GUEST COLUMN, Shannon Francis, 125th District Representative:

March 23 marked an important deadline in the 2022 Legislative Session. That is the date by which all non-exempt bills, from committees other than Appropriations, Federal and State Affairs, and Taxation, had to be considered in either chamber.  This week the House debated and approved 55 bills...

GUEST COLUMN, Shannon Francis, 125th District Representative:

This week we are making the final tweaks to the House version of the budget bill.  Several items important to rural Kansas were added to the bill this week. The first is doubling the funding to $3 million for the Kansas Teacher's Service Scholarship...

If two lawmakers from Missouri and Kansas had their way, metro-area residents would no longer lose an hour of sleep every spring. “We’ve lived thousands of years without any standard time at all, so it's interesting how contentious it can be,” said Rep. Shannon Francis, a Republican from Liberal. Francis is among the Kansas House members who have supported a resolution urging Congress to adopt permanent, year-round daylight saving time. Francis said his constituents prefer to have an extra hour of daylight in the evening. He said 60% of the 108 people who responded to an online survey he ...

GUEST COLUMN, Shannon Francis, 125th District Representative:

The Legislature completed the first half of work Feb. 23, ahead of the Turnaround deadline, when non-exempt bills have to be considered in their house of origin. Work continues on the big issues, including the budget, taxes, and redistricting ...

Remarks by GUEST COLUMN, Shannon Francis, 124th District Representative

GUEST COLUMN, Shannon Francis, State Representative:  On Monday, the House convened for the start of the 2022 session. A key responsibility of the Legislature this year is redistricting of the House, Senate, State Board of Education and Congressional District maps. Redistricting information can be found at the Kansas Legislative Research Department’s website and on the House Committee on Redistricting’s webpage ...

Kansas legislators gave updates on their legislative session so far at the February Legislative Coffee hosted by the Garden City Area Chamber of Commerce Saturday. Rep. Shannon Francis, R-Liberal, spoke on highways and how one of the good things that happened as a result of the COVID-19 funding package passed by the federal government at the end of December is about $95 million is coming to Kansas for highways. "$10 million of it roughly is going to go to Sedgewick County and Johnson County, the other $85 million will come to the Department of Transportation," he said. "They estimated tha...

We’re about a month away from having to change our clocks, but a group of lawmakers hopes this is the last time. There’s a new resolution in the Kansas House that says the whole country should implement daylight saving time. A bipartisan group of 27 Kansas Representatives is urging Congress to make the change. “I kind of realized people really care about this issue and it’s something that really affects us every day, more than a lot of the things we do up here in Topeka,” said the bill’s sponsor Liberal Representative Shannon Francis.

The 2020 Kansas Legislature returns Thursday to Topeka. The one-day agenda includes legislation to bolster oversight of Kelly’s emergency orders and her decisions about pandemic spending. Rep. Shannon Francis, R-Liberal, said city and county governments should apply a portion of the $1.25 billion to cover matching-fund requirements for other sources of federal disaster assistance. “I think there’s some hope it possibly could in this disaster,” Francis said.

The Kansas Highway Patrol requested the Kansas Legislature allocate $11 million for two new helicopters and $4.8 million for a new airplane to replace aging equipment and meet rising demand for assistance from law enforcement agencies statewide. The pitch to a House budget committee Tuesday indicated KHP was proposing purchase of a pair of Airbus H125 helicopters for $5.5 million each and to acquire a Cessna C208 Caravan EX for $4.8 million. “This is a big expenditure for this committee. It’s new spending,” said Rep. Shannon Francis, a Republican from Liberal who chairs the House Transpor...