NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Republican Rep. Kenny Titus, whose district includes part of Manhattan and much of Wabaunsee County has served as an adjunct water law professor at KU in addition to working on water policy with the Kansas Department of Agriculture before getting into politics. He explained that making sure the money supply for water work is stable was one of the accomplishments of that committee in the House prior to turnaround.
"First is stable funding for the State Water Plan fund," Titus said. "If you go all the way back to Sam Brownback's first term, he was very interested in water and taking care of that resource in the Ogallala. He created a blue ribbon task force. It takes somewhere between $60 and $70 million to actually fund all of the water projects that we need to be working on. Out west, that includes dealing with declining ground water levels. In the eastern part of the state, it includes keeping our reservoirs from silting up, because much of our water supply comes from reservoirs and surface streams. There are problems in different parts of the state, but everybody has problems."
The recommendations have made it out of committee this session and made it across the floor of the House before the turnaround deadline.
"We adopted the blue ribbon task force, which carves off about $54 million of existing sales tax," Titus said. "We're not raising any taxes. It would take the fees that are already charged, plus dedicating a certain amount of sales tax to water projects every year, sort of like we do with the state highway fund, a similar model. That should give the water authority and the water office the resources they need to work on projects. One piece of that is very important. Because we're adding so much new money to the Water Plan budget, we wanted to put some guard rails in place. If you look around all of your communities, water infrastructure in most communities is aging and in need of repair. We have the lead pipeline rule from the EPA and all of these issues. It takes a lot of money to fix these."
Cities and towns of all sizes across Kansas need to work on this.
"About $20 million a year of that $54 million that we're dedicating to water, will be available to municipalities and special districts to varying degrees, in order to allow for all the engineering work and the planning and the grant applications and the matching funds," Titus said. "There will actually be some loan forgiveness through the state and some other grants, as well, to help cities repair this aging infrastructure and create safe drinking water and wastewater systems."
Some of that money will also be dedicated to raising pay for the people who keep those systems running. Towns that have one or maybe two employees on this and no professional engineering staff will have access to additional dollars.
"There are provisions we put in for communities of 2000 people or less," Titus said. "They are going to get more forgiveness than some of our larger cities. I hear constantly, my district is mostly small towns, other than Manhattan and these small cities, when all the federal money comes available for these grant projects, they oftentimes don't have the resources to hire the engineer to get the shovel-ready grant project ready, to even apply for the federal money. This will give a state source of up to $5 million a year to help with technical assistance, so that these small towns will be in a position to capture more of this grant money that's available from the feds, or wherever."
The bill still needs to go through the process on the Senate side, but Titus is confident that it can gain support over there, as well.
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