UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, October 6, 1994
Yumi Chikamori / KANSAN
Student Senate Libertarian candidate Ena Wheeler, Lawrence senior, talks with KU Democrat Ted Miller who attended the political forum as a panelist after the meeting. The forum took place yesterday at 3:19 PM Wescoe Hall.
Candidates debate local politics
By David Wilson Kansan staff writer
Four local candidates for state representative plodded through a question-andanswer session last night during an audience debate forum in Wescoe Hall.
Candidates for the 46th district are Ena Wheeler, Lawrence senior, who is running as a Libertarian, and Troy Findley, Democrat. Eric Schmidt, the Republican candidate, did not attend.
Candidates for the 45th district are incumbent Forrest Swall, Democrat and professor of social welfare at the University of Kansas, and Tom Sloan, the Republican challenger.
The candidates fielded questions from a three-student panel made up of one student from KU Democrats, one student from College Republicans and one student from KU Libertarians.
About 80 students attended the
Election '94
FORUM
forum, which was sponsored by the Department of Communications.
Wheeler, the only student candidate, said her youth shouldn't disqualify her from becoming a state legislator.
"I'm young, but I care," she said. "The issues we vote on in Topeka affect our lives, and that's something I care about very much."
Wheeler said she was running as a Libertarian because she supported the Libertarian philosophy of minimal government involvement in people's lives. Her only departure from Libertarian philosophy was her support of term limits.
She described herself as "prochoice on everything," including abortion.
Swall and Sloan, said they supported qualified admissions for KU and other Kansas Board of Regents schools. But all four candidates agreed that raising the quality of secondary education should precede qualified admissions.
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All four candidates agreed that the controversy about whether to build a trafficway through wetlands near Haskell Indian Nations University should be a local issue, not a state issue.
Three of the candidates Findley
Sloan suggested building the trafficway on concrete piers to preserve the wetlands.
Forrest, Swall and Sloan agreed that school vouchers were a bad idea because they would undermine public education. School vouchers would allow parents to receive reimbursements from the government for private school tuition.
"I'm strongly opposed," Swall said. "We need to do everything we can to strengthen public education."
The University of Kansas is being watched with close eyes.
KU is in the process of having its accreditation renewed by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, a process that occurs every ten years. The University's accreditation was last renewed in the 1984-85 academic year.
By James Evans Kansan staff writer
The team has been analyzing the University for the last four weeks by reading through University catalogs, University profiles, recruiting material and a self-study report that details how the University is trying to live up to its mission statement.
A 14-member accreditation team made up of professors and administrators from Midwestern colleges and universities will be on campus from Sunday to Wednesday to analyze the University as a whole.
Randy Dickerson, associate dean of fine arts at the University of Illinois and member of the team, said the three-day visit to KU would help the team provide information that the University provided for the association.
KU accreditation to be reviewed
Dickerson said the team would pull some files, check out some of the facilities and talk to different members of the University community.
"We're very randomly going to make sure the University is doing what it supposed to be doing," he said.
The accreditation team will meet with different members of the administration, all deans, chairs and directors of all academic programs and governance groups.
Dickerson said the accreditation process was designed to be beneficial for the University and that the team's job was to serve as consultant and evaluator. He said the team would make suggestions on certain strengths of the University and make recommendations on changes that could be made.
The University began preparing for the accreditation process in the spring of 1983 when the self-study report was being written.
Jeanette Johnson, assistant to the executive vice chancellor, said the evaluation conducted by the association was important to the University in many aspects.
She said that accreditation often played a crucial role in recruiting students to come to KU.
"Maintaining accreditation is absolutely essential in keeping your university a place you would want to send your children," she said.
Johnson said that an institution that was not accredited by the association was not respected in the academic community. She said that universities such as KU were under no obligation to accept credit for courses taken by students in schools that were unaccredited by the five different regional accrediting associations in the United States.
Johnson said the accreditation was necessary because professional schools could not be considered individually for accreditation unless the University was accredited by the association.
Johnson said it was unlikely that KU would not have its accreditation renewed.
Judge rules single residents taxed unfairly
She said the association will make its final decision by April.
The Associated Press
TOPEKA — A judge's ruling that the state unfairly discriminates against single residents at tax time could affect the 1995 legislative session, an influential lawmaker said yesterday.
"This could be earth-shattering," said State Sen. Gus Gogina, R-Shawnee, chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Last month, Shawnee County District Judge Matthew J. Dowd ruled that it is unconstitutional for the state to have lower income tax rates for married individuals filing joint returns than for individual filers. The Department of Revenue is appealing to the state Court of Appeals.
In a letter to all 165 legislators, Revenue Secretary Nancy Parrish said the ruling had a greater potential for liability than a recent military-retiree refund case. The Legislature agreed to pay $68.5 million to settle the case.
The military retirees took their case
"During the 1995 legislative session, the Legislature should consider eliminating the differential in rates between married individuals filing jointly and single filers," Parrish said in her letter.
Parrish said estimates of the potential cost to the state for such a change ranged from $48 million to $150 million over three years.
However, House Majority Leader Vince Snowbarger, R-Olathe, said the state Supreme Court should rule first before the Legislature jumps in.
Under present law, a married couple pays 3.5 percent on the first $30,000 of income, 6.25 percent on the next $30,000 and 6.45 percent on anything more than $80,000.
to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against the state's practice of taxing military pensions but not the pensions of other government retirees, both state and federal. The Legislature agreed to pay refunds for taxes illegally collected from 1984-91, plus 5 percent interest.
However, in the single taxpayers' case, Dowd refused to certify the lawsuit as a class-action lawsuit. That means Eric Peden, who filed the lawsuit, does not represent all single taxpayers who paid taxes over the past three years. Instead, the ruling applies to only Peden.
Single taxpayers pay 4.4 percent on the first $20,000 of income, 7.5 percent on the next $10,000 and 7.75 percent on anything more than $30,000.
How to interview with the Fortune 500 without even getting out of bed.
The ruling could have a significant effect on the financing of public schools, Bogina said. Legislators are expected to revise the school finance formula next year, and some officials want to provide more money for schools.
"Will it have an impact on adding dollars to it? Well, certainly," Bogina said. "I believe whatever dollars are there will remain there. We may apportion them differently.
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Program includes Trio in G Major, Op. 1, No. 2 (Beehoven); Trio No. 2 in B Minor for Piano, Violin and Cello, Op. 76 (Turina); Piano Quartet in G Major, Op. 25 (Brahms).
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