmakers you worked with during your 1985-1988 days as Chair of the Tax Panel. Robin Leach and Joan Wagnon were among the heavy hitters on the Democratic side of the committee room; and the very estimable Keith Roe from Mankato was your Vice Chair. Also any recollections you may have had with your interactions with Senate Tax Chair Fred Kerr during this era when you guys would go off to conference committee and whatnot. What all do you recall about this ’85 to ’88 era at least relative to the personalities that were involved?
ER: I don’t know. Fred Kerr was probably the most genial person I’d ever met next to my grandfather. He was very easy to work with, highly intelligent. We never had a cross word coming together on issues. It was never a problem. When I was there, we were dealing with such difficult issues. My desire was that in terms of the Tax Committee itself was that we be as nearly unanimous as we could be in committee, and when we got to the floor, we could play all the political games we wanted. But it was important to me that we came out with strong legislation and got everybody’s views involved.
And having someone like Joan Wagnon there on the Democratic side that shared that vision, I think we were able to craft excellent work product because we didn’t have those kinds of partisan fights that you typically see in a committee that’s divided between Republicans and Democrats. Everyone on the committee was really unanimously behind the idea of good tax policy, fair tax policy.
CC: And being collegial in committee.
ER: And being collegial at least in committee.
CC: Understood. Everyone, as we mentioned earlier, who has ever worked on or around the Tax Committee has funny stories to tell about the seemingly insatiable demand for new sales tax exemptions. I recall one time when we were back in Speaker Braden’s office here during the ’87 session, and he asked you, “What’s up with the Tax Committee’s having bundled fifteen or twenty of these exemptions together in the very same bill?” You said, “Well, Mr. Speaker, as a former Tax Chair, you know how there is a never-ending supply of these bills. So I thought if I bundled all of them together so as to make it appear utterly ridiculous, it should hopefully sink them all.” And I recall the Speaker, no political novice himself, agreeing with you, thinking that was a good idea.
But in the whole crazy universe of sales tax exemptions and it being so counterintuitive, what ended up happening is that the bundling of all of those exemptions together in ’87 gave the bill even more buoyancy, and it ended up getting enacted. Is this ringing any bills for you? You talked a little about this earlier. What other challenges were there in trying to discourage your fellow legislators from pushing bills to get their pet sales tax exemptions approved? Sometimes it seemed like every other bill in committee was a sales tax exemption.
ER: Probably one of my greatest failures I think as a legislator was figuring out how to get fewer people to ride in the wagon and get more to pull it. I was never able to conquer that. Every sales tax exemption, every income tax exemption has a constituency, and it’s a powerful constituency, and it may be a very small constituency, but my golly, that’s the one issue they care about. If you don’t do it, then “I’m going to vote for someone who will.”
I don’t know. The state was generous enough this year to exempt my groceries, which those of us in the top 1 percent appreciate all the tax breaks we can get. The other thing the state did was they exempted my Social Security this year. So now my Social Security benefits aren’t subject to income tax.
Well, if you took the total cost of exempting that Social Security and said, “Okay, let’s just lower the income tax rate,” you might go from 5 percent to 4.99 or 4.98 percent. Nobody would notice. Nobody would care. But by doing it the way they did it, they carve out all of us old guys and, boy, we’re happy as can be. So the politics of all of that is—I don’t know how to solve it, and I’ve struggled with that from the first day I stepped into this House Chamber, but I don’t think it is solvable. I just think it’s the nature of democracy.
CC: A quick question about the 1987 special session on highways.
ER: I don’t remember it. Next topic.
CC: Okay. We won’t get into the ’87 special session on highways. A lot of drama occurred during your final session in 1988 during a big debate about how much of the state income tax windfall attributable to the enactment of the Federal Tax Reform Act of 1986 would be retained by the State General Fund or in fact would be returned to the Kansas taxpayers. Governor Hayden had a huge battle within 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. Representative Kerry Patrick famously filibustered all night out here on the House floor, trying to stall the compromise package that you were carrying.
So before we get into property tax reappraisal and classification, do you have any reflections on the late 1980s income tax battles, which went on for a couple of years?
ER: There were two prongs to that. One was the general rate reduction, which was eventually adopted, but the other was tax simplification. What we basically did was piggyback off the federal system because we created an income tax system that had all of these differences with the federal system. So to complete a state return had become quite complicated. While under the new system, all you did was take your federal adjusted gross income, apply the state tax rate, and send in your money. It was a simplification move.
And all that was eventually adopted .I know it was controversial because again there were a lot of special interests in maintaining those differences in tax code. By coming into conformity with the federal system, all those special exemptions just went away.
CC: We’re about to get into all things property tax in a major way, but let us for the record point out that you had decided during the 1988 session that you would not be running again, that ten years in the Legislature had been enough, and that it was time to go back home and plug in even more, helping run your family’s bank. You were saying this by April of ’88, toward the end of the ’88 session.
But after former Secretary of Revenue Harley Duncan leaves over the summer of 1988, Hayden quickly approaches you to see if you would be willing to step into that rather challenging job. I will say that even if you had some inkling about what the next two years were going to bring by way of a statewide property tax revolt, you certainly did not duck it and quietly exit the stage here at the Statehouse. And in retrospect, maybe you needed a Profiles in Courage award for that.
In the summer of ’88, what all did Hayden discuss with you when he asked you to take over at Revenue? I will say that editorial pages around the state were all but unanimous in their praise of him for picking you, and the Manhattan Mercury in particular threw you a very nice bouquet.
ER: We both knew it was going to be tough. We knew that before he even thought about appointing me Secretary of Revenue. So I think what he was hoping for was someone who was familiar enough with the tax policy and tax implications that they could handle some of that controversy. I was a miserable failure at that, but that was the hope at the time.
A funny story though, my family, we’re very, very cheap. So, when I worked at the bank out of college, I was basically making the minimum wage. I remember Sue Peterson called me. I knew the Governor was going to appoint me Secretary of Revenue. She told me the salary he was going to pay me, and I said, “What?” She said, “Let me get back to you.” She called back two hours later and offered me about 30 percent more, and I was just shocked I was going to get paid so much. It’s funny how those things work out.
CC: Absolutely. We know that the history books 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 and here we were in the mid-to-late eighties.
So legislators in the mid-eighties passed a mandatory statewide reappraisal that was going to update all values as of January 1, 1989, giving 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 very first property tax classification amendment. That measure, which was in fact adopted by the voters, amended the prior constitutional requirement that all property be assessed at 30 percent of 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 the 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, 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 when you would have been over at Revenue here, and how everyone here at the Statehouse tried to respond.
You and the Governor had as your point persons, John Luttjohan, the PVD Director; and George Donatello, the Statewide Reappraisal Coordinator. But the ’89 special session and 1990 regular session here at the Statehouse turned out to be quite a wild ride for everyone. Can you tell us what all that must have been like for you over at Revenue?
ER: Oh, it was pretty bad. There was really no way to avoid what happened.
ER: So if you’ve got two neighbors, Neighbor A that moved into their house fifty years ago and paid $20,000 for it, the county never shifted that value. That house is now worth $100,000. The guy next door just built his brand new house for $100,000. Well, lo and behold, the appraiser shows up and says, “Oh, you built your house for $100,000. That’s how much it’s worth.” They’ve both got two houses that are exactly the same value, but one’s paying a fifth that the other one is, and there’s no way you can ever adopt anything that’s going to solve that problem. The guy that had the $100,000 house, they’re paying on $100,000 value, they’re going to see a dramatic decline in his property tax. The guy with the $20,000 dollar value is going to see a dramatic increase. But the $20,000 guy has been underpaying for decades, and so it’s basically catching up. But to explain that in a political realm is impossible. That’s why we have smart economists like Mr. Chris here to explain those things to us dumb legislators, but it doesn’t get you more votes.
CC: No, and it’s likely that the person in the $20,000 house was one of the aggrieved people marching on the Statehouse steps here in December of 1989.
ER: Absolutely.
CC: Even though he had been getting a relative break for a number of years.
ER: People hate change.
CC: Due in part to some of this political fall-out and angst as well as some other frustrations with Hayden, he loses his 1990 gubernatorial re-election bid to Democrat Joan Finney, who had been State Treasurer. 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. Finney in fact beat both of them in 1990–Carlin who had been attempting a comeback in the Democratic gubernatorial primary; and then Hayden in the November general election.
Let me ask, were you planning on staying on Secretary of Revenue during a second Hayden term, had he been re-elected?
ER: I was hoping not, but I mean, if he’d asked, I would have stayed. I had no desire to. I think you’re off on Joan Finney. I feel personally responsible for Hayden losing that election, simply because of the property tax. I have no idea what I could have done to fix it, but I mean, Hayden was a good governor, and he should have been re-elected.
A funny Joan Finney story: Joan’s first job was as my grandpa Carlson’s secretary over at the Jayhawk Hotel. His Chief of Staff for Kansas was a man named Cap Edwards from Madison, Kansas. Cap was Grandpa’s Colonel of the Highway Patrol when he was Governor. When he was US Senator, he ran the Kansas operations. Joan was his secretary. “Joannie” is what Cap always called her, and Grandpa did, too.
About twice a year, my mom would love to come to Topeka, and I think there was a ladies’ store called Pelletiers, and I think she took us kids there once and swore never again. We got dumped off at Grandpa Carlson’s office at the Jayhawk while Mom went shopping. Well, I’m not very well mannered as a four- or five-year-old kid, and I disappeared. Poor Joannie was in a panic because she was going to have to tell Grandpa Carlson who called every day promptly at 6:00 that she had lost his grandchild.
As it turned out, somehow, wherever the Menninger Foundation was from the Jayhawk Hotel, I think it was a long way away, I wound up in some nice lady psychiatrist’s office that figured out who I was and who to call. Joan was never so relieved in her life. I remember her driving up to Menninger’s to pick me up. That’s my Joan Finney story.
CC: One of the many important duties you had while serving as Revenue Secretary in addition to presiding over the property tax classification mess we’ve been discussing was serving on the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group alongside myself and a number of others. Do you have any recollections or stories about all the work that used to go into the CRE meetings and the whole process back during the late eighties and the very early nineties?
ER: I remember it was a room full of know-it-alls that got it all wrong – always way, way, way wrong.
CC: Yes, sir.
ER: Our job was to try to guess what our revenues were going to be in the next what—it was six months or twelve months. I don’t even remember what it was. But, I mean, we were off by miles. And we would spend weeks getting ready for these meetings. You couldn’t be more wrong than we could have been, I think. Maybe it’s gotten better because with AI and all this computer stuff they have now, it’s probably a lot better. But, boy, we sure got it wrong. That’s all I remember about that group. And it was probably all your fault.
CC: I have no doubt. Anything you have worth sharing on administrative hurdles and struggles that must have been involved with overseeing an agency of that size? There’s so many different functions beyond just the loudest dog that was barking as we mentioned regarding property tax stuff. Revenue, as we know, is a sprawling agency that’s dealing with everything from license plates to alcohol regulation to income taxes. You were just in your mid-thirties when you had that very interesting and challenging Cabinet-level job. It was the late eighties. Was the computer era starting? Were people and their accountants wanting to start filing electronically and doing away with paper returns? What all were you dealing with as Secretary of Revenue?
ER: Hundreds and hundreds of Macintosh computers. Revenue was a Mac shop. I remember we spent a fortune in Macintosh computers. That was the state of the art at the time. I think things have probably shifted, but what I remember most is I discovered something called the state civil service. Under the state law, you can only compensate a civil service employee based on their longevity. I, of course, believed in paying for productivity. So I invented new job classes. As people became more productive, they would get raises. The State Director of Personnel took great umbrage at this. I was circumventing the state civil service law.
When there’s a dispute—I didn’t know this—between a Cabinet Secretary and the State Personnel Director, it goes to the Governor for resolution. Of course, Mike and I were very good friends. I had him out fishing a number of times at Milford Lake. So I was able to lobby him, and he ruled in my favor. So we actually got to pay people based on productivity, and we reduced our head count, FTE count, by 8 percent when I was there.
CC: Administratively, you were able to start down the road of making it more a meritocracy, if you will.
ER: Yes, but I think that’s a dirty word today. The Democrats will hate that.
CC: My next question I was going to ask you a little bit—everybody has Joan Finney stories, and you already told us one about how she lost you when she was babysitting you.
ER: Not babysitting. I was no baby. I was probably four or five years old.
CC: But when she was State Treasurer, did you interact with her much?
ER: Yes.
CC: What was your sense of her when she ascended to—
ER: My first exposure in politics was I was her Geary County campaign chairman when she ran for the Republican nomination to the United States Congress against Chuck McAtee of Topeka. I got to know her so well. We did mailings, and we did door to door. But that was the first campaign I’d ever been involved in. When I got elected to the Legislature, she would frequently come to my office and tell about all the horrible things Bob Bennett was trying to do to her because he was trying to get the State Treasurer’s office to be an appointed office rather than elective.
Joan didn’t like that one little bit. She was, as you said, a very populist-oriented person, and she, like Grandpa Carlson, had a great memory. If she met someone, she would know who their father was and who their daughter was and who their son was and where they went to school and everything else. That’s why I think she got elected governor. People just like Joan. She’s a very nice lady.
CC: I will say she shared your view of sales tax exemptions.
ER: I know.
CC: In fact, in the early nineties, she insisted that some of them be repealed to help fund the new school finance law.
ER: Yes. Were any of them repealed?
CC: Actually for a few years, they repealed four or five of them.
ER: Did they really? Okay. I never heard.
CC: They were quickly restored when she was no longer Governor. For a brief window, from ’92 to ’94 or ‘5.
As long as we’re on the topic of your interactions with policymakers who would become even more prominent down the road, I would note that you served your final two years in the House with future Governor Kathleen Sebelius across the aisle from you as a Democrat. And she had been around here for a few years as a lobbyist for the Kansas Trial Lawyers. I think it was before she was first elected in ’86. Did you ever work with her much back in the day? Did you have any inkling that she might have a bright political future?
ER: I thought she might. I don’t know. The funny thing about Kathleen—she had absolutely no sense of humor. She is a stone-cold tactician. But I was a contributor to her campaign. As a Republican to a Democrat, that’s kind of a big deal. My friend Shirley [Allen]was her acting appointments secretary, and Kathleen said, “Find out what Ed wants. Let’s get him appointed to something.” So I told Shirley I wanted to be the lay member of the supreme court.
CC: That wasn’t on the bingo card, I take it?
ER: I’d vote however Kathleen wanted. I just wanted the robe. Of course, there is no such thing as a lay member of the supreme court. Shirley’s sitting around in a staff meeting with the Governor, rolls around to the appointments, and Kathleen asks her, “Did you ask Ed what he wants?” “Yes. Ed wants to be the lay member of the supreme court,” and she said—there were like seven or eight people around that table—not a smile. Someone after a ten-second pause says, “There is no lay member of the supreme court.” Shirley said, “Well, it really sucks when you have to explain your jokes.” Kathleen was bright, but she was humorless. It was strictly business with Kathleen.
CC: You do leave as Revenue Secretary, and you return to help lead maybe your family’s most important legacy, the Central National Bank. In fact, you were still managing the institution during what must have been a particularly troublesome mortgage crisis and subsequent Great Recession some fifteen years or so ago. Can you tell us what some of those challenges must have been like? Did any of the skill sets that you had acquired working in and around the Statehouse help serve you when it came to navigating those choppy waters?
ER: I can’t think of anything at the Statehouse. We had our biggest problem because we’re regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. They were in crisis mode, and they would send all their bank examiners back to San Francisco and Los Angeles where property values, you could take a $100,000, and you could sell it for $5,000 or $10,000. They’d come back in panic mode, and they would interpolate that to the state of Kansas and think, “Oh, my god. You’ve got this $100,000 piece of property, and these people owe you $40,000. You’re going to lose $35,000,” which isn’t the case in Kansas. So that was the biggest struggle, just dealing with federal bureaucrats on determining—again we circle back to, I should say yes, fair market value. We’ll have to deal with reappraisal.
CC: Yes. I do want to jump ahead to the 2012-2014 era when your name would surface again in association with another relatively prominent tax policy controversy here in Kansas. Of course, former Governor Brownback rather famously launched a self-described experiment on the state tax system. He even flew supply-side economist of renown, Arthur Laffer, into the state as a special consultant. But I think it’s fair to say that the experiment did not turn out anywhere nearly as well as Brownback, Laffer, and other proponents had hoped. The reality is that the fiscal crisis it caused quickly became ongoing and institutionalized, and lawmakers had to consider backfilling tax increases, smoke-and-mirrors budget gimmicks, and painful budget cuts annually until sanity was finally restored in 2017 – when two-thirds majorities in both chambers rather remarkably overrode his veto of a bill that largely repealed said experiment.
You seemed to have been one of the canaries in the mineshaft back in 2012, when you formed a group with a number of other former GOP elected officials called Traditional Republicans for Common Sense.
CC: You traditional Republicans expressed a great deal of alarm as to what the 2012 tax cuts were going to mean for the state and its economy, and history appears to have vindicated you on this point. Sheila Frahm, Dick Bond, Gary Sherrer, Jim Braden, Wendell Lady, R. H. Miller, Alicia Salisbury, Rochelle Chronister, Jane Aylward, Jim Lowther, Fred Kerr, and Lana Oleen, among others, joined you on the letterhead of this entity.
And many of those same folks, yourself included, again banded today in 2014 for the launch of a group known as Republicans for Kansas Values. The latter group actually endorsed Democratic nominee Paul Davis for Governor that year, given how doubled down Brownback and his people were when it came to defending their failing tax experiment. You were quoted in a press release that RKV put out that summer after you took particular umbrage at Brownback and his minions, blaming what was going on in Kansas on President Obama and his administration. You said, and I quote, “I mean, you can’t basically destroy the income-tax base and then blame some spurious thing from the federal government. When you cut taxes, you lose revenue. I’m sorry. That’s just the way it works.”
So given how you felt about what went on during the five-year experiment, can we assume that you were glad when Brownback’s veto was overridden and some form of normalcy was restored to the state tax system beginning in 2017?
ER: Yes. I don’t know. The Kansas tax system in my view—the way I see it, it’s like a three-legged stool. You’ve got the income tax. You’ve got the property tax, and you’ve got the sales tax. And I lump gas tax in with sales. It’s just sales tax on a different product. But the more you chip away at those things, the less stable your stool becomes. I think in today’s world, they’re dealing with a much less stable stool than we were dealing with thirty years ago. I just don’t think there are very many pieces to the foundation.
But, no, I think the reversal was good, but I think they’re a long way from doing what needs to be done. In fact, I think they’re going in totally the wrong direction today. But I do appreciate exempting my Social Security from taxes and my groceries, very generous of them.
CC: Jumping back in time to your days in the Legislature from ’79 through ’88, we, of course, spent a good bit of time on tax and fiscal matters since that’s the area of policymaking you and I focused on during much of our careers. But how would you characterize some of the big debates on major social issues such as the death penalty and abortion? Can you tell us what your position may have been on those issues back in the eighties, and whether your position may have evolved somewhat now that we’re here in 2024?
ER: Death penalty – Bob Frey and I wrote the bill that Carlin vetoed. Abortion – our leaders protected us. We never had to vote on it in the ten years I was here. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now how I’d vote. I guess I voted on the constitutional amendment I think, but that’s a secret ballot.
I think the most important thing I did when I was in the Legislature was I was viewed as a Young Turk or a Young Nazi when I first got here and voted against every single—as a freshman, every single appropriation bill that ever came to the floor. I remember John Vogel from Lawrence coming to me, saying, “If everybody did that, we’d never be able to do anything in this government.” “Yeah, that’s what I want.”
As a sophomore, Wendell Lady and Mike Hayden decided to put me on Ways and Means, and being the arch conservative, Mike Hayden put me in charge of SRS, mental health, and mental retardation. This terrorized everybody. “Oh, my god, we’ve got this jerk in!” It’s just a three-member subcommittee—Mike Meacham, Billy Wisdom, and me. But Bob Harder was gracious. He was the Secretary of SRS at the time, and he spent many, many hours with us. He told me, “You can close every state hospital we’ve got. I won’t fight you. All you have to do is promise me you’ll visit them for half a day.”
And I did. And if you visit KNI for half a day, you don’t want to close it. You want to increase their budget. We worked on that subcommittee hundreds of hundreds of hours. We rejected the idea of the federal poverty level because the federal government thinks 50 percent of our people are in poverty, and they’re not. We calculated what we thought was a Kansas Poverty Index. I think they still use it today.
We agreed we would base whatever it was, our welfare benefits on those, because we met people—when I went into this, I assumed anyone on welfare was there fraudulently and didn’t deserve it. After I was through with four months of personal one-on-one visits, there are people desperately poor out there that I have felt honored to be able to help. But we did that, and the net effect, we instituted a work requirement, but the net effect of it was to increase overall benefits by over 10 percent, which was a godsend to those people because when we created our Poverty Index, we included medical care for kids, transportation to work—so many of these programs ignore those key components, and if you’re a mom and you can’t have a babysitter for your kid and can’t get to the doctor when he has a cold, well, it’s hopeless, and you put these people down this whirlpool of poverty. There’s no climbing out of it. That’s the proudest thing I ever did in the Legislature was that.
CC: That sounds like a pretty transformative experience. When you got here, you were sort of a budget hawk/budget-slashing freshman, and then when Speaker Lady and others put you on the budget committees, and you began to get to know the nuts and bolts of the needs and what the expenditures were actually going for, it sounds like you were on your way in becoming a RINO at that point in time.
ER: Oh, my god, no. I am far from a RINO. I’m very, very conservative. I think someone that abuses the welfare system should be shot.
CC: But you understand the legitimate need for a lot of people receiving that.
ER: Absolutely, but that’s a conservative point of view, not a RINO point of view.
CC: Understood.
ER: I don’t know. It’s just difficult. I go back to Plato. What he said was that the ideal legislator is someone with wisdom, and he said it is impossible for anyone to have wisdom before they’re fifty. So I come into this at twenty-four and leave at what? Thirty-five or so? I come in as an absolutely, “By God, if the prosecutors say you committed murder, then off to the gallows with you.” And today, when I’m seventy, I would never vote for the death penalty simply because I think there’s a good chance we get it wrong.
And I think your life’s experiences whether it’s on welfare budgets, whether it’s on being convinced that the government is poorly run when actually it is not poorly run, you learn those things over life’s events. I think Plato was right. I think it makes sense having someone with some grey hair around—not all of them. You need the young shit kickers to stir the pot, but—
CC: It sounds like you need to run for the Legislature again.
ER: No. It would be tempting though because I have a lot of different ideas than I did fifty years ago.
CC: I bet that’s right. You mentioned Secretary Harder. A quick ask about working with some state officials when you were here in this chamber, especially Cabinet level ones. You worked, of course, with a number of different Secretaries of Revenue, Agriculture, Transportation, and SRS over the years. Any additional particular memories regarding those relationships or of working with their staffs? Did your perspective about the dynamics of the relationship between the legislative branch and these folks change at all in 1989 and ’90 when you suddenly found yourself standing on the other side of the podium in the committee rooms here in this building?
ER: It was very different. When you’re a Cabinet Secretary, you’re basically—you’re not devoid of independent thought, but you’re there to present a message on behalf of someone else. When you’re a legislator, you have no boss but your constituents, and nobody’s going to tell you how to vote or what to do except the people that sent you here.
So that’s quite different, and sometimes you would have to take positions that you didn’t necessarily believe in, just because you’re there in support of an administration, and it’s not—you weren’t elected. Your boss was elected, and that’s who carries the message and carries the day.
CC: Sure. It does seem that your strong suit was always 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 policy-making whirlwind in one form or another since the late seventies or at least monitoring it from afar, how would you compare and contrast the institutions of state government today, especially the Legislature, with the way things were forty-plus years ago? What are the biggest differences? Are those differences generally 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 the powerful special interest groups?
ER: I feel like Joe Biden. “Get off my lawn!” Every old person says, “Oh, it was so much better back when I was there, I was doing it.” I don’t really think that’s probably the case. There have always been deep divisions. That’s the nature of a democratic republic, and I think there will continue to be.
CC: Do you think you had more collegiality back in the day working across the aisle and with urban legislators and conservatives and liberals and all of that than that which goes on today? Do you have any observations about that?
ER: It depends upon who. Joan and I got along pretty well. Kerry Patrick and I probably did not.
CC: Anything else you want to add about what the future holds for you beyond the fact that you’re still involved on the board I guess at CMB. I’m wondering if you may still be engaged in an informal advisory role here and there in the policymaking process. Will you be closely monitoring the results up and down the ballot this fall?
ER: I’m looking forward to my death. That’s what I have to look forward to. Nobody calls and asks my opinion on anything. Yes, I’ll be watching very carefully the results of the election.
CC: Well, Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for your time today.
ER: You’re welcome. Good to see you, Chris.
[End of File]
January 11, 1954
Republican
Member, Joint Committee on Administrative Rules and Regulations 1979-1982
Member, House Elections 1979-1980
Member, House Federal and State Affairs 1979-1980
Member, House Commercial and Financial Institutions 1979-1980
State Representative, Kansas House of Representatives 1979-1988
Chair, House Committee on Governmental Organization and Elections 1981-1982
Member, House Ways and Means 1981-1986
Member, Computers and Telecommunications (Joint) 1983-1984
Vice-Chair, House Taxation 1983-1984
Chair, House Taxation 1985-1988
Member, Joint committee Legislative Post Audit 1987-1988
Member, House Federal and State Affairs 1987-1988
Secretary of Revenue, Kansas Department of Revenue 1989-1990
64; 65
Statehouse, Topeka, KS
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