Interview of Wint Winter, August 9, 2024

Chris Courtwright: Good afternoon. Today is August 9, 2024, and we’re here in the historic Senate Chamber of 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 [Laura] Kelly appointed me shortly thereafter to her bipartisan Council on Tax Reform.

Today I am privileged to interview former Senator and current member of the Kansas Board of Regents, Wint Winter Jr., who has had a long, distinguished, and diverse career in public service as well as the private sector. In addition to serving as a Republican member of the Kansas Senate from Douglas County from 1982 to 1992, he served as Douglas County Counselor from 1998 to 2001 and also was appointed to the Kansas Center for Entrepreneurship Board in 2004. He most recently was appointed by Governor Kelly in 2021 to the Board of Regents, and his term runs until 2025.

Wint is a proud graduate of the University of Kansas, both as an undergraduate and later its Law School. A former KU football player, he remarkably enough followed in the footsteps of his father, Wint Winter Sr., in three very interesting ways – given that both of them in fact played football for the Jayhawks; graduated from KU Law; and later got elected to the Kansas Senate. In addition to you and your dad, your mom and siblings were also Jayhawks, and the entire family has an unblemished record of being long-time supporters of and major benefactors for the university.

After leaving elective office, Wint has remained a prominent behind-the-scenes figure in Kansas political circles. Currently a partner and attorney at Stevens and Brand who specializes in real estate law, banking law, and commercial litigation, Wint also previously served as CEO and Chair of Peoples Bank. Did I get most of that right?

Wint Winter, Jr: You did, even the stuff that I made up. It sounds good and added to your list. It’s great to be here.

CC: This interview with Mr. Winter 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 KOHP donors. Former House Speaker Pro Tem Dave Heinemann is our videographer today.

During your decade in the legislature, Wint, I suppose 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 likely be delving into more in a few minutes, you yourself chaired quite an impressive array of committees, including Judiciary, Claims, Economic Development, and were Vice Chair of maybe one of the most powerful panels, Senate Ways and Means. But I see that you also served as a member on Education, Fed and State Affairs, Local Government, and State Building Construction, to name a few. Is that a fairly good executive summary of your larger laundry list of committees?

WW: Chris, it sounds like as you’re reading it, it sounds like a guy who couldn’t keep a job. I remember my Chairman of Ways and Means, Gus Bogina from Johnson County, once said about me, “Well, he’s a mile wide and an inch deep,” and I took that as a compliment. I’m not sure Gus meant it so. But as a lawyer, we’re trained to identify issues and be able to analyze different situations. So I found it invigorating to be involved in a variety of different committees and issues over the years. I think I was fortunate to be in that situation.

CC: Before we jump into your legislative years and committee work and big issues and whatnot, let’s get into some additional background. We normally ask people if they are native Kansans, and if not, when their family moved here, but I saw someplace that you are in fact a fifth-generation Kansas. So at this juncture, you may not necessarily have a lot of institutional memory as to when the Winters first got here, maybe some time during the 1800s. Is that correct?

WW: Yes, in fact, that’s an issue that’s dear to my heart. The Winter family moved from West Virginia… probably with a posse chasing them out…to settle in a homestead between Lawrence and Lecompton in 1856. And then as one of the more successful farmers in that area, they got together with other folks in the area and decided they needed a schoolhouse. There’s a school situated between Lawrence and Lecompton that’s named the Winter School because it was my great-great-grandfather and grandmother that donated the property and helped build that school.

When I’m thinking about the importance of education for us all, I remember that those settlers didn’t first build a police station. They didn’t first build a hospital. The first thing they built was a school. They knew how important education was even to people who were homesteading. So my family with my involvement got the Winter School renovated and listed on the National and State Historic Registers. My granddaughters are seventh-generation Douglas Countyians. So, with that long explanation, I think it’s obvious that I have great pride in the length of time that the Winters have been around.

CC: That’s fascinating.  Your family was here and contributing to the K-12 system even before statehood.

WW: Yes.

CC: Another introductory question we often ask is about what gave you the public service bug and whether you have any family history or favorite professors or mentors or anything who lit the fire under you. But as we’ve already noted, your dad was first elected to the Kansas Senate from Ottawa in 1968, when you were still a teenager. So I’m assuming a lot of very interesting family dinner table discussions about politics during the late sixties must have been an important part of the story. Did any of your classmates or professors during your days in KU Law figure you’d be following in your dad’s footsteps politically just as you had on to the gridiron at Kansas Memorial Stadium and then into the practice of law?

WW: I don’t remember that specifically although the one KU Law School professor, a guy named Barkley Clark. He taught commercial law. Barkley was a politician himself. He got elected to the City Commission in Lawrence. I don’t remember growing up with somebody setting a goal that I should be in politics. It was just that’s what you did. In fact, the story is that my great-great-grandfather was the first elected Democrat County Commissioner in Douglas County. Now that may have been the bad news because there was, of course, a big fight about the Ku Klux Klan back then, and the Democrats, some of them, were not necessarily on the right side of that. But there must be something in the DNA of the Winter family that causes us to volunteer to do these things.

CC: Let’s jump ahead to 1980. Your dad who represented Ottawa decides not to run again after twelve years in the Senate, but you try to jump into the Statehouse yourself, running for a House seat in the newly created 44th District in Douglas County. You win the GOP primary but end up losing that November to Democrat Jessie Branson.

At the risk of dredging up some unhappy memories, please tell us what you recall about your first run for office in 1980 when you were twenty-seven years old. Were there debates and forums that you both attended? Or was the campaign fought more along the lines of radio ads, yard signs, and postcards? Also if you have any funny front-porch stories to tell us about the first time you were going door-to-door and meeting some of the more eccentric Lawrence-area voters, we would like to hear that. I will tell you that some of my very favorite front-porch stories often seem to involve somewhat aggressive dogs.

WW: Dogs and other animals. People in Lawrence are obviously quite vocal about many things including politics. You know, the interesting part, I decided that—I really was driven to be in politics in large part to try and make a difference. So my slogan on the yard signs was, “He Will Get Things Done.” That was an open door for—what was important to me.  Well, I represented a district that had some pretty obvious connections with funding state government and education, and so on and so forth. So I thought it was important—and I wanted to do the job in part because I thought I could help actually make a difference and actually craft legislation that would make a difference.

I can tell you that Jessie [Branson] and I both worked very hard when we went door-to-door in successive days of 100 degrees plus heat. We did have some debates and so on and so forth, but it was really pretty much a retail election. But Jessie won. Somebody told me during that campaign, they said, “You know, you’re not going to win this.” I said, “How come?” They said, “Well, you know, what Jessie Branson’s husband did?” I said, “No.” “Well, he’s an ob gyn, and he delivered approximately 98 percent of the babies born in this town in the last forty years.” I thought, “Whoops! That’s not a good sign for me.” And sure enough—and Jessie was a lovely lady, and we worked well together afterwards. But that was not an auspicious thing to learn.

The other thing, it’s not a very funny story. It’s a poignant story. But I was going door-to-door in North Lawrence and introduced myself to an African American gentleman. He said, “Were you any relation to Shep Winter, the Chevrolet dealer?” I said, “Yeah, that’s my grandfather.” And he looked at me and he got very, very serious, and he said, “Your grandfather was the first person to sell me or any other Black person a car in this county. Before your grandfather, none of us could buy a car because we were presumed to have bad credit, and your grandfather broke that mold.”

So that made me feel good about my lineage. But that—

CC: It wasn’t enough.

WW: There wasn’t enough of those people.

CC: Before we get back to your next political foray in 1982, I have to tell you that when I was an undergrad at KU, I am pretty sure that I saw both you and your dad take the field at Kansas Memorial Stadium one last time in May of 1981, when there was a special scrimmage between the then-current KU football team and a hastily-assembled alumni squad. It was a fun way to close out spring football practice that year. I think this turned out to be a fairly good KU team that went on to a bowl game later that fall, and if memory serves, the scrappy alumni team may have hung around with the young fellas for a little while. Can you tell us anything more about this game, and what that experience must have been like? Your former coach, Don Fambrough, was in his second stint as the Jayhawks’ head coach. So it must have been fun for you old guys to run out on the field one last time?

WW: Yes. It was fun. In fact, I think there were at least two, maybe three years where they put together this alumni team. As time went on and the skill level departed, that came to an end. But at one of the subsequent alumni games, Don Fambrough at that point in time had retired. In school, in college, Coach Fambrough kicked field goals. So we were told that the last play of the game was going to be a field goal attempt by Don Fambrough. And, of course, they said, “Don’t try to block it. Do not rush,” etc., etc.  Well, my dad was on the field at that point in time. I said, “Dad, don’t do that. Don’t knock the center over and run in and block the field goal.” And he looked at me like, “Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Sure enough, guess what happened? The ball gets snapped to the holder. My dad, there’s eleven people on the field. Ten of them are standing, watching in horror as my dad broke through the line and blocked Coach Fambrough’s extra-point drive. And Fambrough was not happy. That was not really as humorous as it might seem. Coach Fambrough was quite displeased, but my dad thought it was great.

CC: I’m sure. Well, back to politics where there are a number of ups and downs, and you certainly did not stay down for long. In late 1982, incumbent GOP Senator Jane Eldredge resigned her seat in the middle of her four-year term after her husband had obtained a job in Washington, DC. I will say that when the precinct committee persons and party officials gathered to replace Senator Eldredge, it was not necessarily a lead-pipe cinch that the seat was going to you. You defeated a gentleman named Doug Lamborn 40-29 after a third candidate lacking significant support dropped out of the race at the last minute as often happens at these kinds of elections. Please tell us anything you may recall at how running an insider-baseball campaign centered entirely within official Douglas County GOP circles must have been a very different experience than going door-to-door running for the House seat had been two years earlier.

WW: Well, it was indeed. That hard work that I put in two years before going door-to-door and losing well really was the foundation for me to be in the position to be competitive in that race. But I’ll ask you a question. Tell me something about Doug Lamborn and what happened to him after I prevailed in that race. Do you know?

CC: I do not. His name’s ringing a bell, but it’s escaping me.

WW: Doug Lamborn went on—he graduated from KU Law School, moved to Colorado Springs, and for twenty-four years served as a Congressman for representing Colorado Springs in Washington. So I didn’t know Doug back when we had that contest, and he was one of the first that I remember, sort of religious conservative folks, and that ideology hadn’t really caught on yet.

CC: Nor would it in a liberal college town like Lawrence.

WW: Right. But my claim to fame in that election is I beat a guy that spent twenty-four years in Congress, which probably means the electorate didn’t know much about me.

CC: Before we get into specific issues you began dealing with at the outset of your legislative career in January of ’83, I’m wondering if settling in here at the Statehouse initially as a twenty-nine-year-old may have been a little easier for you than other freshman legislators given you still had your dad still available to help guide you, not to mention perhaps being able to rely on his contacts with lobbyists, media, and powerbrokers here in and around the Statehouse. And beyond whatever help your dad and his networks may have been to you, can you tell us maybe how you went about learning all the legislative procedures and nuances, who the key stakeholders and lobbyists were, and whether some more senior members of the GOP caucus helped to mentor you here starting in that 1983 session.

WW: First of all, I remember the—I did ask my dad for advice, of course, but about the only meaningful advice he gave me besides remembering to ask him for advice from time to time really had to do with his statement to me. I asked him about partisanship, and I didn’t identify in my own mind particularly as a partisan person, and I said, “Tell me about what’s expected of me with respect to voting on issues that are at all partisan.” And he said, “You know what I learned pretty quickly in the State Senate? No party has a monopoly on good ideas. So don’t be thinking that if the Democrats stand up and offer some amendment or offer some bill, never think that they’re wrong because they’re often right. And the truth and the best policies often come from open-minded discussions back and forth.”

And that served me very well because when I was here, there were twenty-one Republicans and nineteen Democrats. So if you wanted to get anything done, you really had to be open-minded, and there was no wall [separating the political parties] in the Senate Chamber. That philosophy served me well over the years, but that was the one quick piece of advice that was the most important to me.

CC: I was going to ask you if you always maintained a good working relationship with your former opponent, Jessie Branson, who was across the rotunda in the House. You already indicated that you had. Your tenure in the legislature was characterized by a more bipartisan balance in the Douglas County delegation than what we see today, of course, but as you just noted, I’m guessing that everyone got along fairly well in the Douglas County delegation, and you guys had delegation meetings and did Saturday morning constituent coffees together and all of that. Was it a fairly collegial group?

WW: Yes, it was. As I recall, I was the only Republican in the group of four or five legislators representing Douglas County. A guy named John Solbach was on the House Judiciary Committee and did a very good job. Jessie Branson, of course, we talked about. Betty Jo Charlton was another prominent person.

So I took pride in the fact that we worked together. We didn’t fight and scratch and claw. We didn’t see things as partisan. And again, I alluded to this earlier, the interests of the district that I represented, that all of us represented, were so predominantly oriented towards quality education and finding ways to improve funding for K-12 education, but, of course, also for the university and the Regents system.

CC: Back to the start of things for you. In January of ’83, one of the biggest issues of that session was the severance tax. Incumbent Democratic Governor John Carlin had been pushing for several years to have a severance tax enacted, and the issue tended to be defined as much by geographic lines as it did political party lines. In other words, GOP House Speaker Wendell Lady from Johnson County and a number of other Republicans in eastern and northeast Kansas also supported having a severance tax come along to join in 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 a little more than they had been to the state coffers.

By way of background and context, I would remind everyone that many of our neighboring states 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.

The GOP nominee, Sam Hardage, after narrowly prevailing in 1982 in a five-way GOP primary against Speaker Lady and 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, setting the stage for getting the tax across the finish line in 1983. So can you please tell us if I’m missing anything in this narrative and what memories you have of the 1983 severance tax deliberations? I did not look it up, but I’m assuming that like a lot of your fellow Northeast Kansans, you may have supported its enactment?

WW: Yes, of course. That was one of those issues that it was a foregone conclusion that the political economic interests of people in Douglas County were very much linked to those people in Shawnee County and Johnson County. Most of us were all in favor of the severance tax for reasons that you know so well.

But that was another issue that I thought my tagline from two years before, “He’ll get things done” was appropriate because I was speaking not only in that phrase of funding for education, but also, you know, “He’ll help get the darn severance tax passed.” It had been a hot issue for so many years, and it was important that we get it passed. I do remember  being on this floor and casting a vote in favor of the severance tax. So it was a very positive, important topic for us, especially to maintain a wide base of sources of tax income and the like.

CC: Broaden the portfolio of taxes, yes.

WW: Absolutely.

CC: I have to say that whatever you were doing during the 1983 and ’84 sessions appeared to resonate quite well with your constituents. When you run for re-election to your Senate seat for the first time in 1984, you win a smashing victory with nearly 71 percent of the vote against your Democratic opponent, a man named Lawrence Seaman. What can you tell us about what the ’84 campaign was like, and maybe why that experience was so much more successful than your House race four years earlier had been? I’m guessing that it helped that not only were you now an incumbent, but also maybe that the Senate district included a significantly different part of Douglas County than the House seat had?

WW: Well, the thing that I think was the most important is neither Lawrence Seaman or his spouse was an ob gyn. That’s the lesson I learned: be careful about running against people whose family is so well-known and does very happy things around the community. But I think and I hope that that strong electoral result was largely the fact that the people—over two years, I’d convinced people that I wasn’t a partisan, that I was interested in issues that would make a difference for people of Douglas County and so on.

I remember being in this very Chamber. About that point in my career, I was told I needed to talk with the president of the Senate. I walked in there, and the Vice President was there, a guy named Charlie Angell, and the President, Ross Doyen said, “I think you forget that you’re a Republican, and you need to be voting with us.” He was very strict and stern about it. I thought, “Okay, if there’s a woodshed, it’s right here in this President’s office.” I was trying to be respectful and so on and so forth, but I said, “You know, I wasn’t elected by the Republican Party. I was elected by the people in Douglas County, Kansas, and the issues, Ross, as you know, are very clear about stable revenues, etc., etc., to support education.”

When I walked out of that room, I thought, “I’m making a difference because they know—they wouldn’t be bothering to kick my tail unless they thought that I actually was helping them make a difference on those issues that I thought”—I don’t remember what the vote was. Maybe it was the severance tax vote. And that’s kind of typical political stuff, back inside baseball stuff, but I did take some pride in the fact that I was noticed by those guys as doing things that were—at least I in good faith were the right things to do for the district.

CC: Yes. You weren’t just a brainless lemming doing what leadership told you to do. You were looking out for the best—

WW: I may have been brainless, bt I was not a lemming.

CC: I’m glad you brought up Ross Doyen because shortly after the 1984 election, there is a fairly major political shake-up in the history of the Kansas Senate. Ross Doyen who had been President since 1976 is challenged for the presidency of this body by Majority Leader Bob Talkington from Iola, I believe. The press had a field day with this, calling it a “palace coup” and a “changing of the guard” within the Senate GOP establishment, which had been running the Senate since back during the days when your dad was a prominent figure in said establishment. The press reported that as late November of ’84, you were suddenly functioning as one of Talkington’s top lieutenants and making phone calls to other senators, trying to solicit support for his bid to knock off Doyen.

Of course, Talkington’s bid ended up succeeding, and I want to ask if the way the votes fell may have been along ideological lines as the press was suggesting, with Doyen’s old guard being perceived as more conservative, but also whether there may have been generational or geographic components involved in the ultimate outcome of that particular leadership race.

WW: Well, you mentioned KU football. I was told by my father when I asked who are the people I should consider mentors. The first one he mentioned was a former KU football player, Bob Talkington. So I had a connection with Talk from my father and then from our football background.

But that from my perspective was an easy, clear choice. And Bob Talkington, we referred to him as Talk, was a solid, cautious, thoughtful guy, but he went down the middle of the road. I was never called into this office after he became President of the Senate. I know that he knew I was doing my job. So that was kind of a baptism by fire because I learned how difficult it was to run a secret ballot race for leadership.

And, yes, I did make some calls on behalf of Talk. No one could figure out if he had the votes. People would lie to you.

CC: Sure.

WW: They’d say, “Yeah, I’m going to vote for Talk.” Well, we never knew because there was a secret ballot, but we know some of those people didn’t do what they said they were going to do. And the vote turned out—I recall Bob won by two or three votes out of probably twenty-four at that point in time.

But we were fortunate to have good, strong thoughtful people like Bob Talkington who people did not see as some wild-spending liberal. Bob was a “get it done” kind of guy. You always knew that if you had an issue, you could go sit down and talk to Bob Talkington, and he would help you work through it. He was a model for me in terms of—he and Bud Burke were kind of the two guys for me that were mentors during my early years.

CC: Both very pragmatic, as I recall.

WW: Yes.

CC: Getting back into some sticky state financial and tax issues, the severance tax did come online in 1983. But Kansas also approved a so-called “booster tax” in 1984 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, were not happy with the booster tax. So the decision was made in 1986 to let the booster tax sunset and instead raise the state sales tax for the first time since 1965. But this was not a small jump in the rate, which in 1986 went from 3 percent all the way to 4 percent. Do you recall anything about this or any controversy at the time over equity issues associated with restoring an income-tax deduction that may have benefited primarily wealthy individuals and replacing it with a sales tax that was more regressive?

WW: I do recall that. But as I kind of jokingly said earlier, but it’s not a joke, my focus in this world of raising money and spending money was on the spending money side. I thought it was really disingenuous of people like me in the legislature who were constantly arguing in favor of additional financial support for education of all types. I thought it was really disingenuous for me not to also support broad-based tax measures. And I certainly understood the regressive nature of the sales tax.

I think that I don’t have specific recollections of it, other than it was a very important issue. Was that your first year on staff?

CC: It was.

WW: I’m sure I listened to you.

CC: No doubt. Jumping to a non-time-specific and hopefully fun question, we noted earlier that among the panels you chaired was the Claims Committee, where people who had exhausted other options would file various monetary claims against the state, most of which would end up not being paid, in a last-ditch effort to get reimbursed in the annual claims bill that would be enacted by the legislature.

A lot of legislators and staffers who worked on the Claims Committee over the years always had amusing stories to tell. I seem to recall there was an inmate who had his stash of Doritos stolen. So he filed a claim for $1,000,004—$4 for the chips and $1,000,000 for emotional distress. And wasn’t there also some years-long controversy about someone who accidentally threw away a winning lottery ticket and sought to get made whole through the claims bill? We would love any cool claims story you could share about what issues you considered and which ones you may have rejected back in the day.

WW: Well, the Claims Committee wasn’t one of those highlight-type committees. The press was hardly ever there. We probably met at 7:00 in the morning and considered these issues. The only way an issue would come before the Claims Committee was if there was no legal recourse. If there was legal recourse, we’d tell people to go to court. Sometimes people would go to court and they’d lose, and they’d still come to us.

But the inmates had a lot of time on their hands. So they figured out the Claims Committee was one of their best pen pals. It was serious, but they had a little bit of mirth around the various claims that we saw.

The one claim that wasn’t so humorous, I remember at least one, we probably had two or three claims of people who were incarcerated but were later found to be wrongfully convicted. It wasn’t just that they should have found a reasonable doubt. It was clear somebody else did this and not these persons. So that was heart wrenching, whether it was five months in prison or twenty-five years in prison. The system took away from them the freedom to live. I had a great amount of connectivity with those folks.

As I recall, we did approve payment to several people on that basis. Now it wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted a million dollars per year, whatever. I think we came up with a formula that helped them get back on their feet. But the Claims Committee was one of those workaday kind of deals.

CC: You also chaired the Economic Development Committee, which had been growing in prominence, given the emphasis that was placed on all things “eco devo” by Governors Carlin and Hayden. Anything you can tell us about what issues and personalities were front and center for that committee during the mid-to-late eighties?

WW: Well, our august videographer, Dave Heinemann, was on that committee. In fact, he really helped to create the committee from his position in the House. I have a recollection that I was put on an NCSL [National Conference of State Legislatures] that met. in that case, in Louisville, Kentucky. The topic was “Economic Development” because there had been a national downturn in the economy. So states and local governments were suffering. So any effort to try and figure out how to produce more revenue, get the economy going, was important.

At this meeting in Louisville, there was a guy there whose job it was to consult with people like General Motors and other companies on the top of “Where should they build their next plant?” It dawned on us that we needed to hire these people. Those people were being hired by General Motors, etc., to tell them where to put their plants . So that’s what we did. We ended up coming back, and two KU professors, one named Tony Redwood and the other, his last name was Krider.

CC: Chuck Krider.

WW: Chuck Krider.

CC: Belden Daniels was the consultant brought in by Governor Carlin who was from out of state, and he was involved in a lot of that.

WW: So, that committee, and it was a special committee. It was a limited term. There were probably six to eight Senators, six to eight House members. It was very evenly balanced. There was not a partisan concept at all in their meetings, and we had some really important work to do. We had some bright people who were consultants to us. I think that’s a really good example of the good or the best of legislative work where we basically checked at the door of the committee room the cudgels that we would sometimes use politically to beat each other up. It was very heartening to see that work.

And out of that came several constitutional amendments that had to be approved by the voters. We got that done. So it was certainly one of those things I look back on and feel good about.

CC: Very bipartisan.

WW: Yes.

CC: You spent a great deal of time as we mentioned on Senate Ways and Means. Incoming Governor Hayden had a mess on his hands when a bad regional recession had cratered receipts, and the newly-assembled 1987 Legislature had to enact recissions more than halfway through Fiscal ’87 for expenditures that had been approved a year earlier. Really painful stuff, and I recall Senator Feliciano getting emotional about it out here on the Senate floor. I gather that must have been a tall order for you and Gus Bogina and the other budget hawks to push through those necessary about painful budget cuts at that late point in time, seven months into the fiscal year.

WW: It was tough. Added to that was the importance to the people of the district I represented to adequately support education and other programs. But I felt pretty strongly that if we were to be taken seriously in places like Lawrence to fund education, we needed to do the responsible thing. So I remember voting in favor of recissions. That vote wasn’t really appreciated very much in Lawrence, but over time, the Legislature really did reward integrity and consistency in those kinds of issues. So I felt like there really wasn’t any discussion or debate as far as I was concerned. It was the responsible, almost mandatory thing to do to enact those recissions. So we did it. Then after some of our economic development work you mentioned earlier started to kick in, we got back to the point where we were able to fund some of these things and reverse those recissions.

CC: A lot of drama in 1988 and 1989 involved 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 General Fund or in fact would be returned to Kansas taxpayers. Governor Hayden had a huge battle with his own party here in the Legislature, as a number of the more conservative members accused him of lowballing the federal windfall estimate and not wanting to cut taxes as much as they had wanted. Before we get into property tax reappraisal and classification, do you have any reflections on the late eighties income tax battles?

WW: I don’t have any specific recollections of individual fights over that, but it’s really in the same category that I was referring to before, and that is, we needed to protect the General Fund. What that means, of course, is maintaining and expanding where we could have the different sources of revenue. So I supported those measures that helped advance our multiple ways of having sound balances.

CC: 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.

So legislators in the mid-eighties passed a mandatory statewide reappraisal that was going to update all values as of January 1, 1989, giving the counties and PVD [Property Valuation Division] several years to get everything up and running. Cognizant of the fact this was going to potentially cause massive shifts between and among classes of property, lawmakers also placed on the 1986 ballot the first property tax classification amendment. That measure, which was in fact adopted by voters, amended the prior constitutional requirement that all property be assessed at 30 percent 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 agricultural 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 emphasis the word “statewide” because of course, there was no “one size fits all” adjustment  that would have been possible to head off massive tax shifts in any given county or jurisdiction even if the shock absorber was being applied somewhat successfully on a statewide basis.

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

WW: Well, the property tax classification issue that you just described was probably tied for first on another topic we’ll talk about in a minute, tied for first as to issues that were profound and deeply seeded and politically challenging. From my perspective as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a lawyer, I felt like I needed to be available to give people opinions on legal issues in the Legislature, and I wasn’t the most important person in that regard. People in the Revisor’s Office and Research were probably more important.

But the way the property tax system developed over the years became unequal, became unconstitutional, and became a situation where we simply could not avoid tackling the issue. It cost Mike Hayden his job, but I felt like there was just no way we could do anything other than tackle it. It would be irresponsible to suggest, “Oh, we don’t have to do that” and so on and so forth. It wasn’t optional. We had a system that was unconstitutional, and the question then became, “Do we want the Legislature and the Governor running the state, or do we want a bunch of judges running the state?” So the obvious answer I think is we want the elected officials.

I didn’t really get too worked—I knew—I started to say I didn’t get too worked up about it. I didn’t get too worked up about whether or not it was necessary. It absolutely was necessary, and there was no way to get around it. We had many people in this body and in the House stand up and say, “We don’t have to do that. This is not something we have to do.” Well, I’m not the smartest lawyer in the world, There are smarter lawyers than me that would answer that question, “Heck, yes. We have to do this.” So it was just one of those issues that responsible legislators had to get over quickly whether or not this was required. Hell, yes, it was required. Fix it.

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

So there had been this tectonic political shift that had occurred that set the table for your final two and in some ways most interesting years in office during the early nineties. Let’s talk a little about Governor Finney who was such an interesting figure politically. Sometimes it seemed to me that she was from a third party at least from the standpoint that she was not at all shy about clashing with legislative Democrats on occasion any more than she was with legislative Republicans.

Can you talk about your own personal interactions with her as well as those in her administration? How would you characterize her relationship with GOP Senate Caucus as well as the full Legislature? We’re going to get more specifically into school finance questions in a minute, but do you have any funny or fascinating stories to tell about Governor Finney?

WW: Well, Governor Finney, the word “offbeat” comes to my mind in thinking about Joan Finney. In many ways, she was courageous. She would see paths that nobody else would see. She probably drove the Democrats crazier than the Republicans because it’s hard to challenge a Governor of your own party, even when they’re wrong. But she was a good person. She cared deeply about the state of Kansas. In politics, sometimes it’s important to have some offbeat ideas. Ultimately, she knew what had to happen. She benefited, of course, from the whole issue of classification and reappraisal. That’s why she became Governor.

I don’t remember many things with respect to her that were humorous. She was interesting. She was kind of fun to be around. You never knew exactly what she would say and even if she said it, you weren’t sure what she meant. But she was a good person.

CC: I also seem to recall that she had lobbied Legislators to place initiative and referendum constitutional amendments on the ballot, but nothing ever came of that. Were you among the legislators who opposed her initiative and referendum proposals?

WW: I don’t remember to be honest with you. It seems to me when I sit here now, it seems to me like that initiative and referendum would be something I would be attracted to, but I don’t remember how I voted on that.

CC: Thirty years ago, you might have thought a little differently about that.

WW: I might have. But that was another very good example of the offbeat nature of Joan Finney. I don’t remember talking to her about it, but I don’t think she ever would have thought, “Who could be opposed to letting the public vote and giving direction?”

CC: Power to the people, yes.

o she brought things to us that probably nobody else would. That was an example.

CC: That was one.

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

Governor Finney, as we just noted, felt she had a mandate to roll back property taxes, given the results of the 1990 election. So the way the final version of the ’92 School Finance Law came out was that there were sales and income tax increases enacted with the new money pumped back through the new K-12 funding formula to decrease property taxes in most areas  of the state. In fact, I can even recall your colleague Fred Kerr lecturing Kansas Chamber lobbyists at one point that they needed to quit crying about the proposed modest corporation income tax increase given the huge property tax cuts that most of their members were about to be enjoying. And Fred was correct. We know that in 1991, School District General Fund mill levies ranged from nine to ninety-eight mills across the state. Under the new law in 1992, all of that was replaced with a single mandatory statewide levy of thirty-two mills.

So in the vast majority of school districts, I think it was some 290 or the then 303 districts, there were property tax cuts that were in some cases huge. I honestly don’t know how many thousands of different numerical plans, runs, and permutations that Dale Dennis, Ben Barrett, Steve Stotts, Mark Burghart, and I might have pulled together during that very long and deliberative 1992 session, but where did you and your fellow Lawrence-area legislators come down on the final version? Were you generally satisfied with the new law and the new system?

WW: The short answer to that is yes, but by way of explanation, this is the other issue that I was referring to about the fact that as Judiciary Committee Chairman, I felt I had to bring some fidelity to what we were required to do by law. And by the way, when you refer to the runs, you’re referring to the computer-generated projections.  You could tell the computer, “Imagine that we decrease property taxes by X. Imagine we increase sales tax by Y.” It would then tell you for every single school district in the state whether that district was a winner or a loser.

So those reports really changed dramatically the way the legislature worked. It was the right thing to do to get those runs, but it was often misused. People would see—they would get tunnel vision and only look at the result of a particular proposal for their particular district. If there were two different runs, people would take the one that provided the most property tax relief and the most money for schools.

But that issue was a rather dramatic end to my career because of the profound nature of the problem and the fact that we had no choice. It was the right thing to do. You can’t argue that it’s okay that a student in southeast Kansas gets $792 a year spent on he or she, but a student in Johnson County gets ten times that. The amount of money that goes into education does have a direct result in the quality of that education.

So like my position on property tax classification, reappraisal, I felt it was obvious what we had to do. I tried to calm people down a little bit and say, “Do we need to do this? Yes. Look at this provision in the constitution. It’s not fair, and it’s not right to have winners and losers in the form of children and the quality of their education.” We had to do it. It was painful, difficult, but it was the right thing to do, and it was the only thing we actually could have done in that context.