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Tuesday, November 14, 1989 / University Daily Kansai
Opinion
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Reappraisal, higher taxes will kill Kansas businesses
The tax man cometh, and many in Kansas are not receiving him warmly.
Property tax bills were mailed last week, and thousands of businesses were shocked to find that their taxes had doubled or even tripled. Hardest hit were office buildings in Johnson County and other industrial and commercial properties.
Businesses are the victims of reclassification and reappraisal. Reappraisal updated the market value of property, and reclassification then taxed commercial property at 30 percent.
David Miller, chairman of the Legislative Post Audit Committee, has called for a special legislative session to discuss property tax relief. A special session at this time would not be productive, but tax relief should be the first order of business when the regular legislative session begins Jan. 8.
A special session would be unable to provide substantive relief because tax bills are due Dec. 20, and the state's Property Valuation Division will not have final mill levies or actual tax levies before then. Consequently, a special session would be working in the dark and would be unable to determine what revisions should be made or what their impact would be.
However, this should not cloud the fact that state businesses are in desperate need of tax relief. Tax levies of the sort that have been trumpeted in headlines will certainly stifle economic development and business expansion. In fact, many businesses say that if they are forced to pay the exhonorant new tax, they might have to flee to the friendlier tax environment of Missouri. Johnson County, long the leader in attracting business to Kansas, could become a wasteland of empty office complexes.
Once the Legislature convenes, it should consider across-the-board cuts in spending and shifts of some gambling revenues from economic development to tax relief. A lower tax levy definitely could be considered a move toward economic development and would guarantee a healthier business climate.
Daniel Niemi for the editorial board
Course listing needs help to provide complete guide
A letter from the Course Source director in the most recent publication says, "Well, this is it! The publication that you've all been anxiously awaiting."
A bigger letdown can hardly be imagined.
A bigger bedroom can marry be imagined. Students had been promised a comprehensive magazine detailing information about classes. The aim was to help students enroll in the classes that best suited their needs. Indeed, the magazine does include information about class objectives, prerequisites, class size, reading assignments, class and test formats, and grading. What it doesn't include is enough classes.
Information is included for only 36 classes. Thirteen of those classes are 300 level or above.
This course magazine debuted in 1969 as "Feedback." It
In 1895, a coalition vying for Senate promised to revive the publication and dubbed it "Course Source."
received Student Senate support to the tune of $30,000 annually. In 1972, the University took over the publication. By 1981, it was dead
Since then, a shortage of financing has hampered its return to earlier success.
Wendy Davis, the director of the Senate advisory board, responsible for the new catalog, said she was "sad and upset that it was only 32 pages of course information." So few pages were included, she said, because that was all the advertising would support.
The board eventually wants to expand the magazine to include all courses offered at the University. Petitions are being circulated calling for Senate support and to make mandatory faculty participation in the compilation of source material.
Davis concludes her introductory letter with "quote from Plato that I would like to pose as a challenge to each and every one of you: 'Why settle for mediocrity?'"
Why, indeed?
Ric Brack for the editorial board
News staff
David Stewart ... Editor
Ric Brack ... Managing editor
Daniel Niemi ... News editor
Danny Witmann ... Planning editor
Stan Dell ... Editorial editor
Jennifer Corser ... Campus editor
Elaine Sung ... Sports editor
Laura Husar ... Photo editor
Christine Winner ... Art/Fashion editor
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Linda Prokop...Business manager
Debra Martin...Local advertising sales director
Jerre Medford...National/regional sales director
Jill Lowe...Marketing director
Tami Rank...Production manager
Carrie Slinkinik...Assistant production manager
Margaret Townsend...Co-op manager
Erik Hughes...Crush manager
Christal Doerd...Classified manager
Jeff Meesay...Teamsheet manager
Jennie Hines...Sales and marketing adviser
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New cast moves toward talks
Slowly, slowly, slowly, Israel edges toward the first direct peace negotiations that it always wanted it with its Arab neighbors. Ara Palestinians, as it happens, are the closest. Last week the Israeli cabinet finally agreed, 9 to 3, to accept Secretary of State Jim Baker's peace plan — with conditions, of course. Does anything in the Middle East come without conditions? One might as well order shish kebab without onions and peppers.
What we have here is a remake of the Begin-Sadat-Carter negotiations that led, tortuously, to the Camp David agreements and the treaty between Egypt and Israel. This time Yitzkak Shamir is cast as Menachem Begin, which is a bit like having Woody Allen play Clark Gable. What has changed is the Israeli negotiating strategy in pain? It is painless; whatever it wants, but do it so slowly, so painfully, so gruddigly when that peace is made it will be a cold one.
If the sequel holds true to the original script, Israel will make all the tangible concessions but get little or no credit for them because the good will necessary for a peace that is more than mere absence of war will have been fritted away in the long, painful negotiating process. The result: Israel will have established a hostile state along its borders, the one result all its negotiating plows was supposed to avoid.
A decade ago, Shamir was a young hard-liner who opposed Begin's handing over the Sinai to Egypt. Now that he's premier and needs to make peace, Shamir is opposed by young hard-liners, such as David Levy, who don't want to hand over the West Bank to a new Palestinian state. History can be a kind of raw justice.
The Israelis are now as divided as the PLO, which stands for either the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestine Liquidation Organization depending on whether it is talking peace to the West or promising its own zealots total victory over Israel. One day Yasser announced terror the next, he linked to its practice by saying that it was confident to make peace wondering which Israel is going to make peace with which Palestine.
Responding to pressure at home and abroad, mainly from the United States, Shamir has been trying to negotiate with the Palestinians without negotiating with the PLO. It's a bit like trying to make an omelet without eggs. Even on the off chance that it could be done, the
Paul
Greenberg
Syndicated columnist
result would be artificial and not likely to satisfy.
The need for peace is so clear, the logic of it so undeniable, that it would be wrong to dismiss the possibility despite all evidence. Peace may have to come inch by agonizing inch, but it has to come. The Israelis will give land for peace, and the Arabs will give peace (the real thing this time) for peace. One side needs security after 40 years of war and ceaseless talk of war; the other side needs to regain its pride after 40 years of defeat. The need for that basic exchange has been obscured by a forest of technicalities, each of which is being argued as though it were the one essential issue.
Lost in the murk is a vision of what peace could be like: security for Israel and self-respect for Arab Palestinians. Suppose the Israeliis were to come out waving the now outlawed flag of Arab Palestine to welcome their new neighbor. Suppose the PLO in turn were to proclaim that security arrangements west of the Jordan would be left to Israel. Suppose Jews were as free to live on the West Bank as Arabs are to live in Israel. Suppose peace.
Yes, both groups would have to make a leap of faith and imagination. Both would have to overcome their most cherished illusions and antagonisms. To create a common future, each would have to give up its exclusive version of the past. But there is another and better past to build on; there have been other times when Jews and Arabs built civilizations together. Why not now? That is what vision is for.
Some time ago, a sage observer of events in the Middle East noted that, where there is no vision, the people perish. This chance for peace must not be lost in a wilderness of technicalities, negotiating points and conditions. What will it profit either side to win the debate and lose the peace?
▶ Paul Greenberg is the editorial page editor for the Pine Bluff (Ark). Commercial.
Politics revert to high school
From time to time I start thinking that my Student Council Theory of life in Washington is dead wrong. Then along comes something to make me even more sure that the principles of our country are properly explains the way of life in our nation's capital.
Briefly, the Student Council Theory states that the major players in Washington — the congressmen, the Cabinet members, the famous news commentators — are really nothing more than those kids who used to tape posters up in the hall of their high schools, asking the rest of us to vote for them in the student council election. Not the Washington news commentators, of course; they didn't run for the student council. No, they were the boys and girls who were deluded enough to think that what the student council did was significant, and who earnestly wrote news of the student council in the school newspaper. The only difference is that now the people in Washington are a little older, wear suits and are nationally telecast.
Every time I begin to doubt the veracity of the Student Council Theory, the politicians and journalists of Washington do not let me down — they demonstrate once again that the Student Council Theory is right. And what happened last week at the roast for syndicated columnist Bob Noyak is one of the best examples vet.
Novak is a conservative columnist and TV commentator who seems to scare people with what is supposed to be his nasty disposition — although on the several occasions I have spent time with him, he has seemed to be a personable enough fellow. Anyway, a roast of Novak, with the proceeds going to charity, was scheduled in Washington. Politicians (Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, Pat Rumsfeld (and others) and journalists were enlisted to take part.
C-SPAN is national, but in Washington it is much more than that. It is the video version of your high school newspaper. Going back to the Student Council Theory, if your school paper was called, say, the Beacon, then C- just as important to the grown-up Washington politician as the Beacon was to the student council members.
The roast was supposed to be telecast on C-SPAN. C-SPAN is a cable channel that provides life coverage of Congress and other government events. Political junkies love it; it may not have the pizzazz of "Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling," but if watching House subcommittee debates is your idea of a good time, C-SPAN is for you.
Congress does not meet 24 hours a day. Thus, when Congress has adjourned for the night, C-SPAN broadcasts other programming, the same way that the Beacon back at your high school would print news other than student council news. And C-Span tentatively had committed to broadcasting the Bob Novak roast live.
But as the roast is ready to begin, Rep. Bob Dornan,
R.-Calf., was preparing to deliver a long anti-abortion
Bob Greene
Syndicated columnist
speech on the floor of the House of Representatives — and G-PAW was going to cover it live.
Dornan, at the Capitol, received a telephone call from Albert Hunt, Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, who was an organizer of the Novak roast. Hunt would last, and Dornan asked why Hunt wanted to know.
Dornan went to the floor of the House and said, "Speaker, I just received one of the most peculiar calls I have ever had in my 12-year time span serving in this Congress." He told of Hunt's call, then, "I (told AL) I would try to help and cut my one hour short." Dornan cut his planned one-hour speech to 15 minutes so that CSPAN would be able to cover the Novak roast, but the day may also have having second thoughts about it, because "nobody should proceeding of the U.S. Senate or the House step aside for additional programming."
Hunt said that, while he never specifically asked Dornan to shorten his speech, he did tell the congressman that "We're at this event and we're going to be on television when the house finishes. In retrospect, it was a dumb call to have made."
Now, you may be asking yourself some serious questions: Should journalists be telling elected officials that they are competing with each other for airtime? Should journalists and elected officials even be socializing together at "roasts"? If journalists and elected officials go to fashionable parties together, doesn't that affect how the government and the press operate?
Those questions show a striking degree of naivete on your part. Think back to your school paper, the Beacon. What would happen if there was a school dance on the same night the student council was meeting? It wouldn't be fair to the boys and girls on the student council; it wouldn't be fair to the boys and girls at the dance; and it certainly wouldn't be fair to the Beacon reporter.
The Bob Novak roast is the school dance, Dorann's speech was the student council meeting. C-SPAN was the official facts with your understanding of the Student Council and know all you need to know. Now change the channel.
Bob Greene is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Halftime sermon unfair
Last week, the men's basketball team played a home game against the gospel-spreading team called the Spirit Express. During the intermission various members of KU's Bible dribbling opponent preached before the crowd, broadcasting accounts of their spiritual discoveries and revelations. It amounted to a religious service, plain and simple.
As the purchaser of season tickets, I find it highly offensive that a group can use the floor of Allen Field House as a forum for religious expression. A state university, which is supported in part by tax dollars, skirts the edge of unlawful church/state entanglement when it condones a particular religion by permitting one of its secular activities to be contaminated by a religious slant.
Scores of unsuspecting non-Christian patrons were temporarily alienated from the half-time activities and confronted with the dilemma of remaining seated with the flock or seeking relief in the nearest restroom. I had always thought the half-time shows at KU games were designed to be palpable as much of the crowd, not just to those with a tain spiritual perspective. I guess I was mistaken.
Granting equal air time to all groups is an option, but I doubt teams like the "Atheist Express" or "Bbuda for basketball" would go over too well. The logical solution is to avoid the problem altogether by segregating religion and events of a temporal nature.
Sheldon Moss Lawrence resident
Math 002 shouldn't be easy
This letter is in response to Andrew Marsh's letter dated 0ct. 31, 1989. Math 002 is designed for the student to work at his own pace with certain time limits. The only fault with the class is that the University is under the assumption that college freshmen will at least try to keep up. From your letter, I got the idea that you took a fatalistic approach from the first day you made the long journey up three flights of stairs in Strong Hall.
As for not having a teacher, I pondered your statement for quite some time before coming to these conclusions: 1) this man appears on Mondays and Wednesdays and gives a two-hour lecture that is dynamic as well as educational. He is also willing to answer even the most elementary questions. 2) He surely is compensated by the University in some way for his dedication and devotion teaching math. 3) At least 200 dedicated students show up with books, pencils and questions. Oh my gosh... HE MUST BE A TEACHER!! OK. now Mr. Marsh, we have a teacher, a classroom and students willing to learn. How is this any different than the rest of your classes? Should I bring my child's pacifier for you? It seems that you must need something such as that in order to learn.
As for your complaint about the tutors. If you would have attended the lectures you would have discovered the best time to get help from the overcrowded tutoring rooms. I was there Saturday morning. There were 10 tutors and three students. Evenings and early morning are other times that are available for that one to one tutoring you need. Oh but then again, mornings are too early, evenings would cut into the social life, and Saturdays are for sleeping in late.
As for the statement about the students that are EARNING A's. I am two points from an A and am striving ever vigilant towards that goal. I had to work very hard to get the grade I have. I am 27-years old, have a home to care for, a husband and children to nurture, am a full-time student, and it has been 10 years since I have taken any math classes. Mr. Marsh ... what's your excuse?
Let's be serious for just a moment. I am attending school to get an education, not to whine about how hard it is and that no one will help me. What did you think college was going to be like? It is not an extension of high school; it is where you are treated as an adult
. . so Mr. Marsh . . . act like one.
Carol Gerontes
Lawrence freshman