Interview of Leslie (Les) Donovan, April 10, 2024
Interviewed by Chris Courtwright
Les Donovan served twenty-four years in both the House of Representatives (four years) and the Kansas Senate (twenty years) from 1993 to 2016. From his position on the tax committees of the House and Senate, he influenced major tax legislation including the tax cuts of the late 1990's. While chairing the Senate Assessment and Tax Committee from 2009 - 2016, he was very involved with the legislature's efforts to correct the budget problems caused by the Great Tax Experiment in 2012. He often called attention to the high property tax rates on automobiles and finally succeeded in lowering them. He was an advocate for small business during his entire term. He also advocated for using fuel tax to fund highway needs. This interview is a very substantive discussion of tax policy at a time of great change in Kansas.
Abortion; Bank of KDOT; Business climate in Kansas; car taxes; Glide Path to Zero; small business taxes
Les Donovan was born in Wray, Colorado. At the age of 2, his father drove the family to San Antonio, TX. He lived there for 40 years, on a farm. In San Antonio he got into the automobile business, working for Red McCombs for 17 years. He really wanted to own his own dealership. After a false start trying to buy one in New Orleans, his mentor and employer sent him to a man in Wichita, John DeLorean. His story about trying to buy the dealership in 1977 is interesting because it shows Donovan's business sense. The first legislative issue he tackled was the property taxes on cars. Although he got a bill passed and it lowered car taxes, it still didn't build in a fee schedule which is the solution he wanted. Throughout his 24-year career, Donovan influenced many tax policies, always with his eye on small business owners. A stalwart within the GOP for many decades, Les had the honor of being selected as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000 that nominated George W. Bush.
Chris Courtwright: Good afternoon. Today is April 10, 2024, in the afternoon, and we’re here in the historic Senate Chamber at the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka. I’m Chris Courtwright, who served for thirty-four years working as an economist for the Kansas Legislature in its nonpartisan research department before retiring in 2020. For full disclosure, Governor Kelly appointed me shortly thereafter to her bipartisan Council on Tax Reform.
Today I am privileged to interview former Senator and Representative Les Donovan, who’s lengthy twenty-four-year legislative career included slightly more than two two-year terms in the House and almost five four-year terms in the Senate. His long and distinguished public service career representing constituents from the Wichita area from 1993 to 2017 dovetailed with many dramatic changes in Kansas state government associated with new technology, evolving demographics and wild swings and changes in the political culture and issues facing policymakers in Topeka.
A stalwart within the GOP for many decades, Les had the honor of being selected as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000 that nominated George W. Bush. We would also be remiss to not mention that before entering the political arena, you had already been extremely successful in the private sector as one of the more renowned car dealers in Wichita, a major business venture you continued to manage from afar for many years during the winter and spring months, even after getting elected to the House originally in 1992. Did I get most of that right?
Les Donovan: I’d say all of it. Good job.
CC: This interview with Mr. Donovan 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 since the 1960s. The interviews will be accessible to researchers, educators, and the public through the KOHP website, ksoralhistory.org, and also the Kansas Historical Society and the State Library. Transcriptions are made possible as a result of the generosity of KOHP donors. Former Kansas House Speaker pro tem Dave Heinemann is our videographer today.
During your two decades in the Legislature, you served on quite a number of committees, including in the House: Economic Development, Labor and Industry, Local Government, Federal and State Affairs, Taxation, and Vice Chair of the Financial Institutions and Insurance Panel. Over here in the Senate, the list over twenty years is as long as our arms, but some highlights include the Commerce, Judiciary, Interstate Cooperation, and Confirmation Oversight Panels. I think even more significantly, you spent your final sixteen years in the Senate on the Transportation Committee, in fact chaired that panel from 2001 to 2008; and twenty years on the powerful Assessment and Taxation Committee where you were its Vice Chair from 2005 to 2008 and chair for your final eight years from 2009 to 2016.
We’re going to be delving into your work on these latter two panels in particular in a few minutes, but we should also note for the record that you served as Assistant Senate Majority Leader from 2001 to 2004. Is all of that a good executive summary of your committee assignments and positions or if there anything else you want to add that I may be missing?
LD: Well, Chris, one thing that comes to mind, I actually served for sixteen years on the Judiciary Committee. I kind of joked to some of the guys and said that I think I could take a brief little test, and I could become an attorney pretty quickly because I heard an awful lot of things dealing with judiciary type things.
CC: Okay. Before we jump into your legislative career and committee work and big issues and whatnot, let’s get into some additional background. One question we always ask former elected officials is whether they are native Kansans. My recollection is that you were not born here, but in fact may have grown up in or around San Antonio, Texas. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood growing up and how you got into the motor vehicle business down there as a fairly young man?
LD: To start with, I was actually born in Wray, Colorado. When I was two years old, my dad drove us to San Antonio. I lived there and grew up there for forty years. We ended up living on a farm. There were seven of us in the family—five kids and a mother and dad, and we moved into a two-room house. People ask me, “Where did everybody sleep?” and I cannot recall. I can’t tell you. I think my older brother and I, I remember in the summertime, we slept outside on a blanket more than once. But that’s the beginning. We had pigs and chickens and turkeys and guineas and geese and ducks and cows and horses and pigs, a lot of pigs, and everything. I got a full taste of the farm life, literally.
CC: You did get into the motor vehicle business while you were still in San Antonio, I believe. But our mutual friend, former Representative Carlson, reminded me recently that you may have decided to come to Kansas and further expand your car business in the Wichita area, thanks to the encouragement of relatively famous Texas oil man. Is there an interesting back story there? When was this? How old were you at the time? What all went into your decision to move to the Sunflower State?
LD: Okay. The man in question, the famous oil man from Texas was a man named Red McCombs. I worked for him for seventeen years. I actually started out selling used cars. That was quite a story in itself. After I did that for less than fifteen years, I became vice president and general manager of the store.
I really loved the car business. It just seemed to be very natural to me to sell vehicles to somebody. It worked out very well. Red was a tough person to work for. He really demanded an awful lot, but he did good things for his people, too. I can’t say anything bad about Red. He passed away last year. He was ninety-five years old.
Anyhow, I decided that I wanted to have my own store, and he was good about putting his people into stores and backing them. So he told us about—we tried to go to New Orleans. That was first on there. It was a Ford Store, and we had to buy that from Ford Motor Company. So we went down there and looked at the store, and it was right in downtown New Orleans, a three-story building. The object that Ford wanted at that time was to go out by the airport and build a brand new dealership and then move out there and take it over. We said, “Okay, we’ll do that.”
So we did, shook hands and went back and waited for the paperwork from Ford, and we waited, and we waited. Red kept asking me, “Did you get the paperwork yet?” I said no. He said, “Call that guy.” I said, “I’ve tried. He didn’t answer the phone.” So that was a pretty good giveaway that something was going on.
Finally, I called and talked to his secretary and she said, “He’s not here.” I said, “Well, then I’ll leave a message. Just tell him that the next phone call you’ll get from us will be from our attorney because we have an agreement, a handshake agreement,” and she said, “Oh, he just walked in.” I’ve had that happen more than once in business.
So he said, “How are you doing, buddy buddy?” That’s a dead giveaway that something’s going on. I said, “Well, we wondered where the paperwork was.” He said, “Well, we told you about this guy from Baton Rouge that we really had been working with for years, and we really wanted him in that store. He finally called, and he’s coming. Sorry about that.” I said, “Well, it would have been nicer if we had known this a while back because we’re interested in getting it.”
We turned away from New Orleans, and that turned out to be one of the biggest blessings of my life. Red told me about this place in Wichita that was owned by a person named John DeLorean. He talked to him about it earlier and everything. John DeLorean is a famous guy that worked for General Motors for years. He wasn’t always what he seemed to be. So we worked it out with the bank that had a note on it, and we ended up buying the dealership.
We did not buy it through the normal way. We did not buy the majority of the assets because if you do that, you inherit all of the debt. The person that DeLorean had working in there, running the store never would give us a list of all of his creditors. He just paused and delayed and did—I knew something was going on. We both did. So we just bought the used inventory. We bought pieces of it so we didn’t get under the bulk sales law they call it. So we did that and made a deal with the bank, and we bought the dealership.
CC: What year was this? When you got to Wichita?
LD: 1977. My son was fifteen years old at the time. I remember that because of what I gave him for his birthday. He now is the general manager and vice president and owns 25 percent of the business because I brought him in as a partner. He’s done a great job, made me a lot of money. You don’t need to put that in there.
CC: Okay. I always thought that the boom and bust business cycles for car dealerships are such a wild roller-coaster ride that they’re somewhat similar to the oil and gas industry in that respect. One reason I think that is because of all the stories you’ve told me over the years. One really horrific tale that always stuck with me is how everything apparently tanked for dealers in the mid-seventies during the energy crisis. Arab oil embargo and recession, all of this was going on, and it really had consumers suddenly rethinking not just what kind of cars they needed, but also how often they needed to purchase new vehicles. Can you tell us what you were going through, trying to roll with all these punches during the mid-seventies as you’re transitioning up here to Wichita?
LD: I remember it well. That was actually before we decided to come up here. You couldn’t give a car away. It was very difficult to get them from the manufacturer, and people were afraid to buy a new car because they didn’t know what was going on. Everybody wanted these small cars. They thought they did. We had people coming in and trading in one-year-old or eight-month-old Oldsmobile 98s to try to buy a Maverick to get better gas mileage. I would tell these people, especially if I knew them, “Are you sure you want to do that? It’s going to be such a change in what you’ve been driving.” “I don’t think we can afford to buy a big car.” So we made a few trades like that. It was just a couple months later they’re back in there, “Please, do you still have that car? I’d be glad to buy it back.” “No, we sold it.”
Anyhow, that was awful. But we did to have inventory to sell was we had a buyer who was one of our used car managers, and we sent him to several places, but the one place that he went to over and over was to Florida and got involved with the Budget Rent-A-Car down there. We bought probably I would guess 200 Budget Rent-A-Cars that had anywhere from 50 miles to 500 miles on it. We bought those and trucked them in to San Antonio and sold them just like hot cakes. People loved them. They were buying practically a new car for a used car price, which was great. So that got us by, and we did fine. And then it broke, and everything was back to normal.
CC: We’re now going to spend a good bit of time on your work regarding lowering Kansans’ property taxes on their cars, which the history books will record as your top priority and possibly greatest legislative achievement. I am fairly sure I recall seeing you here at the Statehouse during the very early nineties, maybe as a conferee, advocating for lowering car taxes even before you are elected in 1992. I’m guessing your frustration over the inability of policymakers in Topeka to address the issue in a meaningful way was one of the motivating factors behind your decision to run in 1992, but I’m assuming there were a number of other issues that prompted you. Were you concerned about state regulation of the overall business climate? This was a fairly volatile time politically, of course, and some of the property tax upheavals of the late eighties had led to the Democrats’ having taken the House in 1990 and the election of Governor Finney that same year. Anyway, please tell us about your mindset in 1992 when you decided to jump with both feet into electoral politics.
LD: The property tax on vehicles was one of the #1 things. At that time, as you may recall, the property tax on vehicles in Kansas was 40 percent higher than the second highest in the United States. I remember an example that they put in the paper and talked about the Ford 4-door sedan, just the basic car, the property tax would be $1,100 in Wichita, and the average highest in the rest of the country was $600. So it was awful. Kansas was just totally worse than anybody else.
One of the other things that’s not in there that I remember being one of the driving things that made me decide to do that was the local taxes, not taxes so much, but regulations on businesses. What we had to do. The one thing that comes to mind was the unemployment tax. It was completely out of hand. It really was. It wasn’t getting any better. It was getting worse. So we wanted to work on that, which we ended up doing and got it rolled back quite a bit. That was the two main things that I recall but there were several others.
CC: I was digging around online, trying to prep for this interview, and I was a little startled to see that when you ran in 1992, your Democratic opponent was a relatively young John Carmichael, a gentleman who of course has been representing Wichita in the Kansas House since 2013, so ended up actually serving in the Legislature and in the Sedgwick County delegation with you for a few years. I spoke to John recently about that 1992 race, and I want to get into all that, but before I do, I have to tell you that he was all but effusive in his praise for you, notwithstanding many of your disagreements on politics and policy. I gather you two may have even shared a drink or two at some point maybe a decade or so ago, when you were both staying at the Ramada during the session?
LD: I think maybe we did. I think I also ended up buying. No, John worked out to be kind of a friend. He gets his cars worked on at my place and one thing or another. I’ve had that happen more than once because I don’t treat people, regardless of whether we’re friends or enemies politically, I don’t treat them with disdain or let them know that I dislike them. I don’t. They’re human beings. They’ve got their views, and I’ve got mine. I’m right, of course, but whatever.
CC: John said that you absolutely clobbered him at the ballot box in 1992, and that experience taught him a great many things that were important about what to do and what not to do when it comes to running for office and more generally advocating in and around the public policy arena. He told me two things, that the 1992 race was a relatively hard-hitting, bare-knuckled affair even by today’s standards, and also that one of the big issues that year was abortion, given that the whole Summer of Mercy protests had been going on in Wichita during the summer of 1991 and in fact making national news. Do you have similar recollections about abortion being a key issue as you were meeting the voters in 1992? Also, did you and John have any legislative forums or debates or was that election contested more with yard signs, radio ads, and door knockers? I’m assuming that, as you said, lowering car taxes also must have been one of the top issues you were pushing. Please tell us all that you recall about your initial 1992 House campaign.
LD: We did get into a discussion of abortion quite often, quite a bit. That was one of the leading things, differences between John and myself. That’s a very, in my district especially in Wichita, that was a very, very strong feeling by the majority of the voters that they were against the idea of abortion. So I knew I had an advantage there. I also believed that. So he was working uphill. Let’s put it that way.
But I never treated him with disrespect. We did have two face-to-face conversations or whatever you call it. I enjoyed both of them. I think I did a good job.
CC: The night you get elected, Republicans also pick up a handful of seats statewide and regain control of the House Chamber. So you came in as part of a GOP legislative majority where you would continue to serve for the balance of your career. But during your first term in the ’93-’94 biennium, your party only controlled the House by a few seats.
LD: Right.
CC: The Senate over here was far more closely divided than it is today, and incumbent Governor Finney, of course, was a Democrat. You are still a freshman and trying to learn all of the legislative rules and nuances and who the key Statehouse lobbyists and power brokers are. I’m guessing all of this was a strange new world relative to what you had experienced in the private sector, and I’m wondering if trying to operate in this very dynamic and new political environment was at all overwhelming or frustrating for you during your first term.
LD: No question about it. I told people many times, they asked me, “What all did you have to learn?” I said, “Well, the first thing you learn that’s very important, on each floor of the Capitol building, where are the bathrooms.” I say that jokingly, but it’s true. You really need to know. This is a big building.
Anyhow, what I really tried to do with people is to educate them on what I believed in, if I thought it was reasonable for them to get on board, and in most cases, that was the case. I kind of lost track of what the question was.
CC: Your very first term as a freshman in the House, the dynamics of learning the new—
LD: We had a very diverse group of people get elected. We really did. Some of them were very, very sharp people. Others, I can’t recall names, and I’m not about to point them out anyway, I didn’t feel like were really quite as well qualified. Anyhow, we all got along pretty well. I never had any enemies. I never have had.
CC: Notwithstanding the challenges facing freshman legislators, the record shows that you did hit the ground running and had already begun pushing in a major way back in ’93 and ’94 for car tax reform during this time and even got a bill past the House that the Senate chose not to consider. Is that correct?
LD: That is correct. Seventy-eight votes. The requirement is only sixty-three, and I took it over. I worked on that day and night. I would wake up at 1:00 in the morning and think, “Oh, my gosh. I should have done this and this.” My approach was quite different than the way it is now. I didn’t have a—based on the cost of the vehicle, a different value for each one. I had a fee schedule set up, and I put that together over the term, and I really did work on it day and night. I got it done. I got seventy-eight votes in the House. I got it passed, and close to the end of the session, I brought it over to the chair of the Tax Committee in the Senate who was Senator Audrey Langworthy, and she took it, didn’t even look at it, and stuck it in her desk drawer, and said, “We won’t have time to work that this year.”
I got physically ill. I went home and got sick. I really did. I had worked on that day and night. It was the #1 thing for me to do. I tell people over and over, and I know it’s true. I’d meet somebody in the elevator, some legislator, and I had this huge wad of green computer tape that had every single vehicle registered in the state of Kansas, property taxes, and I’d say, “Have you got a minute?” I was the scariest thing that ever happened in this building.
CC: I’m laughing because I remember you carrying those reams of paper around the building. I do want to ask you briefly about the 1994 election. The historical record shows that your party had smashing success up and down the ballot that year, and Republicans picked up quite a number of additional seats in the Legislature. After Governor Finney opts not to run again, incumbent Secretary of State Bill Graves wins the gubernatorial race against Democratic Congressman Jim Slattery.
But from what I recall of that campaign, Jim Slattery made proposed cuts in car taxes one of his major issues. Even though we know of course that you are a loyal Republican and no doubt supported Graves as the GOP nominee, I would assume that you must have had some weird mixed emotions given that Slattery was out there that fall saying exactly the same things you had been saying for some years relative to car taxes. Did you ever approach Graves or his people during that ’94 campaign and advise them to agree with you and Slattery about lowering car taxes and then somehow use other issues to emphasize the distinctions between the two candidates?
LD: As I recall, Governor Graves after seeing the notoriety that I got on the idea of lowering car taxes, when I first started covering this issue, the Wichita Eagle constantly had something in the paper every day. The reporter’s name was Denny Clements, and he was asking me, “Do you just want to lower taxes so you don’t have to pay so much on your cars?” I said, “Denny, I don’t pay property taxes on cars. I drive a car and pay a fee to buy a plate. That’s it. I don’t pay property tax. It’s the customers out there that pay the tax, and they’re very unhappy.”
After he finally came around to my way of thinking, which he did, 100 percent, he wrote a quarter-page article and was totally in agreement with me. Governor Graves I’m sure took note of that as well as Mr. Slattery, who I never had a conversation with about it, and they both saw that it was a sellable feature to the public. So they both got on board. Governor Graves actually got a bill introduced in his name doing it.
Now it didn’t do what I wanted it to do. It didn’t put in a fee schedule. That’s what we need to do, get rid of this valuation thing because the county’s part of that formula, and if you’re in a county that has real high property taxes—some of them are sky high, and there’s others that are very small because something in that county is paying all those taxes where the whatever, that puts electricity out. What the heck is that county? Anyway, whatever. Western Kansas has a lot of gas. It pays a lot of taxes. So their mill levy is way low.
CC: Lower levies.
LD: Anyhow, that is not the way it should be. A fee schedule, if you’ve got a 1984 Buick, and you drive it, you’re going to pay $8 or $12, whatever it is, all over the state. It shouldn’t be different. But it didn’t get changed. The formula got changed, but it’s still there.
CC: Well, no harm, no foul because in 1995, Governor Graves, as you indicated, and many of your newly arrived GOP colleagues did seem to finally acknowledge the high burden that car taxes had been placing on their constituents, and of course, the 1995 Legislature approved a major car tax cut package that phased in a full 50 percent reduction in taxes over the next five years.
A number of other policymakers, including your chair and other fellow members on the House Tax Committee as you have indicated, ended up authoring that final package and did take a different approach from what you had been recommending regarding certain specific components of the law change. You, of course, had been carrying around thousands of pages of computer printouts, car tax runs for several years by that point and were more of an expert on that complicated tax system than anyone on the planet with the possible exception of myself and the gentleman we worked with over at the Department of Revenue during those years. Were you at all frustrated that you did not have as much input as you would have liked on the final version of that historic ’95 revision to the car tax law? Or were you just generally more relieved that it finally had happened?
LD: Well, some of both. I was disappointed in the fact that they didn’t see the reason to do it the way that I wanted to do it. I still think that’s the way to do it because they changed and lowered very much by 50 percent, but they kept the formula in place. So what’s going to happen when the price of cars goes up which it has done greatly since that time, and when mill levies start going back up in the different states like they will do, they’re doing now. We’re going to get back to where we were. So take my word for it. You’re going to be back with this same argument maybe ten years from now or sooner.
CC: Staying chronological for the time being, tell us how you ended up over here in the Senate in March 1997 after having been re-elected to your House seat in 1996. Was this after Senator Harris had resigned?
LD: Yes.
CC: Were you approached by precinct committee people? Were you the logical candidate to just move across the Rotunda?
LD: Well, yes. I think people talked to me. But then I talked to Mike. Mike Harris was a friend of mine, too. He’s from Wichita. I talked to him and told him I would be interested in that seat, and he was happy. He seemed to be.
CC: So you had his blessing.
LD: Absolutely. I really did. So it wasn’t much of a race. There were two other, three other people that were going to run, and I talked to all three of them, and they all decided they didn’t really want to run. I told them, #1, the person was eighty-some odd years old and had terminal cancer. I told her, “You can’t go through a race like this. This is tough.” She agreed. Then the other two were guys. One of them was not really wanting to run. He just wanted to have a four-minute speech when he said, “I concede” kind of a deal. Whatever. The four-minute speech took about fifteen, but that’s okay.
CC: Tax cuts continued to remain a big priority for policymakers during the late nineties, as I’m sure you will recall, and there were major reductions enacted in the statewide levy for public schools in 1997, and then a broader smorgasbord of additional sales, income, severance, and property tax cuts passed in 1998. Can you tell us any memories you had about the tax cut debates of the late nineties? Your former colleagues in the House always seemed to me in that era to be a little more aggressive in wanting to cut taxes than did your new colleagues over here in the Senate. Is that correct?
LD: I kind of remember that being the case, yes. I think it’s because of the lack of years of understanding how the process works and why you have to have a certain amount of taxes. I think the Senate understands it a little better. Most people over here have been in this building.
CC: Have been in here longer.
LD: Longer, yes.
CC: Tell us about your interactions with Governor Graves? How closely did he work with the GOP caucus leadership in both the House and the Senate and with you personally? I gather you must have had a fairly good relationship with him and his key staffers and Cabinet officials?
LD: Yes.
CC: As long as we have temporarily left the timeline and are talking about specific personalities, what do you recall about your interactions with Governor Kathleen Sebelius? You, of course, briefly served with her in the House in ’93 and ’94 before she gets elected Insurance Commissioner. Then in 2002, she’s elected Governor, and you’re dealing with her as part of the deliberative policymaking process in a much more major way while you’re here in the Senate until she leaves in 2009 to go to work for the Obama administration. I get it that you two are in different parties and certainly may not see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, but do you have any particular memories or funny stories that you could share about when your paths did cross over the years? How was working with Governor Sebelius and her staff different than things had been for you under Governor Graves?
LD: I have to tiptoe around this a little bit, I think. As I understand, dealing with Kathleen, Governor Sebelius, she did not have a real grasp on taxes, how they work, and why they’re where they are. So there was a case in point. We were discussing something one time, and I asked her a question, and she didn’t know the answer to it, and it was a fairly simple question dealing with taxes. She asked her assistant who was a young man named Troy [Findley] Something, a nice young man, he really was. He didn’t know the answer either. They looked at each other like, “What’s he talking about?”
Anyhow, I think it might have had to do with who pays the taxes and how are they taxed. I told the group that was there that there is a known factor that about 85 percent of the income tax that’s paid in this country, in this state is paid by individuals through their business. These small business owners make up a huge amount of the taxpayers, and they pay a lot of the taxes. They are the ones taxed, but they pay it personally, just the way the system works. She didn’t know that, and Troy didn’t know that. How can that be? Well, it was. It’s true. I just happen to know that. I’d known it for years. I felt the pain for years, trust me.
Anyhow, I remember that. There were a couple of others. She took credit for some work that was done in Wichita, some paving project or something like that. The media came up, and they were just—you know, how the media is. They couldn’t believe it, that a woman got things done like that. They were bragging on her, this and that. She said, “I was just so happy to put that deal together.” She had nothing to do with putting the deal together. A couple of contractors there said, “We know who put that deal together.” But that’s okay. That’s just the way politics works. Governors take credit when they can. People above governors take credit when they can. And I understand that, and I don’t get too excited about it.
CC: I do want to touch briefly on the 2000 election. We noted earlier that you were a delegate to the Republican National Convention that year in Philadelphia that nominated Texas governor George W. Bush for president.
LD: Right.
CC: Why did you decide to run that year as a delegate? Had you been approached by party officials and encouraged to do so? Were you just an enthusiastic supporter of the Texas governor and wanted to be there to see the whole GOP convention spectacle in person?
LD: I can’t really answer that because I don’t remember. I know one thing. I flew in from Istanbul, Turkey to be there in Philadelphia so I would be able to attend that. We were one day late getting there. I can’t remember who it was that was the vice of that committee that voted before I got there. I don’t remember who it was.
A couple of things I thought were funny while I was there. We all had big, old badges like this. I was walking down from where we were sitting up there, and I was running into George Stephanopoulos, little George. He was on the way up, and he saw my badge, and he came to see me. He got closer and closer and closer, and he saw that I was quite a bit taller than him. He darted off to the side. I know that’s what it was. He didn’t want to be on camera with me, I think. I may be wrong. I never talked to him.
There was another guy there that was head of something, and he snuck in. He rode the bus out from where we were, and he was not supposed to be in there. This is a Republican get-together, and he was a hard-core Democrat. He did something with unions and this and that and everything. Oh, he wanted to get in there and say bad things about George Bush real bad, and he got in. How in the world he got in, I don’t know. He never got a chance to say much, I don’t think.
CC: Did you ever get a chance to meet Mr. Bush in person, either at the convention or maybe at some other point before he was elected or even after he had been sworn in as president?
LD: No, I didn’t. I’ve been to his library twice, I think. But Sissy, my wife and I, got a chance to attend a fundraiser in Kansas City at the home of one of Kansas City’s well-known citizens, whoever they were, for a fundraiser and gave her [Laura Bush] a check. She was a sweet woman, a very nice lady, but I never met him. He was off campaigning.
CC: During that 2000 election, you win re-election to your Kansas State Senate seat with some ease, but, of course, Mr. Bush ended up in a weeks-long battle over the Florida vote count and hanging chads before the US Supreme Court finally stepped in to basically assure he was going to be the next president. Looking back at all of that and some of the more recent national electoral controversies, especially 2016 and 2020, do you have any thoughts about anything different we as a nation should be doing to improve our elections and associated infrastructure? I gather you support maintaining the electoral college system as an alternative of using a plurality of popular votes, but how do we best go about ensuring the integrity of our elections moving forward, especially given how much skepticism seems to have set in in recent years?
LD: We need to work with a lot more diligence to make certain that every vote is a legal vote and gets counted. Every vote should count every time. Votes that aren’t legal should never count. I know that’s simple to say, probably hard to do. We just need to practice very strict control on our voters and our vote count. That’s all.
CC: Moving on from election infrastructure to more traditional infrastructure, I want to ask you next about your longtime, dogged support of the state’s transportation system. Kansas has generally been renowned for having one of the best highway systems in the nation, and the Legislature seems about once a decade to address a major new funding package designed to help KDOT prospectively oversee the entire transportation system. You, of course, were in the Senate when the 1999 program was approved, and you shortly thereafter took over as chair of the Senate Transportation Committee in 2001, where you would serve in that important position for the next eight years. Do I recall correctly that that chairmanship also prospectively gave you a seat of some kind on the governing body of the Kansas Turnpike Authority? Please tell us about why you have always been such a fierce advocate for maintaining and improving the state’s roads, airports, and other infrastructure, and what are some of your memories working with KDOT officials over the years, at least through 2008, in terms of how all of this was going to continue to be funded?
LD: A big, big portion of the funding comes from fuel tax. For many years, the Kansas Governors mostly have seen fit to borrow that money from that particular pool of money and use it for other things in the state, mostly education, and the things that are putting the pressure on. I call that “using the National Bank of KDOT.” That’s a silly term, but that’s exactly the way they used it. It shouldn’t be that way.
When we had one of those—after I got out and the person that was running that committee had a bill in front of him to continue to raise the funds for Transportation, I tried to get him to take it off of the normal place to put it and put it onto fuel tax. Fuel tax is covered in the Constitution, and the state can’t touch it. So if you can put that 50 million dollars a year on to fuel tax instead of sales tax, then that would not be a problem anymore, that portion of it, but I couldn’t get him to do that.
CC: So you had sort of a lockbox idea for transportation funding?
LD: The US Constitution locks it for you, yes. That would have been, I think, reasonable, but it didn’t get in there.
CC: Okay. Before we get into your years under Governor Brownback, I want to note that you had served in the House during the nineties while future Governor Mark Parkinson was over here in the Senate while he was still a Republican. Did you ever interact with him much during those early days and during the time he was a Democratic Governor in 2009 and 2010? I know that he was still in the GOP and in fact serving as statewide Chair when you were a delegate to the RNC. Were you involved with him at all during that period leading up to the convention that summer? Anything that you recall about Mark Parkinson?
LD: I don’t recall ever having any face-to-face interactions on a regular basis. Let’s put it that way. Whether he was involved in me running for that seat, I don’t remember. I really don’t remember that. I do know that Sissy and I were on a trip that I went to the Greek Islands, and we had to fly out of Istanbul, Turkey to fly back to Philadelphia. We couldn’t get in there because it was storming. So we had to land in New York City, and the next day we flew.
CC: In daylight.
LD: I liked Mark. I always got along with him fine. I just didn’t understand why he changed parties, but that was his idea.
CC: As long as we are badgering you for your recollections about your dealings with other prominent politicians, we should also point out the future Governor Jeff Colyer did serve in the Legislature with you for a few years before he was elected lieutenant governor in 2010 including two years here in the Senate. The same kind of questions about him as other future Governors that you worked with. Do you have any vivid memories or funny stories to tell, either from his days on the third floor or when he was down on the second floor as Lieutenant Governor? Did you figure he was an up-and-comer in Kansas political circles, meaning that you were not surprised when he was chosen to be Sam Brownback’s running mate in 2010?
LD: I thought it was an outstanding choice. He’s a great person and well versed in politics and everything. I thought that was a great choice. I had no qualms about it at all.
CC: You may be sensing a pattern where we’re asking you about a lot of these future Governors who you may have known from the Kansas Statehouse political circle, but Governor Brownback may be a little bit of an outlier in that he may have only briefly been around as Kansas Secretary of Agriculture during your first term in the House, but then of course, got elected to Congress initially in 1994.
LD: Right.
CC: He was soon thereafter elected to the US Senate in a 1996 special election opened up by Bob Dole’s resignation and remained there until he was elected Governor of Kansas in 2010. Did you know him personally before he was elected as well as you did some of the others? Had your paths at least crossed at fundraisers or political events over the years?
LD: Yes. They had, and I had supported Sam when he was in the US Senate and after he ran for Governor. I supported him all the way through his career when it was available.
CC: All right. One more of these. You, of course, served in the Senate for a number of years with current Kansas Governor Laura Kelly. How did you get along with her? What did you think about her political abilities and were you at all surprised when she decided to run for Governor in 2018?
LD: Not really. I knew that normally it would come out of the Senate, the Democrat side of the Senate. I thought, in fact I wrote that on my notes there, I thought she was the most qualified Kansas Democratic Senator to be the Governor. She’s got more clout or more political smarts than anybody else in there. I thought she always should have been the leader of the Democratic Senate before she was. I won’t name names there. In my mind, she’s the class of the class, if you would.
CC: Let’s talk a little more about taxes. Starting in 2009 and through the balance of your career in 2016, you chaired the powerful Senate Assessment and Taxation Panel during some extremely interesting times.
LD: You think?
CC: We know that Governor Brownback had gotten elected in 2010, and by 2012, was rather famously pushing for some dramatic changes to the state’s tax code with many of his proposals getting enacted. There was some parliamentary maneuvering out here on the Senate floor, of course, and I think to be fair to the Governor, we should point out that the final version that landed on his desk was not exactly the version that he preferred. He did however sign it into law, and the great self-described Tax Experiment was off and running.
What are some of your memories of 2012? Arthur Laffer, the famous economist, was flow in here to Kansas as a special consultant. Is that correct?
LD: Yes, I remember that.
CC: Any memories about the original 2012 tax package and its enactment?
LD: Well, I had more than one conversation with the Governor-to-be Brownback, and that was that—it will come up in your next questionnaire, the race to the bottom, so to speak? You had a different term.
CC: The Path to Zero.
LD: The Path to Zero. I didn’t disagree with wanting to do that. I thought it was a good move and a good idea, but his bill tried to do it too fast, and I told him that. If you do that, you’re going to get us in the hole, and we’re going to have to come back and refill that hole. If you’ll slow it down instead of dropping it 2 percent, drop it 1 percent. That’s all. That’s all I ask you to do.
He said, “No, we’re going to run it the way it is.” I said, “All right, whatever, but I disagree that it’s going to stay there very long. It will come back to bite you.” And I guess it did.
CC: Following up on that, I think it’s fair to say that because the fiscal impact of that 2012 legislation turned out to be more costly than some of the law’s proponents had hoped, the Legislature in fact seemed to have spending cuts, so-called smoke and mirrors budget gimmicks, and even backfilling tax increases on the table pretty much annually for the next five years.
On this latter approach of backfilling tax hikes in 2013, you as Senate Tax Chair had to help that legislation get across the finish line. Democrats, of course, were not eager to help bail the Governor out at that point. So the tax increase had to be enacted with only GOP votes. That 2013 bill had a sales tax increase and reductions in both itemized and standard deductions from the income tax as its most controversial features. Was getting anti-tax Republicans, especially a number of nervous freshmen who had come in with the 2012 election, to vote for that plan a huge challenge for you and leadership?
LD: Yes. I had another term than “nervous.” Yes, it was a problem. Let’s put it that way.
CC: Quite a challenge.
LD: Oh, big time, yes.
CC: So this was why perhaps the so-called Glide Path to Zero Formula that ultimately never would be implemented was in the 2013 bill – to maybe help people who voted yes be able to say that they at the very least had voted for the ultimate repeal of the income tax.
LD: Yes, that’s the kind of stuff that the public gets a hold of and says, “See? They don’t know what they’re doing. Back and forth.” We should never do that. We should fix it the right way and not have to go back and change. That’s my personal and political opinion.
CC: We had a very similar situation two years later when policymakers in 2015 had to enact yet another backfilling tax increase with pretty much only Republican votes. I know the 2015 session is the one that languished all the way into late June, and there was a near meltdown of the state financial system as the end of the fiscal year was approaching. There ultimately was another sales tax increase, a cigarette tax increase, and a postponement of income tax rate cuts that had been set in 2013 to help get that previous measure across the finish line.
LD: The only thing I liked about that was the cigarette tax. That was fine with me. You could raise it again today if you want to.
CC: I’m guessing that your job as Tax Chair must have remained pretty much the same. You had to help convince majority party members that this had to happen. But even though you were no longer chairing the Transportation Committee during these years when the state fiscal crisis seemed to have become ongoing and institutionalized, I assume you must have been a little concerned with all the raids on the so-called Bank of KDOT when funding that had been earmarked for transportation was repeatedly diverted to help backfill the State General Fund.
LD: Exactly. And it wasn’t just then. I had happened over and over and over up to that time and still happening today as far as I know.
CC: As we indicated earlier, your last term from 2013-16 was characterized by a number of new faces on the scene in the Senate, as there had been some hotly contested GOP primaries in 2012. Beyond all the work on tax policy, do you have any recollections as to how the overall legislative dynamics had changed somewhat during your final four years in the Senate? In the twilight of your legislative career, did you work fairly well with the incoming freshman class of 2013?
LD: I have never had a problem getting along with anybody in the legislature because I realized what they’re going through because I went through it. I tried to make them feel as welcome to this position as anybody else.
Now I may not agree with them on policy, and I probably more than likely wouldn’t vote with them, but I’m not going to talk bad to them or about them, unless it’s you. I might do a little bit about you, but not likely.
CC: Before we leave the tax talk aside, the third and final backfilling tax increase enacted in the wake of the original 2012 experiment occurred in 2017 after you had left the Legislature. At that time, lawmakers in both parties approved a bill that repealed the non-wage business income exemption and restored the three-bracket system to the individual income tax that had been reduced to two. Although Governor Brownback vetoed that measure, legislators subsequently overrode his veto with two-thirds majorities in both Chambers.
Even though you were no longer around at the time, did the way all of that went down surprise you at all? Or does anything that happens here surprise you?
LD: No, very simple. In fact, my answer on the sheet says, “Nope, it doesn’t surprise me.” Not at all.
CC: Again, by way of full disclosure, I would point out that we have known one another for well over thirty years, and I was a member of your committee staff during all the years you served on and then oversaw the tax panels. I can honestly say that one reason I looked forward to doing this particular interview so much is that of the many hundreds of legislators I have known over the years, you are by far one of the most colorful and fun to be around.
One of the highlights of the legislative session for me every year would be when you would wear an extremely loud, bright green suit for St. Patrick’s Day. I assume it’s safe to say that you are quite proud of your Irish heritage.
LD: Oy.
CC: Given that you were such an important part of the political whirlwind here at the Statehouse for so long, how would you compare and contrast the institutions of state government today with the way things were some three decades ago when you first got to Topeka? What are the biggest differences? Are those differences generally positive or negative in your mind?
LD: I put on my answer sheet there they’re both. There’s some positive, some negative. But people looking back when they were in the office always felt like they did a better job than the people who are there now. I can’t say anything derogatory about them. I’m not going to.
CC: Anything else you might want to add about what the future holds for you? Do you remain involved politically as a behind-the-scenes advice-giver or consultant of sorts? Any chance you’re going to be a GOP delegate again this summer?
LD: I haven’t been asked, and I’m not sure I would accept that if I was. It was not a lot of fun. Let’s put it that way. And I’m not into traveling much anymore. I’m too old for that sort of thing. But I enjoyed it while I was. I wouldn’t have flown all the way back from Istanbul, Turkey to be there if I didn’t think it was worthwhile. I think I’ve had my run, and I don’t want to jump back in again. Let’s put it that way.
CC: Mr. Chairman, thank you so much for your time today.
LD: Thank you.
[End of File]
May 5, 1936
Republican
Member, House Economic Development 1993-1996
Member, House Local Government 1993-1994
Member, House Labor and Industry 1993-1994
Vice-Chair, House Financial Institutions and Insurance 1995-1996
Member, House Taxation 1995-1996
Member, Senate Judiciary 1997-2012
Member, House Financial Institutions and Insurance 1997-2000
Chair, Senate Transportation 2001-2008
Assistant Majority Leader, Kansas Senate 2001-2004
Vice-Chair, Senate Assessment and Taxation 2001-2008
Chair/Vice-Chair (rotating), Joint committee Legislative Post Audit 2005-2008
Member, Senate Transportation 2009-2016
Chair, Senate Assessment and Taxation 2009-2016
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Statehouse, Topeka, KS
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