Category: News

Motor Vehicle office will try paging system to reduce long waits in office

Unhappy taxpayers, crying children, and personnel who were applying for other jobs – that is how Unified Government Treasurer Debbie Pack described the situation in the Motor Vehicle Department in Wyandotte County.

Ever since the state shifted more of the workload to the local offices in May 2012, also changing forms and software at the same time, there have been long waits in the Motor Vehicle office for people who want to get their vehicles registered. The state shifted the approval process from the state to the county.

The county office handles about 60 to 70 new registrations a day at each of its two locations, and sometimes the number is 100.

The average wait in February 2014 was four hours for new registrations, Pack told the Unified Government Commission at the 7 p.m. meeting March 20.

But something is being done now that may address the long waits in the office, she said.

Currently, Wyandotte County’s Motor Vehicle office is working with Shawnee County, which developed its own queue system to allow customers Internet access that will tell them the approximate wait time, she said. The office is also working on a call-in system.

That will mean that customers may come in with their paperwork, leave for a few hours, get a message that they will be needed in 45 minutes, and then come back when it is close to the time they will be needed.  The office still will need about the same amount of time to process the paperwork, she added. But customers will not have to wait in the office the entire time.

Pack hopes the new system will be running by the end of March.

The county office handled more than 37,000 new registrations in 2013, and there were 114,000 renewals that year.

Pack said the state had four to seven full-time persons at the state level working on Wyandotte County cases in 2012 when it shifted the approval process to the county level. That shifted some additional costs to the county in the form of extra personnel needed, according to UG officials.

The county has had to add one approver and other staff since then. Only one employee can take time off from the office at any time, she said. She also asked the commission for additional personnel.

Repeal of renewable energy standards ready for Senate floor

by Trevor Graff, KHI News Service

Topeka — The repeal Kansas standards for renewable energy generation may be debated by the full Senate after members of the Senate Utilities committee today recommended a bill to eliminate them.

The party line vote, with Republicans favoring the bill and Democrats opposed, can allow floor action on the topic, though similar legislation to roll back the standards failed before the Senate last year.

The bill’s proponents said that despite the lack of information showing the standards’ add much to electrical prices, they were convinced repealing them would either lower rates or discourage future increases.

“The proponents said they didn’t know if this would reduce the rates, but it would definitely prolong the rates from going up,” said Sen. Robert Olson, an Olathe Republican. “It’s also a mandate. I believe it will lower rates. It won’t increase rates.”

The panel’s Democrats disagreed. Sen. Marci Francisco, a Lawrence Democrat, said that with the recent launch of an integrated electricity market by the Southwest Power Pool, a power grid that connects Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma and parts of Texas and Arkansas, the committee should not be sending a negative message to utility companies.

“Without having anymore information about the affect of that very recent (March 1) change, I think we could be sending this signal this year and turning around and saying, ‘Oh my gosh we want our utility companies to be players in that market so we can reduce the cost of energy for our customers,’” Francisco said.

Most utility companies in the state already meet the renewable standards, according to the bill’s opponents, and several national corporations are beginning to seek states with renewable energy standards for their sustainable manufacturing initiatives.

“If what we’re trying to do is add jobs in Kansas we need to be very careful that we’re not putting barriers in front of economic development and making this state less attractive to national firms.”

Francisco said. Sen. Forrest Knox, an Altoona Republican, said that the expiration of the federal Production Tax Credit for wind energy at the end of 2013 changed the nature of the debate this year.

Without the tax credit, he said, wind energy costs are going to rise.

“If we continue down this road and have to build wind to cover our RPS, it’s going to cost us significantly,” Knox said. “It’s going to cost the ratepayer. We’ve built way ahead of the RPS. This is the way business works and that’s where we’re going here is saying let’s let business do it’s thing.”

The state’s leading regulated electric utility companies, such as Westar, did not weigh in on the bill for or against.

“Since we are reasonably close to the standards that we’re looking for I do think that this will have a negative impact on the competition of the state,” said Sen. Tom Hawk, a Manhattan Democrat. “I think that we want to create jobs and a good state economy and I don’t see that removing the RPS, in any way, will get us to that joint goal.”

Hawk and Francisco voted against the bill.

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Supreme Court reverses Wyandotte County conviction

The Kansas Supreme Court today reversed a Wyandotte County defendant’s conviction for aggravated indecent liberties with a child and remanded the case to the district court for a new trial.

Jose Santos-Vega had been convicted on two sex offenses involving a child in 2008, and received hard 25 sentences under Jessica’s Law.

A jury acquitted him of two counts of rape of a 15-year-old, but he was convicted on two counts of aggravated indecent liberties with an 11-year-old child.

Today the Supreme Court ruled Santos-Vega’s right to a fair trial was substantially prejudiced by a combination of trial errors. The district court did not instruct the jury that it had to unanimously agree on the specific act underlying each of the convictions; and a testifying detective violated a court order by telling the jury Santos-Vega had invoked his right to remain silent during questioning, the Supreme Court ruling stated.

The court held the state failed to demonstrate the errors did not contribute to the guilty verdicts.