Caelin Bragg
Advertising & Distribution Manager
Kansas’s 77th District Representative Kristey Williams has introduced a bill to the state legislature, which pushes for community colleges to offer greater transparency.
House bill (HB) 2144, titled the “Community College Taxpayer Transparency Act,” seeks to reform how Board of Trustees fund their community colleges by requiring more involvement with the community.
“For many constituents, it’s often frustrating watching our tax dollars casually spent on programs or cycles of spending that lack fairness, accountability and commonsense,” Williams said in a newsletter on Tuesday, Feb. 5.
The new bill would require college Board of Trustees, for expenditures over $250,000 that relate to infrastructure, furnishing or property acquisition or for increases in the college’s budget, to publish three consecutive weekly resolutions on their website and a local newspaper, and if a petition is filed against such resolutions within 60 or 40 days of the final published resolution, the resolution would go to a vote by local electors.
Other content from the bill requires the Board of Trustees to clearly state which courses offered by a community college are fully transferable to other state institutions on their website, and any publication discussing such courses would have to identify this as well.
“Johnson County Community College is very supportive of efforts toward furthering transparency,” Chris Gray, associate vice president of marketing at Johnson County Community College, said. “However, one of our main concerns is in how this bill is comprised and the erosion of local control, which HB 2144 takes away by placing a tax lid on any expenditure over $250K.”
This concern was also echoed by Greg Joyce, chair of the Butler Community College Board of Trustees. He said the restriction on expenditures over $250,000 could make it difficult for the college to deal with immediate problems that come up, citing a previous sewage problem that ruined the gym’s floor, requiring replacement. This new bill would have potentially forced the college to wait at least 60 days before anything could have been done.
“There’s no doubt in my mind this bill is motivated by Representative Williams’ opinion and concern that Butler’s mill levy is too high, and the support of the Butler County taxpayer for out-of-county students is too high,” Joyce said. “That said, I’m not certain how this bill provides any remedy. Some form of increased state funded assistance will be needed.”
The new bill also defines what is considered in-state and in-district for tuition and fee rates, requires that student fees only be used for a stated purpose and that the purpose be made clear to the students. The bill would also require a Board of Trustees to publish annual reports on tuition and fee rates and total cost (excluding textbooks and housing) for international, out-of-state, in-state and in-district students, the geographical demographics of each campus and total enrollment, stating which non-college county has the highest percentage of enrollment, the total mills levied and property tax collected by the college within the previous five years and finally the total budget for athletic and non-athletic scholarships and the geographical demographics of who has those scholarships.
The Butler County Board of Commissioners issued a statement on Tuesday, Feb. 12 to the Kansas House of Representatives Education Committee in support of HB 2144.