Candidate Forum - Submit your questions

Community engagement and efforts to hold officials accountable is critical

Last week, I said I was going to either start doing FAFO Fridays or Fact Check Fridays. This will be sort of a combination of both.

For the Fact Check part - I want to let you all know that there’s a Candidate forum in Hutchinson on Saturday. I would strongly encourage you all to go and hear what your elected officials have to say. I would also encourage you to be respectful and to not be disruptive. But you should be there and you should submit questions ahead of time. You should submit any question you have here.

The forum starts at 9 a.m. at the Stringer Fine Arts Center, 600 E. 11th Avenue. There will be free coffee - and you’ll get the bonus of doing one small thing to participate in Democracy and hold your local elected officials accountable.

Later on in this post, I’ll list some questions I think would be worth asking - some specifically for Sweely and some for the delegation at large.

Now, the FAFO - The Representative from Hutchinson and a Representative from Wichita seem to have an odd way of getting a laugh. This time around, by running through a series of military commands that translated into shooting me with armor piercing artillery to inflict maximum damage. As is typical of these sort of small energy people, once they got caught doing a thing they shouldn’t do they blamed everyone but themselves. So much for the party of personal responsibility.

You can read what I wrote about it here. You can read the original story here.

They are two elected officials, spending time threatening me, a now private citizen. Feels small and undignified. But based on a combination of history and experience, this sort of talk from these two can’t entirely be dismissed.

It’s also worth pointing out that there are a bunch of kids around the country - some as young as 10 - getting, expelled or arrested and having their mug shots plastered on the internet for saying things less incendiary than what these two wannabe leaders said from the well of the Kansas House.

An excerpt from one of the stories about an 11-year-old’s arrest in Tennessee.

“Two contradictory laws went into effect before this school year began. One requires school officials to expel a student only if their investigation finds the threat is “valid,” a term that the law does not define. The other mandates that police charge people, including kids, with felonies for making threats of any kind, credible or not. As a result, students across the state can be arrested for statements that wouldn’t even get them expelled.

Police in Tennessee say that even when kids make threats that are not credible, they need to be held accountable for their actions — including with arrests and felony charges. The Tennessee Sheriffs’ Association announced in September that law enforcement would “not tolerate anyone making threats and inciting fear within our schools and our community. Those responsible will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Certainly, one of the factors that influences the behavior of children is the behavior of the adults in their lives. And certainly one of the things that influences the behaviors of adults is the language and actions of the people in leadership positions.

When “leaders” like Penn and Sweely behave like boorish children and brush off such questionable statements and behaviors from a position of public trust as a “joke,” it’s little wonder our world is in its current state. We should hold the people we elect to at least the same standards we expect from children.

Now, back to those questions….

Friday, the House passed HB2206, and it would be worth asking for more explanation on this. One thing this bill does is change the name of the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission to the Kansas Public Disclosure Commission. Because the word “ethics” hurt someone’s feelings and now taxpayers will cover the expense of updating materials if the bill becomes law. It also raises the limit for anonymous donations, and makes a number of other significant changes to state elections ethics laws. It also could legalize straw donors to exceed contribution limits, and could also legalize coordination between PACs and candidate committees. It could also create a giant loophole that allows PACs to avoid disclosure - which is thin to begin with.

The only proponent of this bill was the law firm that represented Sweely in the challenge to his residency - the same law firm at which one of the principals is married to the woman who largely runs the Kansas Chamber’s PAC. Waggoner and Sweely voted for it. Seiwert was absent.

School voucher - specifically SB 75. This bill provides an $8,000 tax credit for each child enrolled in an accredited private school, or $4,000 for a child in an non-accredited private school. There is no income limit - so someone who makes $1,000,000 a year and already sends their kids to private school would get a tax break. The credits are capped at $125M, but contain a mechanism that raises the available amount of credits 25 percent each year more than 90 percent of the credits are used. This is basically a potential exponential growth curve that will take money from education and Kansas taxpayers and largely redistribute that to wealthy families. We should know where our representatives stand on this.

HB2109 requires public utilities to enter into agreements with law enforcement when they want to install surveillance equipment, and limits those utilities’ liability for any legal claims that arise. This basically makes widespread deployment of security cameras easier. Sweely and Waggoner voted for it.

Ask what their big ideas are to reduce property taxes. They all campaigned on this, but what’s been coming out of Topeka seems pretty small. Based on some of the people I’ve visited with, most of the proposed property tax cuts would amount to, at best, a couple hundred dollars on a $200,000 home. It’s also worth noting that any money that goes into funding a school voucher for rich people should be viewed as money that is not being used for property tax relief for homeowners.

We should know if our representatives favor school voucher tax credits over property tax relief.

We should know what efforts are being taken to get those grocery prices down like they promised.

We might be curious about whether they’re working any bills to lower the corporate tax rate and how that fits into the overall tax cuts they promised you during election season.

I think any question about this week’s “joke” are appropriate. As are any questions about Sweely’s residency status, since we’re gravely concerned about where people are from in other areas of our life.

And someone should ask him how he makes his money, since his statement of substantial interest was completely empty.

I hope you’ll all submit your questions today - and make your presence known tomorrow and in the future.