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Daily Legislative Update 🐝
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Below is today’s morning update on published activities in the Kansas Legislature.
Table of Contents
Top Stories of the Day
Bills arrive in opposing chambers, head to committees
This week, the bills passed in last weeks’ vote-apalooza are being introduced in their non-originating chambers: House bills sent to the Senate, Senate bills sent to the House. Exempt committees also continue their work, mostly in the domains of tax and appropriations but also federal and state affairs. Most of these bills get routed to committees in the receiving chamber.
For the remainder of the 2025 session, Topeka Buzz will focus on the progress (or not) of these ~200 bills that have the potential to be sent to the Governor. We’ve added information on BillBee that displays the current status of each bill (according to what’s published on kslegislature.gov, anyway!1)
To make it slightly easier to navigate all of this information, we’ve added Bill Status to the BillBee platform:
Conveniently, this also makes it possible to bookmark important lists, such as:
Bills on the floor of the opposite chamber: These are bills that passed one chamber and have reached the floor of the other chamber, approaching a final vote.
Bills sent to the Governor: This is a pretty empty list right now, but will show everything that’s awaiting the Governor’s signature (or veto).
Bills in Committee (other chamber): These bills have been assigned to a committee and are on the path towards a recommendation for a vote.
NOTE: The data in our bill-tracking system is only as good as the data published to the Kansas legislature website. There will be occasional delays, gaps, or inaccurate tags as the publishing process in Topeka has its imperfections. If you see something you know to be inaccurate, please email [email protected] so we can manually fix it!
Editorial note on Constitutional Conventions
I want to draw special attention to House Concurrent Resolution 5001—a resolution pre-filed before session even began, currently scheduled for a hearing tomorrow in the House Committee on Federal and State Affairs. The heart of the language of the resolution:
That the people of the State of Kansas, speaking through its legislature and pursuant to Article V of the Constitution of the United States, hereby apply to the Congress of the United States to call a convention for the exclusive purpose of proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to set a limit on the number of terms that a person may be elected as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
The largest concern with such an effort, notwithstanding the merits of term limits, is a “runaway convention.” In short, there are risks that an Article V convention, once convened, could decide to pursue issues beyond whatever purposes were claimed as its justification. This is a purely hypothetical risk, because we’ve never had an Article V convention before.
The conservative movement has been attacking the notion of a runaway convention for years. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the deeply conservative 50-state coalition with fingerprints all over the Project 2025 manuscript (and whose most immediate chairman was our very own Senator Ty Masterson), has been quite vocal about how citizens shouldn’t worry about a runaway convention because there are systemic safeguards in place.
In this current moment, those safeguards are failing.
This is a large committee, with 20 members. If the resolution passes both chambers with a two-thirds majority, things are settled; there is no requirement for a citizen vote to approve the resolution.
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Upcoming Actions
House of Representatives
Session Time: 11:00 AM
Committee Updates:
Appropriations (9:00 AM): Meeting on call of the chair.
Elections (3:30 PM): Hearing on SB 5 (prohibiting federal funds be used for election-related activities).
Taxation (3:30 PM): Hearing on HB 2377 — Providing that countywide retailers' sales tax is apportioned based on total assessed valuations of property taxes rather than property taxes levied.
Insurance (3:30 PM): Hearing on HB 2043 — Requiring agents and insurers to respond to inquiries from the commissioner of insurance within 14 calendar days and authorizing certain rebate pilot programs to exceed one year in duration.
Education (1:30 PM): Hearing on SB 50 — Establishing uniform interest rate provisions for service scholarship programs administered by the Kansas board of regents that have repayment obligations as part of the terms and conditions of such programs.
K-12 Education Budget (3:30 PM): Presentation on Kansas State Department of Education FTE (full-time employee) positions.
Transportation (1:30 PM): Informational briefing on Unmanned Aerial Systems: Kansas Agriculture by Lukas Koch.
Welfare Reform (1:30 PM): Meeting scheduled - Agenda to be announced.
General Government Budget (3:30 PM): Presentation on the impact of grasslands in Kansas.
Law, Judiciary (3:30 PM): Hearing on HB 2061 — Including aboveground and belowground lines, cables, and wires in the definition of a critical infrastructure facility used for telecommunications or video services.
Higher Education Budget (1:30 PM): Meeting on call of the chair.
Local Government (3:30 PM): Presentation on Impact of Grasslands in Kansas.
Legislative Modernization (3:30 PM): Meeting on call of the chair.
Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications (9:00 AM): No meeting scheduled.
Veterans and Military (9:00 AM): Meeting on call of the chair.
Water (9:00 AM): Presentation on Kansas Reservoir Water Supply by Connie Owen and Richard Rockel, Kansas Water Office, and John Shelley, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Senate
Session Time: 2:30 PM
Committee Updates:
Agriculture and Natural Resources (8:30 AM): No meeting scheduled.
Public Health and Welfare (8:30 AM): Meeting scheduled – agenda to be announced.
Transportation (8:30 AM): Presentation on Kansas Highway Patrol.
Assessment and Taxation (9:30 AM): Hearing on SB 215 — Excluding social security payments from household income and increasing eligibility thresholds for seniors and disabled veterans related to property tax homestead claims.
Financial Institutions and Insurance (9:30 AM):
Hearing on HB 2043 — Requiring agents and insurers to respond to inquiries from the commissioner of insurance within 14 calendar days.
Hearing on HB 2050 — Authorizing the commissioner of insurance to set the amount of certain fees and requiring the publication of certain fees in the Kansas register.
Hearing on HB 2048 — Eliminating the requirement that the commissioner submit certain reports to the governor and removing specific entities from the definition of a person for enforcing insurance law.
Government Efficiency (9:30 AM): No meeting scheduled.
Local Government, Transparency and Ethics (9:30 AM): Hearing on SB 66 — Requiring certain local governmental officials to disclose substantial interests in major development projects and abstain from related governmental actions.
Federal and State Affairs (10:30 AM):
Hearing on SCR 1611 — Proposing a constitutional amendment for the direct election of supreme court justices and abolishing the supreme court nominating commission.
Hearing on HB 2106 — Banning contributions from foreign nationals for supporting or defeating a proposed amendment to the Kansas constitution.
Hearing on SB 254 — Prohibiting unlawfully present aliens in the U.S. from receiving state or local public benefits in accordance with federal law.
Judiciary (10:30 AM): Hearing on HB 2061 — Including critical infrastructure facilities in telecommunications definitions.
Ways and Means (10:30 AM):
Briefing on Sub HB 2007 — Supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2025 and appropriations for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.
Budget hearing on higher education.
Commerce (1:30 PM): No meeting scheduled.
Education (1:30 PM): Briefing by staff on House education bills.
Utilities (1:30 PM): Overview of Evergy projects by David Campbell, Chairman & CEO of Evergy.
Have any ideas or feedback just let us know!
1 Tracking and interpreting the current state of a bill on the Kansas legislature website is, unfortunately, a non-trivial process. We’re using automation to accomplish this but it’s dependent on the quality of the information published to the website…which is not pristine. If you see something that looks incorrect, please email [email protected] and we’ll manually correct it.
