One of the delights of living in the present day United States is access to the full range of wonderful reality shows on cable television…
Such shows include My 600 Pound Life, Toddlers & Tiaras and Bridezillas.
My personal favorite,however, is Hoarders, about people whose homes become filled with trash and debris because they can never throw anything out, but insist on hoarding it because they think they will need it someday.
Usually a family member has to intervene before the person who is suffering from this form of mental illness is forcibly removed by health authorities. A variant on this malady is displayed by misers,who obsess over hoarding money or other valuable property but only can only do so because they get someone else to pay their living expenses.
I represented a court-appointed client (I’ll call him Silas Marner) for a number of years ,who displayed symptoms of both disorders.
Silas Marner
Marner owned three houses and two commercial buildings in Kansas City, yet he would beg door-to-door to get money to eat or loiter outside restaurants and ask people to give him money to get a meal. When people instead offered to buy him groceries or a meal, he told them he’d rather have the cash! Eventually he was committed to the state mental hospital in Osawatomie after he was found to be suffering from malnutrition, living in a house in Fairway without heat, lights or running water after the utilities had been cut off for non-payment.
After the Johnson County District Court appointed me to look out for Marner’s interests, I worked with his legal guardian, a local businessman, to take care of him. We discovered that Marner had a $75,000 certificate of deposit stashed away in a bank in St.Louis and we used that, plus the money we got from selling off his real-estate,to get him into a nursing home where he could be looked after.
Incidentally, Marner threatened to kill us after he found out we’d actually had the gall to use his own assets to support him.
I thought of the T.V. show “Hoarders” and my hoarder/miser client recently when I heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth from Kansas School District administrators in reaction to proposed changes to this year’s state education budget.
Because of the way state law is drafted, the local school districts have the choice of raising and spending more money in their particular districts to supplement what they get from the state ((the Local Option Budget).
Under our complicated educational finance formula this can trigger yet more obligations on the part of the state to pay “equalization” money to certain school districts deemed to be “property poor” (Supplemental General State Aid,i.e.”SGSA”)
Across the state, the increase in local option funding totaled $36 million.
This meant, for example, in the Olathe School District that even though the equalization money had already gone up $3.8 million from the year before, the district wanted it to go up an additional $897,000 to reflect more LOB money being raised state wide.
The Legislature has proposed not funding this latest round of more taxes and spending, which would mean $897,000 less from the state, a .05% reduction in the Olathe $190,000,000 million dollar operating budget, which still went up 9.7% from last year.
You’d never know that Olathe had $13.6 million in a carry-over cash balance from prior years they could tap into if they decided they couldn’t live without that additional $897k.
All told, local school districts have $740,000,000 in cash reserves.
That means they could spend down their cash reserves for the next 20 years at the current rate before they would be depleted.
The excuse usually heard is these are “rainy day” funds and they shouldn’t be used up to to pay normal operating expenses. However, no one is saying that these funds need to be totally consumed before state aid can be increased in this fashion again.
Moreover,there are at least a half a dozen other huge state funds that have built up, either because state agencies have received more taxes than necessary to fund projects or because they had lower costs than expected.
The rainy day arrived in 2009, with the economic downturn.
By the way,Kansas governor Sam Brownback didn’t get sworn in until 2011. The tax cuts were passed in 2012, at the behest of the old moderate leadership in the state senate,and didn’t take effect until 2013. The spending cuts under Governor Parkinson have now all been reversed and spending on education not only restored to pre-crash levels, but even increased.
A little reality check is in order!
It makes no more sense for the state not to touch these surplus funds than it did for Marner to starve in the cold and dark in his bungalow a few blocks away from here when he had untapped assets in excess of six figures.
Seeing someone playing the mendicant while hoarding money is offensive (and border-line crazy), whether as an individual or as a special-interest group like school administrators.
RE your first pic: who knew that Ben Kingsley once had hair? Or, you know, was that frickin’ old?
Another episode in the weirdest state in America.
Sasnakistan: Not for amateurs or sanity.
Dwight, good to see you back here discussing public education funding in Kansas and not letting ” Rich Steele” have all the fun.
Not really looking to argue with you but I do want to offer one clarification from the “liberal” perspective and then add a point that I know you understand but many readers here may not.
First, the state legislature seems to have the perspective that money raised by the Local Option Budget should count towards the funding requirements of the state. If voters in Johnson County vote to raise additional funds to benefit their own local school district over and above what the state offers, then the Republicans in the legislature and the Governor’s mansion feel they should be able to count that money as the equivalent of “state mandated funding”. As a result, they shoud be able to reduce the funding requirements of the state. Similar to punishing the wealthy. When higher taxes are proposed for the wealthy to benefit those less affluent it gets lambasted by the Right as punishing the “job creators” but when the state legislature in Kansas does effectively the same thing to try to balance a mortally wounded state budget, it’s fine. I often hear the argument from my friends on the Right “if you want to pay more taxes, go for it” but when it happens in public education they want to punish that behavior. Just seems a little hypocritical to me to blast a behavior on one level but advocate it on another, but I’m sure the argument from the Right will be, that’s apples and oranges, public sector versus private sector.
The point I want to add addresses the funding formula. You understand it but many may not. There are many that think districts like Blue Valley, as an example, are fabulously wealthy and can afford whatever they want. The formula, as you referenced above, measures taxable property per student. Therefore a district like Blue Valley, that is among the largest in the state in terms of student population, actually has a lower tax base when measured against the student population. While some roll their eyes when they hear that Blue Valley is “property poor” , it is way down the list when the state measures taxable property per student. The Burlington School District, where the Wolf Creek Power Plant lies, is the wealthiest district in the state, by this formula.
You had a guy committed so you could raid his nestegg? Nice.
No,I didn’t commit him,the State of Kansas did.(I fought his involuntary commitment and got him released to live in a nursing home,free to come and go as he pleased,which is a lot better than a locked mental ward in Osawatomie.) I worked on his behalf for many years,stopping only with his death in the late 90’s. In other words, I worked “pro bono”(together with his legal guardian) to see that he was taken care of. In fact,I arranged his funeral and burial after he died. I never received compensation for my time over the twenty-five years I helped him and all his money was spent solely on his behalf.
Wasn’t there a fella in Parkville something like this happened to? The State came in, and committed him. Then Platte County Clerk or something got control of his entire estate? The guy was fairly well-off, had a nice home over off 9 hwy. Can’t remember his name. But shows what happens if you don’t live the way people think you should. They can take what is rightfully yours.
Found it! John Flentie!
http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article640180.html
From the Mad Scientist to the Tortured Artist, sometimes society just doesn’t understand exceptional minds.
Absolutely right ! Imagine my chagrin when I got the bill from the State of Kansas for keeping my buddy locked up against his will before I could get him sprung. It came to well over a $100,000.00! I told them what they could do with their bill, and I and his legal guardian went out and found him a place to live- cheaply but with his needs all met. When he died years later,he still had money in the bank. These are real tough situations with no easy answers.
blank .point.
brownie has madd Kansas the laughing stock of the entire nation. His
experiment failed. State is broke….education will take a huge hit.
taxes will go up…but they’ll hide those….but we can carry a gun
openly without a license.
Why would any company want to move here unless brownie puts the
state in even worse situation than it is by using tax incentives to come here.
the 200 jobs the dairy farms are bringing over to Kansas…how many
yaars are their credits….and to be honest its just another way for
brownine to say he created new jobs. There’s no new jobs he created…
so take your trickle down ideas and try them somewhere else.
Kansas has been killed by this clown. Every major tv news show
has said lots of things about the state of Kansas and its failed experiment.
he is killing one of the nicest states to live in the nation.
thanks for your time and thanks for TOP GOLF!!!!!!!!!!!!
HARLEY