The agency announced earlier this month that it will submit, review and publish regulations electronically beginning in 2026, a move to streamline work for agencies, executive offices and staff, while impacting highly regulated sectors such as banking and insurance. To do so, the state has picked a policy management platform from the Texas-based company Esper, selecting it for a three-year contract at a cost of $1.4 million. The system includes first drafts, reviews, approvals, publication and publication syndication.
“Modernization is becoming the culture of the agency,” Secretary of State Scott Schwab told Government Technology.
Two months ago, the office completed a full in-house replacement of its 30-year-old IBM AS/400 computer system, marking a major step in that journey. Now, it's regulations' turn.
Schwab said that the current paper-based system means that state employees have to literally carry stacks of paper across the 20-acre Capitol Square and to the Kansas Register and Kansas Administrative Regulations department. Workflows aren’t visible, paperwork can be misplaced or delayed, and when staff retire, institutional knowledge is lost. He added that public and business stakeholders need a clearer way to track issues and timelines as regulations move through the system.
The SOS team learned about Esper at a National Association of Secretaries of State conference. Whitney Tempel, director of communications and policy, took the information back to the secretary and began to document processes and gather feedback on what end users needed. She also provides testimony before legislative committees.
Tempel and agency counsel Clay Barker gave testimony earlier this year to support a $1.5 million budget request, saying the project would benefit all involved. She also explained the five-step process for creating and approving state regulations in an Oct. 21 committee meeting.
The process itself is multilayered. Agencies draft a rule, submit it to the Department of Administration for review, and then to the attorney general for legal approval. Next, the Division of Budget reviews the economic impact statement, before holding a public hearing and filing the final version with the SOS. At several points, if reviewers find problems or request changes, the process loops back to the beginning for revisions, meaning the number of steps can vary.
In addition, agencies often call upon the SOS staff to help with questions and research, Barker said in January.
“It takes a lot of work to get a regulation through,” he said. “Unlike the Legislature, that has the revisor’s office … most agencies don’t have a dedicated person for regulations. They lack the knowledge and expertise on how to write them and how to move them through the system.”
The remarks reflect a need for a clearer, more uniform process, and the new platform may help close the gap between knowledge and practice.
Questions range from how to write a transmittal letter to the attorney general to how to write a public hearing notice. That type of guidance will be built into the new platform, as will policy examples, writing templates and public visibility. It will also connect to the Kansas Register for final rule and regulation publishing.
“It’s been about an 18-month sales cycle …," Esper CEO Maleka Momand said. "We did a lot because it’s such a big implementation across many different agencies and the SOS’ office. We had to get a lot of buy in, so we did campaigns and tours, if you will, through the state agencies collecting their stories.”
Louisiana, which has recently embarked on large-scale modernizations of its own, has also contracted with Esper. For Kansas, the new system stands to literally lighten a burden.
“We had to go through various agencies across state government to get to the RFP process,” Schwab said, “but we did it, and the other agencies are going to love it because they literally drove paper across the Capitol complex.”
