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-Jason

The 🐝 Rating System

Each bill is evaluated based on four key factors: Scope of Impact, Financial Impact, Urgency, and Controversy. These factors are weighted to reflect their influence on the bill's overall importance. Here's how the ratings break down:

  • 🐝 Minimal Impact: Legislation with limited reach or lower urgency and controversy.

  • 🐝🐝 Moderate Impact: Proposals with a broader or more notable influence, addressing issues of medium urgency or financial significance.

  • 🐝🐝🐝 High Impact: Bills with widespread consequences, urgent needs, or significant public and political attention.

Daily Legislative Update 🐝
Friday, February 28, 2025

Below is today’s morning update on published activities in the Kansas Legislature.

Table of Contents

Top Stories of the Day

LetterSwarm is almost here!

All work and no play makes Jack Jason a dull boy. We’ve been working extremely hard to prepare for the Boots on the Ground event tomorrow (Facebook event, registration form) and hope to be able to see some of you in-person.

This weekend we will officially be launching LetterSwarm, our grassroots-driven letter-writing campaign platform. The process is really simple:

  1. Register an account and provide your address. We look up your legislators.

  2. Join an active letter-writing campaign, or create and publish your own.

  3. Let our AI write your letter, and the letter for anyone else who joins your campaign. (Edit it and fine-tune it if you like, though we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how ready-to-go it is!)

  4. Download your PDF, if you want to email it. For $1/page, we will print and mail it for you.

There’s a lot more going on under the hood, and there’s much more to do to make things even smoother. But once live, it will be so much easier to flood legislators with citizen feedback.

We obviously all live in a digital world, but for better or worse most elected officials are extremely good at ignoring emails and social media. Our goal—our hypothesis—is that it’s much harder for someone to ignore a pile of 200 letters sitting on their desk or clogging their mailbox.

Reasons to become a paid subscriber

When I started Capitol Bee, I wanted to find opportunities to continue advocating for Kansas families, schools, and communities. To find gaps in the system, ways to help citizens better understand their choices and risks when it comes to their vote.

These newsletters will always be free, because we want the information to be broadly available to all who are willing to read. But there are “power user” features that do have costs involved, such as our bill-scraping software and the upcoming LetterSwarm system.

By upgrading to Supporter, you’ll be supporting these efforts. You’ll also get most of that money back in the form of LetterSwarm credits, that you can use to participate in letter-writing campaigns!

Chapter 3 of Intended Consequences

If you need some more doomscrolling material, we’ve published the next chapter of the Intended Consequences series / novella / thing. (If you missed it the first time around, you can also find Chapter 1 and Chapter 2). This episode contemplates what happens with another Republican sweep in the 2026 elections…

Bills and Resolutions

UPDATE: Summaries of these bills are now published on BillBee. The links below go directly to each bill’s writeup.

House Bills on the Floor for Consideration

  • Final Action on Bills and Concurrent Resolutions:

    • HB 2096 – Providing for transferability of Kansas housing investor tax credits from the year that the credit was originally issued.

    • HB 2231 – Clarifies the additional personal exemption for head of household tax filers.

Senate Bills on the Floor for Consideration

  • Final Action on Bills and Concurrent Resolutions:

    • 🐝🐝 SB 137: Regulates handling of forfeited firearm sales.

    • 🐝 Sub SB 33: Exempts custom meat processing services from state sales taxation.

    • 🐝🐝🐝 SCR 1604: Making application to the United States congress to call a convention of the states for the purpose of proposing amendments to limit the federal government.

New Bills Introduced

  • House Bills:

    • Criminal Justice, Public Safety, and Corrections:

      • 🐝🐝 HB 2393: Court fees and juvenile expungement.

      • 🐝🐝 HB 2389: Modifies conditions for pre-trial release in certain offenses.

      • 🐝🐝 HB 2391: Prohibits concealed handguns in the state capitol.

    • Taxes, Fiscal Policy, and Economic Development:

      • 🐝🐝 HB 2394: Revises property taxation valuation methods.

      • 🐝 HB 2395: Tax credit for expenses of adopted pets.

      • 🐝🐝 HB 2396: Limits property tax funding through protest petitions.

      • 🐝🐝 HB 2390: Authorizes countywide sales tax for hospital services funding.

    • Healthcare and Public Health:

      • 🐝🐝 HB 2392: Establishes new standards for nursing school approvals.

  • Senate Bills:

    • Taxes, Fiscal Policy, and Economic Development:

      • 🐝🐝 SB 281: Establishes Kansas education savings account grant incentive program.

      • 🐝🐝 SB 280: Voter approval required for property tax increases above inflation.

    • Government Organization, Elections, and Public Administration:

      • 🐝🐝 SB 279: Revises campaign finance and governmental ethics laws.

Have any ideas or feedback just let us know!

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