Kansas Governor Spending Slots Revenue

The first slots are not actually up and running yet, but Governor Kathleen Sebelius has already found ways to spend the money that will be coming in from them. Her new budget completely takes advantage of the slots revenues that will be coming in, and she is planning on a large quantity of money coming in.

Her budget, released Tuesday, includes more than $81 million in slots revenue in order to make it work. In addition to the slots revenue, she is also planning on hitting the state’s rainy day fund in order to make it all work. Using all of her resources, she was able to introduce new spending on programs that many in the state feel are majorly under funded.

She is putting money into early childhood and higher education programs, pay raises for state workers, bigger pensions for government retirees, increased funding for highway projects and increasing aid to public schools. She says that the money that the state will be bringing in from the slots, they will be able to handle all of these programs plus more.

They know that they should be receiving the first of their slots revenue checks later this year, and they say that the budget is dependant on those funds. The state is still waiting to see if the slots law will withstand the pending court challenge that they are currently battling, as they know that they cannot pass the budget as it stands if it does not. It would need to be cut drastically.

The increased total spending due to the slot allowance would be 3.6% so that they would be looking at $13.6 billion for the next fiscal year which begins July 1st. They expect that they will know exactly where they stand with the slots by the time it would need to be implemented.


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