Committee Hears Bill to Standardize Notice for Revoking State Regulations, Remove Inactive Agencies from Five‑Year Review List

The Committee on Legislative Modernization heard testimony on Senate Bill 77, a bill to require state agencies to give written notice to businesses, local governmental units and other known interested parties before revoking administrative rules, and to remove abolished or inactive entities from the statutory five‑year review schedule for regulations.

Gordon Self, Reviser of Statutes, told the committee that “Senate Bill 77 . . . deals with rules and regs in 2 aspects,” and summarized the bill as adding a notice requirement before revocation and updating the five‑year review timetable by removing abolished or inactive agencies from the list. Self said the bill makes the statutory list reflect current agencies so the periodic reviews apply only to active agencies.

Clay Barker, general counsel for the Kansas Secretary of State, testified that the bill responds to two problems agencies encountered after the Legislature established a five‑year review process in 2022. Barker said the existing expedited‑repeal tool lacked a clear statutory standard for how agencies must notify the public when they seek an expedited revocation; “The only way you can figure out where a regulation is in the process is to call the agency and ask them if they happen to know,” Barker said, describing the difficulty of tracking regulatory status. He said the bill’s use of the word “written” is intended to be broadly read — for example, email or a website posting — so agencies can satisfy the requirement and use expedited repeal with confidence.

Barker also said the five‑year review, as originally drafted, produced a timetable that included agencies that no longer exist; he said the reviser’s review identified 19 agencies on the list that are abolished or inactive. “We would not have brought a bill just to get rid of outdated agencies,” Barker said, but removing those inactive entries was feasible while fixing the notice standard.

Members asked several clarifying questions. Representative Riley asked whether the Secretary of State is an office or a department; Barker responded that the Secretary of State is a constitutional officer and not a department under the governor. Representatives raised questions about how the bill defines “written notice” and whether the statute should set a minimum notice period. Barker and Self said the bill does not specify a fixed number of days and that the existing statute already provides that a revocation is not effective until 15 days after publication of notice in the register. Self described the bill’s approach as leaving the timing and methods largely to agencies to accommodate differences in agency size and audiences.

Committee members also raised access concerns for members of the public without Internet or email access. Barker and Self said agencies typically provide notice in the format requested by an individual who has asked for notice (for example, by letter if the requester submitted a letter), and that the Secretary of State maintains a website tool that people can use to request automated notices for particular agencies.

No proponents other than Barker and no opponents or neutral witnesses spoke at the hearing, and the committee closed the oral testimony and ended the hearing on SB 77. The chair said the committee will take up the bill at a later date.

The hearing record contains multiple clarifications from witnesses that the bill is intended as a technical fix to provide a statutory standard for notice and to clean an outdated agency list, not to make broader substantive regulatory changes.