by RICK DANLEY // May 7, 2018
Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, who took the executive reins from Sam Brownback just three months ago, made a brief appearance at the Iola Public Library Saturday evening, where he held a friendly 40-minute conversation with a dozen interested Allen County residents.
Billed as a getting-to-know-you event, the conversation was necessarily light on policy and was instead a chance for local citizens to meet their new governor before deciding, in the upcoming primary, whether or not they want to keep him.
Originally from Hays, Colyer received his undergraduate education in economics at Georgetown University and completed his medical training at the University of Kansas. He forged a successful career as a plastic surgeon in the Kansas City area and is known, to this day, to depart Cedar Crest on occasion to perform the odd craniofacial surgery — “because I think, in politics, you can lose your soul,” Colyer told the Iola group. “So, for me, I like staying part of the real world.” Colyer is also a long-serving volunteer in the International Medical Corps, conducting wholly admirable work in various war-torn pockets of the world for the last 30-plus years. He and his wife, Ruth, have three college-age daughters, and Colyer joins a number of the other nearly 20 candidates in this year’s race for governor in declaring that his “whole goal in government is to [create a situation] so that my kids can envision their futures in Kansas.”
MOST OF the recent coverage surrounding Colyer’s accession to the governor’s office remains focused on the many ways he has deviated from the Brownback playbook. In his short tenure, Colyer has already signed a much-ballyhooed five-year, $500-million school finance bill. He has approved a modest increase in highway funding and has advocated earmarking more money for the state pension system. He’s also taken steps — namely, the signing of two bipartisan transparency bills — to suggest that his commitment to governmental accountability is more than just rhetorical.
Plus, Colyer told those gathered at the Iola library, the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s on Friday “just raised our credit outlook for the first time in years. We’re now in a stable place.”
But for this longtime lieutenant governor — a social conservative, who built his career in the Kansas House and Senate on his rock-solid opposition to abortion — there’s still a fair amount of ideological overlap with his past boss. For instance, as one of the main authors of KanCare, the state’s privately operated Medicaid system, Colyer, like Brownback before him, remains firmly opposed to the program’s expansion. And, in recent days, Colyer has given a great big bear hug to a bit of Brownbackian legislation that would allow faith-based adoption agencies to refuse placement services to LGBT couples.
Whatever your side, there does, though, seem to be some agreement that the executive changeover in Topeka has inaugurated, at least for now, a promising revolution in temperament — a notion not lost on Colyer. “I want you to see that I’m going to be listening to you a lot more,” said the governor, “and that we’re going to be working together a lot more.”
NOR WAS THAT point lost on the evening’s first questioner, USD 257 Board of Education President Dan Willis. “I want to thank you for the friendly environment in Topeka,” said Willis, who then pivoted to his subject expertise and emphasized for the governor the critical role that the state’s “equalization aid” plays in a school district like Iola’s. “The [problem] we have in this area is declining enrollment and declining population,” said Willis. “No matter what you give us for base state aid per pupil, when we lose 10, 12, 15 kids every year, it still never makes it to our district. So equalization” — the formula by which poorer school districts receive more state assistance than their property-rich counterparts — “is still very important to us.”
Colyer, if a bit Delphic in his reply, seemed to sympathize with Willis’s point. “What people don’t realize,” said the governor, “is that we’re going to be reinventing schools and I think that’s pretty exciting.”
PERHAPS the night’s most interested questioners were two affable, well-informed students from Allen Community College — one an intern at Thrive Allen County — who pressed Colyer on subjects as diverse as Medicaid expansion, the opioid problem, rural mental health care, the depletion of civic engagement and the crisis of lax voter turnout, plus an abundance of other issues.
The governor had had a long day. He’d zipped back from the Berkshire-Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha the night before. He’d been up early to attend Independence Community College’s graduation ceremony. From there, he’d visited Fredonia and Yates Center and Erie, where he spoke to a reporter from KOAMTV, and he’d eaten, during his travels across southeast Kansas, “in every single ice cream shop along the way.”
And so if the governor wasn’t always the equal of the students’ percipient questions, he always presented his friendliest game face and lent courteous replies.
At the end of his time, Colyer told those gathered that he liked “the ideas and the energy” in the room. “Iola is a great place,” he said. “Be proud of it. And, listen, we’re going to take good care of it.” And, with that, the 47th Governor of Kansas absorbed a brief round of applause, shook a few hands, gathered his couple of minders, hopped back into his state-issued SUV, and then disappeared into that golden evening, in search, perhaps, of more ice cream.
This article originally appeared in The Iola Register on May 7, 2018. *
