HERCULANEUM, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri Department of Transportation is giving away a Jefferson County bridge that was built during the Great Depression for free, but the offer comes with a catch.

The state’s transportation agency plans to demolish the truss bridge that carries cars across Joachim Creek along State Route 61 in Jefferson County, unless state officials find a new owner. But anyone interested in the bridge must be willing to either maintain the structure or pay for it to be moved.

The Missouri Department of Transportation and its partners have a practice of making historic bridges that they plan to remove available for use by others. Joachim Creek isn’t the only bridge that’s available for the taking. The department is offering more than a dozen others, varying in size.

Multiple federal grants could make up to 80 percent of demolition costs available to potentially reimburse those interested in reusing the bridge, according to the department’s website .

“It’s interesting, but it’s not something I’d want to do, own a bridge,” said Sam Shelton, who lives near the historic bridge.

Shelton’s neighbor, Kenneth Chailland, predicted that the bridge’s upkeep will require a lot of money.

Both Shelton and Chailland said they’ve seen the bridge flood too many times to be its new owner.

GREENE COUNTY — One person died in an accident just before noon Sunday in Greene County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2004 Chevy Truck driven by William A. Dorlac, 39, Springfield, was eastbound on Interstate 44 inside the Strafford City limits.

The driver lost control of the truck. It crossed the median cables into the westbound lanes and struck a 2015 Chevy Equinox driven by Deborah R. Coleman, 65, Lebanon, head-on.

Coleman was pronounced dead at the scene.  Dorlac was transported to Mercy Hospital.  Coleman was not wearing a seat belt, according to the MSHP.

 

 

SHAWNEE COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating a fatal accident.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri State Capitol has recently completed an effort to restore and conserve the building’s murals that provide visitors with snapshots of the state’s history.

Neosho-born artist Thomas Hart Benton’s “A Social History of the State of Missouri” was a focus of the preservation project.

Benton’s murals give visitors a chronological guide through the lives of Missouri residents, from fur trading and early farming to a political gathering. Some of the artwork captures uglier parts of the state’s history, such as slavery and the 1838 expulsion of Mormons from the western part of Missouri.

The Legislature commissioned Benton’s murals in 1935 for $16,000, according to Dana Rademan Miller, chair of the Missouri State Capitol Commission. Benton traveled the state to find and sketch residents before featuring them on canvas. His artwork depicts 235 people.

“At the time, he was at the height of his fame as a regionalism artist that captured these themes from the Great Depression and of the Midwest particularly,” Miller said.

Benton’s murals were met with mixed reactions at the time. Supporters argued that every detail in the murals were true, while critics said Benton focused on the wrong stories from the state’s past.

But now, Capitol officials hope to preserve Benton’s work for future generations to admire.

The Capitol Commission started consulting with professional conservators two years ago to assess the conditions of Benton’s murals. The assessment led to 75 murals throughout the Capitol being inspected for damages.

“The nice thing is that our murals, we found out, were actually in pretty good shape,” Miller said. “We were afraid there would be a lot more deterioration and paint loss.”

She said the preservation project is important because the Missouri Capitol’s murals make the building unique.

“It’s something that is a legacy really for the future, for those who come after us,” Miller said.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas astronaut says he’s ready for his next mission after a failed space launch in October.

Hoxie native Nick Hague will embark on a six-month stay with two other crew members at the International Space Station. The scheduled launch aboard a Soyuz MS12 spacecraft is set for Feb. 28, 2019.

Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Christina Hammock Koch will join Hague in the launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

On board the station, they will participate in about 250 research experiments and technology demonstrations made possible by micro-gravity conditions inside the station.

Ovchinin was also aboard the initial failed rocket set to launch on Oct. 11, 2018. Shortly after launch that day, the rocket’s booster malfunctioned in a rare failure for the Soyuz rocket. Hague and Ovchinin successfully aborted the mission and made a “ballistic descent” back to Earth in a capsule.

“Essentially the rocket came apart underneath us,” Hague said at a news conference Wednesday.

Hague said he’s looking forward to the new mission even more than his previous one, in part because of the addition of Koch to the crew. She and Hague were part of the same astronaut class at NASA.

“What we’re doing is making advancements for all of humanity,” Hague said.

Hague, Ovchinin and Koch will return to Earth in October 2019.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A 57-year-old southwestern Missouri man has pleaded guilty in federal court to a $2.4 million wire fraud scheme and faces up to 20 years in prison.

Dwight Moody Cox, of Ozark, pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count. He owns Dwight Cox Cattle Co., which bought cattle for clients and grazed the cattle on land Cox owned or rented. When the cattle reached a specified weight, Cox shipped the cattle to the clients.

Prosecutors say Cox carried out a scheme in which he falsely claimed that he had purchased about 3,250 head of cattle under a contract with the Texas Beef Cattle Company of Amarillo. The Texas company paid him more than $2.5 million for the cattle.

But when the company requested the cattle shipped to it in early 2018, Cox admitted he had only 147 head of cattle and had submitted 35 false invoices to make it appear he had more.

Cox will be sentenced at a later date.

By SCOTT CANON

Kansas Gov.-elect Laura Kelly insists the state budget she’s preparing can fully fund the state’s schools, expand Medicaid coverage to another 150,000 people and begin to repair a troubled child welfare system — without a tax hike.

The Democrat said Wednesday night she’ll lean on experience and relationships built over 14 years in the Kansas Senate to carve out compromises with lawmakers on those priorities.

Yet she described her job as daunting and state government as broken in several key areas.

In little over a month since she beat Republican Kris Kobach in the race for governor, Kelly said she’s worked on a budget proposal to put to legislators in January and found serious problems in state government.

“No surprises … but I am disappointed that the devastation was even worse than I thought,” she told a crowd of 200-plus at Washburn University in Topeka. “The problems are broad and they’re deep.”

Her comments came at Kansas News Service event.

Kelly said rosy revenue projections — the state’s draw from taxes and fees has beat expectations for 18 months in a row — suggest the ability to deal with “school finances without breaking the bank.”

She’s braced for a push from conservatives in the Capitol to pass an amendment to the state constitution scrubbing out the demand for “suitable” financing to local districts from the state. Much of the Republican leadership in the state contends that would free lawmakers to decide funding levels without ongoing lawsuits dictating what the state should spend.

She promised to oppose such a move, although the Legislature could put a proposed constitutional amendment to voters without her approval. But that’s happened before, and failed.

“I have no doubt,” Kelly said, “the people of Kansas will reject that.”

The state may yet need to add money for aid to local school districts in the wake of a Kansas Supreme Court decision. A plan to add  hundreds of millions to that formula in coming years was approved by the Legislature and Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer earlier this year.

But more money may still be needed to account for inflation. Kelly said she’s been studying the state budget and recent improvements in tax revenues.

“We will find when the budget comes out we can afford” to cover her top priorities, she said, without raising taxes.

Republicans have already begun to challenge her definition of a tax hike. Federal tax cuts pushed through by the Trump administration last year had the unintended effect of increasing what a small minority of taxpayers owe the state. Some people simply can’t itemize things like they did before.

That’s produced a windfall in state revenues. Broadly speaking, Republican lawmakers say failing to rewrite state tax law to return that money amounts to a tax hike.

Kelly sees it differently.

She argued again Wednesday that Kansas policymakers don’t yet fully understand the impact of the partial reversal in 2017 of sweeping tax cuts enacted under former Gov. Sam Brownback five years earlier. She also said state officials still need to better fathom how the Trump tax cuts will change state finances.

Only well into 2019, she said, will those things become clear.

“It’s at that point we can look” at whether to return the windfall, she said.

Yet she talked confidently about corralling votes in the Legislature for an expansion of Medicaid in line with the federal Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

She was vague about how much her plan for that expansion would cost Kansas taxpayers — and suggested it might not cost them anything. But Kelly promised to study other states in search of a model that can work in Kansas.

A fight will come in the Legislature, where conservatives are already girding for battle. In the end, she said Democrats and moderate Republicans — what she calls “the moderate majority” — can push through a plan.

This year’s elections replaced some moderates with either conservatives or Democrats. But Kelly said the math is roughly the same as when lawmakers approved expansion in 2016 and came just three votes shy of overcoming a Brownback veto.

The difference this year: “We don’t have to override vetoes.”

She used her most urgent language of the evening to describe the state’s shortcomings in how it cares for children.

A fast-growing foster caseload has added to chronic problems in recent years. Kids have been forced to spend nights in the offices of placement contractors. Some children were shuttled among more than 100 foster homes. Young people have been assaulted while in state custody.

That’s generated frustration with the Department for Children and Families.

“We are literally in a life-or-death situation on DCF,” Kelly said.

In a brief interview after her appearance on stage, the incoming governor said the state needs to hire more people to better manage the cases of children in crisis.

“There is no doubt that we have a lack of qualified social workers,” Kelly said.

DCF, helpd, needs to put more work into family preservation efforts to help parents keep their children. For those children who end up in foster care, Kelly said the agency needs to devote more people to helping them adjust when they’re reunited with their biological families.

“That’s a clear, critical need,” she said.

Yet she didn’t say how much improving those child welfare functions might cost. And Kelly said she’s not yet sure if she’ll approve DCF’s pending plans to expand the number of contractors it hires for that work to five firms from the current two.

Still, the lawmaker from Topeka said Kansas will have enough money for that problem, for robust school spending, for expanding Medicaid, for roads.

Among other things she said in a rare public appearance since her election:

• She’s exploring whether the state must enforce a law passed this year allowing some state-hired faith-based adoption agencies to deny placements with same-sex parents.
• Kelly will collect proposals on what she called “common sense” gun control, but seemed to suggest any proposal won’t come soon. “I’m not sure how quickly we can get that policy together and round up the votes.”
• Her efforts on climate change will focus on working with the state’s congressional delegation and western governors. She also promised to push for more renewable energy use in the state.
• Kelly said tighter welfare rules are part of the reason more kids are landing in foster care. Changing those rules, she said, is “a priority” for fixing DCF.
• She gave Brownback credit for his efforts to deal with the state’s dwindling water supply. “The problem is,” she said, “there was absolutely no funding, very little funding, put into it.”
• Kelly said the state’s criminal sentencing practices need dramatic reform and locks up non-violent offenders too often and for too long. “Those people belong in prison no more than you or I.”

Scott Canon is digital editor of the Kansas News Service. You can reach him on Twitter @ScottCanon.