Kansas Committee on Government Efficiency reviews 3,254 portal submissions, plans monthly interim work

Senator Erickson, chair of the Committee on Government Efficiency, told members at an interim meeting that the committee had received 3,254 submissions to a public portal set up to gather Kansans’ ideas about improving state government.

The committee spent the session reviewing how the submissions were handled after open‑records requests and discussed priorities — notably improving transparency and interagency cooperation — that it will pursue in monthly interim meetings before the next legislative session.

The portal was opened to solicit ideas from Kansans about “how government works and runs,” Erickson said. Gordon Selle, adviser of statutes, told the committee staff had treated the entries as public records from the outset and that the office placed a warning on the submission page informing users of that status. “The submissions to the portal... would be public records,” Selle said, and staff reviewed each submission before releasing them in response to requests.

Selle said reviewers categorized submissions into three groups: those safe to release without change, those that required redaction of personally identifiable or sensitive third‑party information, and a small number that were set aside for additional review but ultimately not withheld in full. He estimated the number of submissions that required redaction as “less than 20.”

Selle and other staff described a timeline in which the first open‑records request arrived on Feb. 3 and that submissions going back to Feb. 1 were made available to requesters after review. Matthew Willis, senior research analyst with the Kansas Legislative Research Department, confirmed that the committee’s webpage now hosts the committee testimony and that staff had assembled a working set of submissions for committee review.

Committee members described how the raw submissions contained duplicates (largely multiple identical submissions from a single person who resubmitted), off‑topic material such as recipes and venting, and policy suggestions ranging from Medicaid expansion to procurement practices. Erickson said staff filtered out obvious non‑substantive items for the committee’s working list and distilled roughly 349 submissions the committee judged to have substantive suggestions or patterns worth considering.

Committee members asked for and received clarifications on how the records were handled. Selle said the review focused on avoiding the release of sensitive data — for example, Social Security numbers or health information about third parties that could implicate privacy laws — and that those instances were redacted before public release. “We still had concern about people... put personal information down about a third party,” Selle said, describing the reason for careful review.

The committee then moved to planning. Willis presented seven broad topic buckets drawn from the submissions and the committee discussion: transparency and ease of access; agency workflow and interagency cooperation; the impact of third‑party vendors and nongovernmental organizations; auditing and oversight; state budgeting and expenditure practices; cost and access of medical care; and procurement. Willis said those buckets reflect themes the committee can pursue in the interim.

Members agreed to prioritize interagency workflow and cooperation first as an initial “bite” to take in the June meeting, with procurement and third‑party vendor oversight to follow. The committee directed staff to invite relevant agencies and to ask them to come prepared with concrete ideas for improving efficiency rather than only explaining why problems exist. Senator Shane suggested engaging state institutions of higher education to help analyze agency data and explore technological options for triage and case processing.

The committee also discussed using the legislative post audit process where appropriate, and noted that audits already exist on many topics; members asked staff to compile relevant past audits as background. Senator Thompson said the committee could request expanded audits when the scope of an existing audit is insufficient.

Erickson closed by instructing staff to circulate the notes and an interim meeting schedule. The committee agreed to meet monthly during the interim to pursue the prioritized topics and to share submissions with appropriate agencies when items fall outside the committee’s scope.

The meeting produced no formal motions or votes; the committee’s outcomes were planning and direction to staff and agencies.

The committee said it will use the coming interim months to refine specific questions to pose to agencies, to gather agency responses before hearings and to prepare focused follow‑up meetings where needed.