Nick Gosnell: Democratic incumbent from House District 102, Jason Probst, with us. His opponent, Kyler Sweely, will join us later on this morning. Good morning, Jason.
Jason Probst: Good morning, Nick. Thanks for having me.
Nick Gosnell: You bet. So, first of all, do you still do the door-to-door canvassing like a lot of candidates do, or is it more events for you at this point?
Jason Probst: Oh, I'm doing a mix of everything, but pretty much every day I've been out knocking doors. Last night I was just out with my granddaughter. She goes with me once a week at least, and we go out and hit as many doors as we can before the sun goes down.
Nick Gosnell: All right. So, what have folks been telling you as you've been talking to them on the canvass?
Jason Probst: Well, mostly what I hear is, of course, people are concerned about inflation, and people are concerned about property taxes. I probably hear more about property taxes than anything else. There's also a surprising number of people who I think feel, or at least they tell me that they're doing okay and that they feel pretty good about things. I feel like maybe people are trying to approach this election season with a measure of calm and hopefulness, and I like that.
Nick Gosnell: Okay. So, that's an important piece for you is to just be connected with the community. You've been around here a long time, Jason. Just go through your background a bit.
Jason Probst: Well, I was here. I mean, I grew up in Nickerson, graduated from Nickerson High School, and then came to Hutchinson right after that. Moved away for a couple of years, and then came back, I think it was 96, and had my family here. Raised my family all through up to adulthood, and now my grandkids are here. My son lives in Wichita, but my daughter lives here. And I worked at Mega Manufacturing as a machinist. I worked at Home Depot when it first opened as a part-time second job. I worked at the Hutchinson News for quite a while, and then ended up in the legislature, and I've done some small business work. I have a small business writing business that I do some contract work and some newsletters, but that's the brief history of Jason and Hutchinson.
Nick Gosnell: All right. I'm going to ask you to go back in the wayback machine a little bit, because Patsy Terrell was the previous holder of your seat before she passed. And I just want you to talk a bit about grabbing the torch from her and being appointed to that seat, and then what you've done since.
Jason Probst: Well, Patsy had a very untimely and sad passing. She beat the incumbent at the time. Sorry, my voice is cracking. She beat the incumbent at the time and went and served one year in the legislature, and that was a very important year. There was a new class of representatives that came in specifically to turn around the Brownback tax experiment, which at that point had completely wrecked the state. So they were able to do that. And of course, she then had a tragic death right after that. And immediately upon her passing, people had started reaching out to me and said, we think maybe you should fulfill her seat. People who didn't know the whole story, people who did know the whole story knew that prior to Patsy running, I had been approached about running, both by Republicans and Democrats at the time, actually, and decided that it wasn't the right time for me to do it. Patsy did it. And I was very happy to fill out her term, honored that people thought I would be able to fill her shoes.
Nick Gosnell: All right. So talk about since then, what has, what has Jason Probst gotten accomplished in the legislature?
Jason Probst: Well, one of the things that I, a couple of things that I specifically worked on that put a lot of my energy behind was a bill that increased penalties for fentanyl dealers, people selling fentanyl in our community, but also gave resources to people with addiction so that they could make sure that if they were in addiction and using drugs, that they could do that safely. And that was a legalization of fentanyl testing strips. I worked on that legislation for three years solid to try to move the rest of the legislature to understand that allowing people, you know, fentanyl testing strips are used to test the use of drugs, but they could also be used to test the presence of drugs prior to use. And it was this fentanyl epidemic was killing people in incredible numbers. And we got that through and made it so that people wouldn't face a criminal charge. And we could actually distribute those strips. And we've seen fentanyl deaths in Reno County dropped significantly since that law has come into effect. So I'm particularly proud of that. I believe that we have actively saved lives in that. And then another thing that I worked on was the contract for deed act, which creates some provisions to make sure that people who are bad actors in this space can't sell property that they don't have the right to sell. And that there has to be some declarations around that.
Nick Gosnell: Jason, what committees do you currently serve on? And do you want to stay on those if you get back?
Jason Probst: Yeah, I serve as the ranking minority member on the House Commerce Labor and Economic Development Committee. I love the work we've done on there. I've built some really strong relationships with members of that committee. And I think that's a good place for me to be. Also serve on the Agriculture Committee. That committee I really enjoy because it is probably the least partisan committee that we have. And most of what we do in there is really a lot of technical detail that affects the ag industry. But it's so important. And what I really appreciate about that committee is that it's solution oriented. We get a problem brought to us, and there's not a lot of bickering. There's just a lot of how can we solve this problem in the best way possible. The other committee that I really enjoy is Legislative Post Audit. And that kind of has a different meeting schedule. But I really like that. We can go in, and we can look at audit requests that any legislator can make. And then we can put some of the brightest minds in Kansas on finding the answers to those questions. And I've really, really enjoyed being on that committee.
Nick Gosnell: Have you seen post audits turn into policy? Can you give me an example?
Jason Probst: I'm trying to think offhand. We had one that I think will turn into policy. There was an audit on education and whether the special, not special, the weighting was being spent right. And whether the Department of Education is providing the right instruction to local school districts. And the finding in the audit was that the Kansas Department of Education needed to do a better job to explain to local schools how they needed to spend that money. And that was creating the problem. So now that we have done the audit, and we can see the actual source of that, we can create legislation that addresses that.
Nick Gosnell: At the risk of making you dig back into your memory once again, Jason, the rhetoric around the reason why that audit happened, if I'm remembering it correctly, was chiefly because at-risk funding was going to pay for administration. I think that was the political point in it. Is that really what the audit showed?
Jason Probst: I'd have to go back and look at it to see the details. What I remember is that it was, there's certain costs, and I think you're right, some of it was administrative, but there are certain costs that the local districts were saying, this is part of the special education or at-risk spending. And it didn't meet the statutory requirement. And the Department of Education wasn't providing the right instruction to local districts about what was in the statute as far as what they can spend. Another audit that we've done that I think is really helpful, we have in Dodge City and Ford County clerk out there who refused to give us some of the documents that we wanted when we were doing a look at elections. And we've continued to audit that county to make sure that they are complying with the law in the way that it's written. So we have some really good resources in that committee and some good tools that we can bring to bear.
Nick Gosnell: And what I find interesting about that is, I'm not going to say that that's nonpartisan because that's not true, but generally speaking, if you're asking for the real, how is the money being spent, that's one of the ways that you can find out.
Jason Probst: Yeah, that's one of the things I really love. The questions and their framing might be partisan and the way that the stuff comes out of the committee might be partisan. But once it gets in an auditor's hand, they are not partisan at all. And so again, legislative post audit, ag and commerce basically are where you've been with that. Now, Commerce Committee, that's one of those catch-all committees. Lots and lots of things come across your desk.
Nick Gosnell: Did the, I'm going to call it what it was. We had a Chiefs promo in the previous break. Did the Chiefs proposal come across Commerce?
Jason Probst: It did come through Commerce.
Nick Gosnell: Okay. What did you hear then? And have you heard anything since then on where that's at?
Jason Probst: I haven't heard anything really substantial since, but the idea at the time was that voters in Missouri had rejected a bid for a new stadium. And the idea is that there might be an opportunity for Kansas to catch that. So they were looking at using an existing program, Star Bonds program as a way to try to attract the chiefs to build a stadium over to the Kansas side of the border, which I know a lot of people growing up, everybody said, why are they called Kansas City Chiefs if they're not in Kansas? So I think there's kind of a big desire to get them over here. But right now we're probably in a game that's being played in the region, in the Kansas city metro region about who can offer the best deal and where's the money going to go. But I was important to have that discussion in the Kansas legislature too.
Nick Gosnell: All right. And speaking of Star Bonds, the Hutchinson area is getting a Star Bond project. Forgive me for asking this, but because of your position on the committee, do you have anything to do with that or did that all happen independent of you?
Jason Probst: Well, I did in the fact that we created some provisions, we go in and adjust the Star Bond program over time to pull in more options. And one of the things we did in the Commerce Committee was expand that specifically and increase the self-bonding amount. Local governments are able to bond some of their own programs and dedicate their own sales tax to that instead of going through the state. And one of the things that we've been able to do, and we will be able to use here is the expansion of that local funding option. And that's going to allow us to do things like update and improve the Landmark, which is for years has been a blight in the community. But I'm really excited about what Star Bond program can do to revitalize that building.
Nick Gosnell: Just a tease for folks, Laura Meyer Dick, and I exchanged emails here and before election day, I'm not going to tell you which day yet, because I want you to listen every day, but before election day, Laura and I set a time for her to come in and talk about the Landmark and where things are at with that, so stay tuned here to BW for those details. Jason, where can people find out more about your campaign? The easiest thing is to go to my website, which is probstforkansas.com, or you can follow me on social media, either with the username Jason Probst or That guy in Hutch.