The Kansas Capitol Dome

The Kansas Capitol dome has been refurbished with new copper and it looks great. The overall Capitol renovation project cost $320 million and took 12 years to complete. The dome portion of the project cost about $10.3 million. As the project nears completion, some ask, "Why did we spend this money on the Capitol building and the Dome when the money could have been spent on educating our children?"

Well, excuse me for enjoying the new look of the Capitol dome.

And furthermore, the decision was never to spend money educating our children or to refurbish the Dome. The Legislature never considered a bill to either educate our kids or fix the roof of the Statehouse. The Legislature chose to redo the Dome because the roof was leaking. And, at the same time, they chose to spend money on educating our kids. In fact, the Legislature spent as much money as they wanted to on education. Some would have spent more, some less.

Every citizen of Topeka is proud of Topeka High School, a building we are told time and time again was the first public high school building west of the Mississippi to cost over $1 million. It was an impressive building when it opened in 1931 and it remains to this day a building that has allowed generations to marvel at it and understand that Topeka places a high value on excellence and education. I've always joked that the school board that approved the cost of constructing Topeka High School was voted out of office at the next election. I don't know if this is true, but I'll bet there was someone in Topeka, perhaps named Ebenezer Ledbetter, who attended the school board meetings and railed against the profligate spenders who threw all that money at bricks and mortar instead of books and teachers.

The fact is that we have to do both. We have to fund education and we have to fix the roof to stop the leaks.