Kansas Senate budget chairman Rick Billinger asked five negotiators clustered around him at the Capitol to buy into a deal allowing the Kansas Highway Patrol to sell its Salina headquarters and lease it at a bargain-basement rate before moving into a new state-financed complex.

Billinger, a Goodland Republican, wanted the conference committee’s four Republicans and two Democrats to include the KHP proviso in the 2026 Legislature’s final budget bill. It wasn’t lost on Billinger’s peers the House and Senate appropriations bills approved earlier in the session didn’t feature KHP’s request for development of a $28 million administrative building.

“So, was this an item passed either your committee or your floor?” said Rep. Kristey Williams, R-Augusta.

Billinger: “This particular item did not.”

The Senate budget chairman didn’t want that technicality to stand in the way of doing something solid for the law enforcement agency. He said a potential buyer for the Salina KHP headquarters had surfaced. The idea was to slide a clause into the Legislature’s budget requiring KHP to get three appraisals for the Salina property, sell the old headquarters for at least $5 million and lock down an advantageous three-year, $10-per-year lease agreement.

He said revenue from the sale could be used to defray the cost of a brand new KHP office located on the Salina campus of Kansas State University.

“After three years, we’re kind of committing ourselves to building a new headquarters?” said Rep. Troy Waymaster, a Bunker Hill Republican and chairman of the House budget committee.

Billinger: “That would be correct.”

During the House and Senate negotiating session on the budget Monday, Waymaster broke the news gently to Billinger and KHP. He referenced a House rule prohibiting addition of provisos not tethered to spending objectives previously sanctioned by the House in House Bill 2434 passed or by the Senate in Senate Bill 315.

Waymaster gave fair warning the House rule could stand in the way of other last-minute tweaks to the Legislature’s central spending bill.

“I don’t think we can accept it,” he told Billinger. “That’s going to be an issue that we run into.”

Rep. Henry Helgerson, a Wichita Democrat, said reliance on just six legislators — three from the House, three from the Senate — to negotiate the final state budget disenfranchised the 122 other representatives and 37 other senators without a seat on the conference committee. In Kansas, conference committee reports cannot be amended during floor debate like a regular bill. Each is subject to simple up-or-down votes in the House and Senate.

Helgerson said the process of assembling the preferences of a half-dozen legislators into a single bill was expedient, but not politically or financially healthy.

“This is not conservative. This is not liberal,” he told fellow legislators. “This is a fast way of turning over your duties and your responsibilities that make it easier and more susceptible of having control handled by a few people. Every year I preach this, and I’m not getting anywhere.”

_ _ _

Story via Kansas Reflector

Photo: Sen. Rick Billinger, a Goodland Republican and chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, was unable Monday to convince Kansas House budget negotiators to accept a proviso allowing sale of the Kansas Highway Patrol headquarters in Salina and clearing a path for state-financed construction of a proposed $28 million replacement facility. (Photo by Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflecto