Interview of Wint Winter, August 9, 2024
Interviewed by Chris Courtwright
This lengthy interview covers not only the decade of his legislative service, 1983-1992, but his continued involvement with politics up to the present time. The 80's and early 90's saw considerable change in taxes, education funding, abortion law, to name a few. The severance tax, the "booster" tax, classification and reappraisal and a new school finance law that lowered property taxes were all discussed. Senator Winter chaired the Judiciary committee and was Vice-chair of Appropriations during that period. He was able to shore up the KPERS fund for state employees and provide appropriate funding for educational institutions, including colleges and universities. Senator Winter was a strong advocate for bipartisanship, saying, "No Party has a monopoly on good ideas." After leaving the Legislature, he was a founder of Traditional Republicans for Common Sense.
Highlights --short excerpts from the interview
Abortion; Bipartisan; Bipartisanship; Booster Tax; Brownback tax experiment; Classification and reappraisal; Corporation for Change; Economic Development; Kansas Board of Regents (KBOR); Kansas Lottery; KPERS; Property tax; Redwood, Krider report; Severance tax; Tax Experiment of 2012
Former Senator and current member of the Kansas Board of Regents, Wint Winter, Jr, 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 1982-1992, he served as Douglas County Counselor from 1998-2001 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 Kansas Board of Regents, his term expiring in 2025. Winters graduated from the University of Kansas with both undergraduate and law degrees. A former KU football player, he followed in the footsteps of his father, Wint Winter, Sr., also a KU football player, lawyer and Senator. After leaving elective office, Winter has remained a prominent 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, Winter also served as CEO and Co-Chair of Peoples’ Bank in Lawrence. Winter's slogan during the years he ran for election to the Senate was, "He Will Get Things Done!" And, he did.
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.
CC: As much as we’ve been discussing some of the prominent politicians with whom you’ve interacted and given that we’ve already talked about some of your interactions with Governors Carlin, Hayden, and Finney, let me take a minute and ask you about several others who were serving here during your era. You served in the Legislature for a number of years with future Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius working across the rotunda in the House, and you also, of course, served for a four-year term here in the Senate with future US Senator Jerry Moran during the late eighties and early nineties.
Can you tell us about your initial impressions of them and whether you had any inkling as to whether they had bright political futures? I’m guessing it may have been possible that you had known one or both of them prior to their entry into electoral politics since Sebelius I think was a lobbyist for the trial lawyers before first getting elected in ’86, and Moran also, by the way, came through KU Law School as you had, although later than you, and then went on to work for the Attorney General’s office during the mid-eighties. We would love to hear any stories or anecdotes you could share about your first interactions with them as well as any and all others you may have had over the past thirty to forty years.
WW: Well, first of all, your question jogs my memory about a somewhat humorous situation, self-deprecating to some extent, but humorous situation with Governor Carlin. It was the first year I came up here. Of course, people know about the Page situation. If you’re a junior high or high school student, you can serve as a Page up here. And you typically go—you’re the sponsoring Legislator, you go to the Governor’s Office, and they take a picture of you with the Governor and so on and so forth.
I remember taking my Pages down to get a picture taken with Governor Carlin. I was standing there watching these high school students getting their picture taken, and Governor Carlin said to me, “Come over here.” I thought, “Why is he wanting me to come over here?” So I said, “You want me?” He said, “Yeah, we want all the pages to have the picture taken with me.” He thought I was a page. I obviously had not made a very positive impression on him at that point in time. But we both had a good laugh about that topic.
CC: I can imagine.
WW: Moran, in 1974, I was entering my senior year at KU, a political science degree. I was working on it. I got an internship working for Congressman Larry Winn in Washington. Lo and behold, the intern working for Representative (Keith) Sebelius was Jerry Moran. Jerry Moran was then I think a senior in high school. So I’ve known Jerry back from then. He served as Vice Chairman when I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. We had a lot of things in common and discussed the issues back and forth. So I certainly have positive memories of Jerry. He did what he did. Here we are now with him being in the US Senate for what? Twenty years, sixteen years or whatever.
CC: So you’re one of the people who can get him on the phone. Is that right?
WW: Well, I tried to get him on the phone about three years ago, and he didn’t answer. So I’m not sure I had a very profound effect on his impression of me.
Governor Sebelius came into the Legislature the last two to four years that I was here. She was, of course, in the House. We grew to appreciate each other and respect each other.
As I left the Legislature, we had created this entity, this Board called the Corporation for Change. The Corporation for Change was funded by oh, I think it was the Annie E. Casey Foundation that did a lot of work with children’s issues. The whole notion of the Corporation for Change was to take all money, local, state, federal money, that had to do with children and serving and protecting children and have all that money funneled and then distributed out by a group consisting of—the interest groups.
Kathleen and I thought that was just a great idea. Let’s coordinate and so on and so forth, but we couldn’t get it passed. So we were the Corporation of No Change because we didn’t actually get that done.
But to default to current days, Kathleen and Gary are our neighbor. They live right across the alley from us. We’ve gotten to be good friends. In fact, we have what is euphemistically called the Wednesday Catholic Political Wine Club. You have to be Catholic and political and like wine. I think we have a great respect for each other. At least I have respect for her.
CC: I can imagine some interesting conversations occurring on your back porch over a glass of wine. Okay, one more of these for now. The record shows your legislative career also briefly overlapped with future Governor Mark Parkinson, albeit during the era when he was still a Republican and just a freshman at that time over in the House during the early nineties. A similar question: Do you have any amusing anecdotes or recollections about him during his formative days as a politician and how effective he seemed to be as a legislator? Did either of the two of the more significant events in his political career subsequently surprise you at all—when he switched parties and then when he opted not to run for Governor in his own right in 2010?
WW: Well, I mentioned that my father’s advice to me, remember that no political party has a monopoly on good ideas really formed my view on how to interact with people in this Legislature. So I really, when Mark changed parties, that really resonated with me, and he was an example of what my dad was telling me, that we need all to do. Don’t pay much attention to the party labels. Pay attention to what’s right and what’s proper and things will go better that way.
So I think that Mark decided for personal reasons not to pursue a more lengthy career in public service, but I have a great amount of respect for Mark. He did the right things the right way, and he had the courage to change parties. I wish we had more people like him.
CC: In addition to the property tax classification amendment, one of the other constitutional amendments that had gotten adopted back in 1986 would cause some challenges for policy makers moving forward. The state lottery was authorized and implementing legislation was then adopted in 1987. But the federal government in 1988 subsequently approved a law that allowed Native Americans to open casinos in states having authorized certain kinds of gambling. By the time Governor Finney was in office in the early nineties, she was negotiating treaties with several of the tribal nations that would get those casinos off the ground here in Kansas.
But looking back at press clippings, it looks like not everyone in the Legislature necessarily agreed with the interpretation of the feds that the fact that Kansas had a lottery automatically triggered the ability of Native Americans to open casinos. The Senate even considered a bill that would have sought to explicitly stop those casinos from opening. You spoke in favor of that legislation in 1992, pointing to some indictments that had come down in California where Chicago mobsters had tried to infiltrate some of the new Native American casinos, and you called them a potential breeding ground for organized crime.
With hindsight being 20/20 and the way legal gaming is embraced in so many more ways now three decades later, are you generally pleased with the way things went with the development of the Native American casinos followed, of course, by the state’s own casinos, and now we even have online gambling available on our cellphones? Do you think we have thus far been successful in keeping organized crime out of any and all state-authorized gaming that goes on here?
WW: I think that the approval by the Legislature of what ended up being parimutuel wagering was one of the worst days in the history of the Legislature when I was here. What does parimutuel betting tell us? What it tells people is you can get something for nothing. That is antithetical to the whole state motto. Our motto is “Ad astra per aspera”—“To the stars through difficulties.” It’s not “To the stars through ease, through luck,” etc., etc. I just think culturally, it’s absolutely the wrong thing to do for any state, and it was the wrong thing to do for Kansas.
I wish we would have won that vote, but we didn’t. It was one of those things that you really realized the train was on the track, and that thing was going to get approved. I wish I and others who were opponents had been more effective in stopping it.
CC: Generally, you think gambling is sort of antithetical to the state’s motto and our work ethic?
WW: Absolutely. What it says is if you pay a dollar and get a lottery ticket or a parimutuel ticket, then do that enough times, and things are going to happen to us through no effort on your part, through no good judgment on your part, through no support for the virtues that make Kansas great. So it seems like that’s just one of those political issues to me—it was a very, very bad day for the state of Kansas, and we would have been much further ahead had we prohibited to the extent we could parimutuel betting.
CC: Okay. On to abortion. As Chair of Senate Judiciary and one of the Senate’s top legal minds about the extent to which multiple bills in Kansas seeking to regulate abortions might have been problematic given what the US Supreme Court had said in Roe v. Wade, your hands must have been full dealing with the myriad of proposals and all the legal arguments. What recollections do you have about some of the early 1990s dynamics regarding abortion politics here in the Statehouse, especially after the 1991 Summer of Mercy protests in Wichita that made national news?
WW: Well, I ended up sort of backing into a fairly important role along with really bright people like Joan Wagnon and David Heinemann and so on and so forth on this issue. And I’ll tell you the end result of it, and then I’ll explain why. The end result is, within three or four months after the end of that session where we adopted, and Governor Hayden, I think, signed what was generally thought to be a thoughtful moderate kind of bill, I was approached by my parish priest, and he told me he thought I would be more comfortable as a Methodist, which was pretty obvious he thought I’d screwed up in voting for this bill.
At that point in time, there were two anti-abortion groups, and I forget exactly the right one—one of them was opposed to any change at all in abortion law unless it was a complete banning of all abortions, no matter what. Then there was another one who took a more pragmatic approach.
What happened was, the law in Kansas, there were no restrictions whatsoever because the old law was declared unconstitutional by Roe v. Wade. So anybody could get an abortion for any reason whenever. Some of us didn’t think that was the right way to do. The long story short, I played a role like others in the House in putting together and passing the law that is still on the books still in some form. It basically said the choice about whether to have an abortion is a choice between a woman and her doctor up until the time that that child is viable on its own.
It was a hard thing for all of us to grapple with, especially when my wife was teaching Catholic religion at the Catholic school, but I’m proud of the fact that I was part of the group of people that got that passed. It was almost an amazing feat that that happened, and that Governor Hayden signed the bill. I still think to this day it’s the right approach. But that’s certainly one of the issues that I remember pretty clear from my time in the Legislature.
CC: Well, the issue of abortion would continue to be a lightning rod in political circles within the GOP and up and down the ballot long after you left the scene here in the early nineties. Of course, the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade precedent with the Dobbs decision that came down here a couple of years ago. And Kansas made national news here just about two years ago in the summer of 2022 when Kansas was the first state to sort of have a vote on whether the state’s constitution contained the right to privacy if you will, and Kansans rather resoundingly voted that they thought that that right is enshrined in our state constitution. Did that surprise you at all? What were your feelings about all that?
WW: Well, I’m of two emotions. I felt good because I thought that was the right policy and to have such a strong majority of Kansans ratify that and feel the same way was important. And I feel like what we did—that was ’92, I think. Maybe it was a few years before that. But I think it was the right thing to do, and I was proud of the fact that we were able to do that in Kansas. But I think there was a tinge in that recent vote, there was a tinge of “Leave me alone. I don’t want to be told by the Legislature, by the Governor, by the authorities what to do.” And that resonated with enough people, that constitutional amendment was adopted fairly easily.
CC: You also seem to have been quoted a good deal regarding a number of the KPERS controversies of the late eighties and early nineties. There were several mini scandals about some really poor investment decisions that had been made by KPERS which prompted some accelerating concerns about the system’s ability to sustain itself actuarially over time. And then a provision that allowed retiring lawmakers to effectively boost their annualized salaries for KPERS purposes really raised a lot of eyebrows around the state and certainly on editorial pages. In fact, when you retired in 1992, the issue was still hot enough that you refused to jump through whatever the loophole was to qualify for a bigger KPERS benefit, telling the Wichita Eagle that you did not feel right about it and that it was like taking fruit from a forbidden tree.
Is this ringing any bells for you? Tell us about the various KPERS controversies if you could? I know former Senator Marge Petty has talked a lot about a lot of work you all did together on the KPERS front back in the day.
WW: Well, that quote sounds like it’s smarter than me. So I’m not sure that that really came from me, but I won’t fight it. That was one of these situations where I think all of us who realized what was going on, and we had some potentially big serious problems of misbehavior to say the least. It was like, “This happens in New York or Pennsylvania or somewhere. It doesn’t happen in Kansas.” But it happened in Kansas, and we created a situation where it was too enticing for people in business not to try to get some money from the state retirement fund for their own purposes.
That was an undertaking that I think was necessary to do. It was done correctly. We hired outside lawyers who didn’t have conflicts. We uncovered a lot of bad stuff. It was one of those things that made you think, “I guess Kansas maybe isn’t quite as sound as we would like.”
But in the end, the job was done the right way. It was another like the Eco Devo Committee. It was another one of those limited special committees that worked very well together. I remember Marge being prominent in that work.
CC: When you announce in 1992 that you would not be running again, citing the desire to spend more time with your family and your law practice, the Wichita Eagle, the Manhattan Mercury, and other outlets threw you some nice bouquets, including comments about how you were “one of the hardest-working leaders in state government,” and it was “too bad there wasn’t a machine that could clone a Legislature full of politicians like Mr. Winter.” That’s one of my favorite quotes.
But even as you were leaving the legislative stage in 1992, reports were out there that you were toying with a run for the AG at some point in the future. I even found one Associated Press article from late ’92 that listed you as one of maybe ten to twelve Republicans who insiders were speculating might be thinking about making a gubernatorial run in ’94.
The first set of reports turned out to be more accurate. You in fact made a run for the GOP nomination for Attorney General in 1994. In that very interesting three-way primary, you were defeated by less than one thousand votes by future Attorney General Carla Stovall who prevailed with just over 38 percent of the vote. Senator Mike Harris, who was the third candidate in the race and finished well back of you and Carla, ran against both of you from the right side of the political spectrum and seemed to be especially critical of you during that summer of ’94 election season.
Did I characterize the personalities, politics, and dynamics of this race accurately? What can you tell us about the ’94 primary? Given how close it ended up being, did you ever consider asking for a recount or anything?
WW: No, if I had asked for a recount, my wife would have left me at that point. She thought the outcome was great of that race. There were tinges in that race of KPERS work. What I’m about to say was in the newspaper reports. Bob Stephan was very close to a guy who got money from the KPERS fund. I remember meeting with Bob about it and letting him know that we were going to be studying it. He made it very clear that he thought we shouldn’t be messing with it. We should not go there, leave that alone. I said, “General, we can’t ignore it. We’ve got to do a good job of investigating it and making sure that it’s done right.”
With regard to my work in KPERS, I made people upset. Some people say that Carla ran because Bob Stephan recruited her. I was fighting Stephan’s people and then Mike Harris was a leader in the anti-abortion group. Of course, he didn’t like what I’d done with a lot of other good people in regard to the abortion rules.
Somebody asked me the other day how many—I won as many political races as I lost. Some of the best things for me in the long run were losing. It was tough to lose, but if I had won that, I probably would have been on a path that would have required me to run for Governor, Congress, US Senator, and I don’t think I’d be married to my same wife if that happened.
CC: The glass is definitely half full. Soon after you left the Legislature in the mid-1990s, there was a fairly dramatic split in the state GOP that became increasingly tense. In late 1994, something similar to what had happened in the Senate a decade earlier now took place in the House when Speaker Miller was challenged within the GOP Caucus and subsequently deposed by Tim Shallenburger, long a champion of the more conservative faction, in the race to determine who was going to be Speaker of the House for ’95 and ’96.
The mid-to-late nineties would go on to be a time defined by some strong internal disagreements within the increasingly dominant Republican legislative majority – with moderate GOP Governor Graves himself frequently siding with the more moderate faction. This was a period where both the state and national economies were quite strong, and one of the flash points involved tax policy, with major reductions being the top priority of many conservatives. Graves and other moderates during this time especially here in the Senate were wanting to move a lot slower on many of these cuts than some of the more conservative House members. Were you still contributing advice from afar to some of your former colleagues in the Senate during this era?
WW: You know, when I lost that race for Attorney General, not because I was upset or down, I was enjoying my retirement. I really didn’t get motivated to be involved in politics until 2012 or ’14 when I saw what Governor Brownback had done, and I felt like so many of us who I served with in the Legislature that I don’t even think they would call themselves moderates. They were just logical people. We knew how disastrous that was likely to be. I thought what Governor Brownback was doing with respect to that massive tax cut, hoping that it would result in some windfall of tax revenue, that was like going across a highwire without a net. We had worked so hard for the years that we were there. I mentioned voting for recissions, voting for cuts, etc., etc. that it just seemed to me and to many of us moderates that it was the wrong thing to do.
So that’s what motivated me to get back involved. As I recall, Kathleen asked me if I’d be part of a Republicans for Sebelius movement, and I was glad to do that. And then from there, I just kind of caught on. I was asked—
CC: We’re going to get to your role in some of the groups endorsing various gubernatorial candidates here in just a minute. But I did see something interesting that the Kansas City Times in 1997 ran a bit of an expose on the NCAA, revealing golden parachutes, Lear Jet trips, and sweetheart mortgages that were being enjoyed by NCAA executives, all of which must have seemed even more appalling during that pre-NIL era when players were not able to avail themselves of some of the opportunities they have today. You as a former NCAA athlete and state policymaker were quoted in this series of articles as being critical of the NCAA, noting that while the college sports governing body had maintained “a quaint version of volunteerism clothed in educational garb, they were in fact a phenomenal economic machine with tentacles reaching into professional sports.” Is this ringing any bells? Given what the major college sports now have become in recent years, is it fair to ask if history ultimately may have now acknowledged your points about how antiquated the old model of the NCAA had become?
WW: Well, clearly the world of intercollegiate athletics has been stuck on its head, and I think as my quote suggested, we missed the boat trying to fix the NCAA earlier. I remember two people who worked for the NCAA—I think it was the General Counsel and somebody else, came and asked to meet with me. I introduced the bill that would have made—the NCAA was then in Overland Park. It would have required the NCAA to pay state income taxes unless they changed their rules to follow due process and equal protection, not a hard thing to do. They refused to do that.
CC: And later moved to Indianapolis.
WW: And later moved to Indianapolis. But I was essentially threatened by them that I’d better back off of that. Well, the Senate passed that bill, and it went to the House and sort of got stuck. But that’s just another one of those things that time—time has told me that some of the things I worked on weren’t such a great idea. Some of them I think got to seem better as time went on. But I think the NCAA is getting what they deserved because they were so anti and opposed to any kind of reform at all, and now they’re paying the price for it.
CC: Jumping ahead to 2002, you mentioned this a minute ago, you seemed willing to continue to weigh in publicly on behalf of the moderate and centrist approach, the pragmatic governing approach that we’ve been discussing. Given that you were one of the founders of the Republicans for Sebelius group during the gubernatorial election years, I gather this was before she was your next-door neighbor.
WW: Correct.
CC: Outgoing Governor Graves did not endorse GOP nominee Tim Shallenburger until well into October of that year, and you told the press that Graves probably had a lot of pressure from others and could not jump ship and not endorse the GOP nominee even though he probably wanted to not endorse him. I’m guessing the others you were referencing must have included Bob Dole who had endorsed Shallenburger much earlier, but you can feel free to confirm or deny that.
You also blasted the conservatives in the Hays Daily News noting that they almost take a destructive outlook towards government, particularly the education sector. So you must have been pleased when Governor Sebelius was elected in 2002. Did you then support her re-election bid in 2006, or did you keep your powder dry that time around?
WW: I did. If I wanted to hide my support from her before, I couldn’t do it. So I was happy to do whatever she wanted me to do to try to—as Bob Dole has supposedly said to somebody that was running for office in Russell, “I’ll be for you or against you, whatever helps the most.” I probably told Kathleen that same thing.
But one of the things, we didn’t really have factions in the Legislature. Maybe they were starting in ’92, but people were civil on the floor of the Senate. They were civil for the most part in the House. They were civil in talking to the second floor Governor’s Office. That was true no matter whether people disagreed with policy issues. We’re so fractured now. We’re so pushed to the extremes that those things, that those of us who were moderates worked so hard for now look kind of silly.
I’m not even sure there’s fiscal conservatives left. It’s been interesting for me to see how some of the—the leadership in the Legislature doesn’t seem to be upset about spending significant amounts of money. Conservative used to mean, “We’re going to conserve or hold on to or protect that which we have”. That’s not the way things are anymore.
Moderatism or the centrist philosophy, which I happily agree with, isn’t really a political position. It’s a way of communicating with others about politics, and that is centrists, moderates, when they read a position on an issue from somebody on either extreme, we don’t immediately say, “They’re wrong” or “They’re right.” We see it’s time to ask questions. “Tell me more about the way you feel. Tell me more about what makes you think that we should do X, Y, and Z.”
I think if we can regain some of that philosophy, some of that willingness for us in the middle to ask questions, again believing that political parties don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, we’d be so much better off. I hope the pendulum will come back, and we’ll see people rewarded for finding true compromise, but what I was trying to do with a lot of other people, moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans, was reward that kind of thinking where we didn’t just shut off the other side because they were extremists. We wanted to sit down and talk to them and understand what made them feel that way.
CC: Swimming in some of these same waters, a few years later, with respect to this bipartisan centrist approach, it looks like in 2012, you were among the founders of the Traditional Republicans for Common Sense alongside a number of your former friends and colleagues including Rochelle Chronister, Sheila Frahm, Gary Sherrer, Wendell Lady, and Fred Kerr. And by 2014, you and that group were largely backing Democrat Paul Davis for Governor.
I found one hilarious report from this era that said you were contacted by The Daily Show and Jon Stewart. Apparently one of Stewart’s people from Comedy Central sent someone to Kansas to talk to you. During that interview, after you explained your opposition to Brownback and his failing tax experiment, the correspondent inquired as to whether you were an actual Republican since you did not really sound like one. You were then challenged to name three hip-hop artists, but you in fact could only name one, leading them to conclude somewhat tongue-in-cheek that you must in fact therefore be a Republican after all.
WW: I do remember that. That was hilarious. I was way outclassed by the folks from The Daily Show. I remember being flummoxed when they asked me to name three hip-hop artists. I named one. Maybe it was Tupac, I don’t know. But I felt really out of my league when I couldn’t come up with two more rap artists.
But that shows that national news got a hold of what was happening in Kansas and was looking to try to make sure, to see whether or not Brownback’s plan would work. And I think for Paul Davis, he was very close to winning that election. Was it ’14, 2014?
CC: ’14.
WW: If that race had been two years later, I think he would have won because people would have seen the bad effect of his tax policies. It hadn’t kicked in yet. Two years later, everybody knew that the results were awful.
CC: By the way, I have to say that I think your inability to name three hip-hop artists might be a generational thing rather than an ideological thing.
WW: Yes, my daughters were all very upset with me.
CC: Please tell us anything else you would like about your impressions of the 2012 to ’17 self-described tax experiment implemented by Brownback and his allies here in the Legislature. You talked a little bit about it. Did you ever try to—I mean, Art Laffer was flown into the state as a special consultant. There was all this sturm and drang going on, and the fiscal crisis became ongoing and institutionalized after a few years, as you mentioned. Did you ever try to get in touch with the administration beyond backing Paul Davis’s gubernatorial bid in 2014? Did you ever try and reason with people who were here at the Statehouse?
WW: No, and the reason for that was there was plenty of debate and discussion going on over here. The position that I held and my friends and colleagues held was well articulated by them. It would have been a useless act for me or any of the rest of us to try to contact the Governor and try to change his mind. So we were stuck with just having to see what happened, and, sadly, it didn’t work.
But that was—we also created a group that helped raise money for moderate Republicans who were trying to return to the Legislature, and that group succeeded in electing enough moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats that they got the votes to reverse most of the—
CC: Override the veto in 2017.
WW: Yes.
CC: Were you again supportive of the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in 2018, when Laura Kelly ran for the first time? What did you make of the whole Greg Orman candidacy that year in the race against Kelly and Kris Kobach? My impression was that Orman was trying to attract disaffected centrists and Republicans who could not otherwise bring themselves to cross all the way over and vote blue. Were you at all concerned that had he succeeded in attracting more of those votes, it would have led to Kobach getting elected?
WW: Yes. I met and worked with Greg some, and he’s a very bright guy. I think his political instincts were right. I think my concern with Greg was I think he made the wrong judgment about whether or not he could be successful. He asked a lot of people including me for public endorsement, and I said, “I really like what I see of you, and I’m going to do that unless Laura Kelly surprises me, and she decides to be a candidate. In which case, I think you have no hope of winning, and I’m not going to back somebody who has no hope of winning.”
Ultimately, that’s what happened. Laura decided to run. She asked me and others to support her, and I said yes. The next thing I did was pick up the phone and call Greg and say, “I’m out. I told you if she got back in, I’d be helping her if she wanted me.” He didn’t take that very well.
But the instinct was right. I just think that I wish it was true that we could make a third party, a moderate third party work. I don’t see it happening. If you find out the way to make it happen, let me know. I’ll probably get involved.
CC: I’ll keep you posted. Governor Kelly nominated you for the Board of Regents in 2021, and your confirmation hearing in the Senate came up during 2022. But there was some opposition to your confirmation from several GOP senators who were railing more generally at the Regents about so-called “woke” ideology on college campuses. Was that maybe a straw man of sorts? Do you think that maybe some of the flack you were getting may have been a blowback from lingering animosities regarding some of your support of Democrats over the years?
WW: Well, I gave those folks enough reasons to be against me that I’m not sure which one, which reason they wanted to pick. But I knew before even the Governor’s nomination of me was public that it was going to be a fight. I’ve talked to the Governor’s Office people, and I said, “If you’re going to nominate me, I’m going to be there. I’m going to run and do this as hard as I can. Are you prepared for that?” and they said, “Sure.”
I think that there were several reasons. I think that it was kind of predictable political stuff when they were taking after me. Part of it was they didn’t want to see a moderate Republican rewarded for doing moderate Republican stuff. And I think they wanted to embarrass the Governor, not that it’s a big deal who the Governor picks to be on the Board of Regents. But I think it would have been viewed as a defeat for her.
I knew that there was nothing I could say in that confirmation hearing that would change anybody’s mind. But there were several important partisan leaders over here in the Legislature that told me that they thought I was the right guy, and they did what they said, and they continued to support me. So I’m appreciative of those people who ended up supporting me.
CC: Well, congratulations of having gotten across the finish line and confirmed. As we mentioned, you’re on the Regents until 2025. We have recently had fairly interesting talks with two other former lawmakers, Ed McKechnie and Kenny Wilk, who served on the Regents a decade or so ago, and both of them told us that during some of the first major conference realignment battles that were occurring during that time, the amount of stress on the Board as well as at KU and K State was incredible. This, of course, was an era that looked like the Big 12 might be going away as a major entity, and there was some talk of at least KU maybe being able to get on a lifeboat and move to the Big 10.
I guess I would ask that now that the Big 12 seems to be stabilizing and adding new teams and will likely survive as at least one of the three major conferences, according to the pundits, is this still a topic of discussion for the Board? Do you have people telling you that KU and K State need to figure out a way to stay in the same conference and protect the historic rivalry and what not? What are your feelings on all this not just as a board member but as a former participant in the so-called Sunflower Showdown?
WW: Well, I can tell you that my position has always been on the Board of Regents that we should stay out of these athletic fights. I have some friends who have worked for the Board of Regents in Oklahoma, and they tell me the battle they do is one of fire the coaches or tell who to hire and fire and so on and so forth. The Board of Regents of Kansas has no business to be involved in those kinds of issues. We need to make sure that we hire and retain the Presidents and the Chancellor who are really good and really strong and can handle this themselves.
So there was a couple of years ago when I was on the Board a time when there was some thought that, yes, KU might be invited to be in the Big 10, and that may be without K State going there. And just that notion caused a lot of bad feelings and confirmed once again that we have no business in the Board of Regents being involved in athletics.
Now, mind you, there’s a theory of college athletics called “The Front Porch Theory,” which sort of follows the notion that in a house, the least important room is the porch except for having people interested to see the rest of the house because the front porch is cute. Surely, the rest of the house must be cute. So there’s no question about the fact that the educational function of universities is helped by successful extracurricular activities. So you can see when K State goes to a big bowl game, enrollment goes up. When KU wins a national championship, enrollment goes up. It just happens. But the Legislature, as I said, needs to stay away from being involved in the hand-to-hand combat over those issues.
CC: Well, given that the failed tax experiment was repealed rather decisively with the veto override vote in 2017; the US Supreme Court has now allowed states to collect use taxes on goods shipped in from out of state; the federal government’s various COVID relief packages contained a generous amount of aid for states and local units; and that Governor Kelly has generally been a good steward of the state’s resources, we just concluded Fiscal 2024 with more available resources in both the State General Fund and the so-called Rainy Day Fund than at any time in our history. And tax relief has again been a major priority – with a major package of taxes having just been enacted recently during the Special Session.
But I know that a number of legislators and university officials who share your passion about the importance of higher education funding and keeping tuition costs from exploding again have quietly expressed some frustration about there not being a larger share of resources earmarked for this important area of the state budget. Many of them have been asking if we are not going to make an increased commitment to fund higher ed now, when will it ever realistically happen? Is that a common refrain that is often shared with the Board these days?
WW: Yes. There’s one aspect that is shared, and that is we are advocates for improving higher education. I tell people my job is to improve the quality and quantity of higher education for Kansas people. But, you know, in this case, what we should be doing again is advancing advocacy for higher education. Over here, that runs the gamut from whether we ought to be asking people their position on DEI all the way over to issues of funding. And we need to be very effective on the funding side particularly without denigrating the whole DEI issue. That will be navigated through, one way or another.
In fact, I can tell you that I feel very good about the Legislature’s funding of higher education in the last two, maybe three years. We’ve had some very, very good years. Now, a lot of that money was funny money because it was COVID-related, one-time money, but I think there’s an understanding by legislators including leadership in the Legislature that what the universities do is important. It’s important for jobs, and I appreciate the fact that leadership, both in the House and the Senate and the Governor’s Office, has done such a good job helping us get through these difficult times.
Higher ed will always have its advocates, but back when I was in the Legislature, it was really sort of moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats who joined together to get the votes necessary to support higher ed. But in a world where we have international competition, we have to be producing really smart people, or else we’re going to fall behind. Our very freedoms are going to be eroded.
CC: Turning our attention back to a few final questions involving your ten-year career here in the Legislature and given that we’ve already talked a lot about some of the dynamics within the GOP caucus, can you tell us which Democrats you worked with the most often, and which ones you thought maybe have been the most effective?
WW: Well, I mentioned Governor Sebelius, my back-alley neighbor. I respected Governor Carlin. There were a lot of people—Marvin Barkis, for example; Joan Wagnon who did remarkably good work, and of course, took over the Legislature—was it ’90, ’89, whatever it was when they got the majority. But I tell you one of the people that I had the most respect for was a guy who served with my dad and me, this guy named Frank Gaines. Frank Gaines was a lawyer. He was from Augusta, outside of El Dorado. His desk was right over there, and I remember when he stood up, this place got quiet. Part of why he stood up is he had this—whenever he was going to make a major speech, he had a cardboard box that he would put on top of his desk so he could read his remarks better. But Frank Gaines was a guy who did the right thing no matter what his party was doing, and it was easier back then. The Democrats probably better than the Republicans allowed their members to do the right thing.
But Frank was really a great guy, and he was great to serve with. Mike Johnston became a good personal friend of mine. He was Minority Leader here in the Senate. We had a family banking organization, and I asked Mike to serve on the Board of Directors, and he did, and I appreciated all of his help through those times.
I don’t know for sure how it is now, but I have a feeling that there’s a bifurcation of the Legislature by political party, and there’s not nearly as much discussion. We had great discussions. We had disagreements that were partisan in nature, but there was not a time when I felt like any member of the Legislature from either party was being disingenuous.
CC: Well, a similar ask about lobbyists. Which ones did you respect the most? And maybe which ones did you dread seeing the most coming into your office regardless of how effective they may have ended up being?
WW: The ones I probably didn’t like in my office were the ones who wanted me to vote to cut taxes, so making it harder to fund education. In a serious vein, I never found—there was one time when I felt like a lobbyist was saying something to me. They were making some kind of threat or promise. I think that my experience with lobbyists has been that there were, just like anything, some of them were better at it than others, but I never really—I feel like Kansas at that time had people of integrity serving in the Legislature, serving in staff, and as lobbyists.
CC: Well, the same for state officials, especially Cabinet level. You worked with quite a number of different Secretaries of Revenue, Transportation, and SRS, and what not over the years. Any particular memories regarding those relationships or of working with their staffs?
WW: Well, I’d tell you the same thing. The heads of the agencies, Cabinet-level agencies, I think by and large were really, really good people. The Governors worked hard to interview and pick people with skill. Very seldom do I remember seeing or hearing about a Cabinet-level person who didn’t deserve it or who was there because they helped politically.
I’m trying to remember the name of the guy who was the Secretary of Transportation for so many years. Anyway, he came from out of state, a good guy. I just feel like from both the lobbyists and the Cabinet offices, we had some really good fortune with having good people in those roles.
CC: It does seem to me that your strong suit has always been working with others regardless of policy differences to get things accomplished. But now that I’ve complimented you on this comes the trickier question to think about: Given that you’ve been around the policy-making whirlwind in one form or another since the early eighties, how would you compare and contrast the institutions of state government today, especially the Legislature with the way things were four decades ago? What are the biggest differences and are those differences generally positive or negative in your mind? You’ve already talked a little about this, but feel free to talk about anything you want from changes in technology to increased political polarization, to changing perceptions about the role of the public sector to the accelerating influence of powerful special-interest groups.
WW: Well, I referred to it earlier. And when I say that I mean my discussion of what I think it means to be a moderate or a centrist, and that is that we should never jump to conclusions about why others are advocating a particular position. We should never denigrate someone else’s position even though it seems perhaps on its face to be illogical. There’s too much name calling. There’s too much “I’m right, and you’re wrong.” There’s too much tribalism, and we somehow, some way have to get back to a situation where we don’t jump to these bad conclusions about people in the political arena, but rather as Saint somebody said, “Seek first to understand.”
We don’t seek first to understand nearly enough. So my hope would be that it becomes fashionable again to be a listener. The most important part of politics isn’t one’s tongue. It isn’t one’s mouth. It isn’t the words. It’s listening. The ears are the most important piece of our anatomy when it comes to operating government properly. We’ve just got to be able to make sure that people see us as willing to listen, to be open to learning and perhaps adopting somebody else’s position or else moderating it.
I’m an optimist, generally. So I’ve got to believe that it’s going to happen, but it’s going to take a number of us to keep reminding ourselves and others, “Stop belittling other people. Stop asking, ‘Why the hell would you say that?’ Stop asking, ‘Why would you take such a ridiculous position?’” The world has become full of the louder you announce your opposition to somebody else, the better you are. That’s completely wrong. The louder we are, the worse we are. So listening and use of our ears has got to be much more important.
CC: Anything else you want to add about what the future holds for you? I’m assuming you may still be engaged in an informal advisory role here and there in the policymaking process. Will you be closely monitoring the results up and down the ballot this fall?
WW: Yes. I mentioned that in five or six, ten years after my run for Attorney General, I basked in not being involved, but I got grabbed back into it. I think we all have been fortunate to have a couple of really good Governors. Laura is doing a great job. If I was a little tiny part with others of helping her get elected, then I want to keep trying to do it.
I do think Kansas is by and large—when I think about Kansas, the thing that I would tell people if they asked me, “How’s Kansas doing in its political philosophy?” I would point to the abortion vote and say, “Where we have a reason to speak up and limit government’s influence over our own people, we do it.” And that abortion vote for several reasons really I think was so important and so heartening that those of us who are in this business are in this advocation should keep doing it.
CC: “Mind your own business” is the popular political phrase that has broken out the last few days with success.
WW: That’s true.
CC: Thank you so much for your time
WW: Thank you. I appreciate it.
[End of File]
April 19, 1953
Republican
Member, Senate Local Government 1983-1986
Member, Senate Education 1983-1985
Member, Senate Federal and State Affairs 1983-1985
Chair/Vice-chair, Joint Committee on Special Claims Against the State 1983-1992
Vice-Chair, Senate Judiciary 1983-1988
Member, Kansas Senate 1983-1994
Chair/Vice-chair, Joint Committee on State Building Construction 1986-Present
Member, Senate Ways and Means 1986-1988
Vice-Chair, Senate Governmental Organization 1986-Present
Chair, Senate Economic Development 1987-1988
Vice-Chair, Senate Economic Development 1989-1992
Vice-Chair, Senate Ways and Means 1989-1992
Chair, Senate Judiciary 1989-1992
Board Member, Kansas Board of Regents 2021-2025
2
Statehouse, Topeka, KS
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