Missouri’s Republican hopefuls for Governor participated in a debate Monday night in Maryland Heights. They all say they support Donald Trump for President, but Catherine Hanaway is the only one who would say that she’d campaign for him if he visits Missouri.

“Unlike Hillary Clinton, he’s not for amnesty, he’s not for abortion on demand, he doesn’t want to take away second amendment rights, he’s going to appoint conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Hanaway.

Peter Kinder doesn’t agree with some of Trump’s statements, but says nobody is perfect.

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” said Kinder. “If I’m not scheduled somewhere else I might.”

Eric Greitens is also undecided about campaigning for Trump.

“We’ll cross that bridge when it comes,” said Greitens. “Where we are 100% united, is that Hillary Clinton can’t be the President.”

John Brunner says Trump should campaign for him.

“I’ll support the Republican nominee. That’s the principal of this party, but I don’t support all of what Mr. Trump has to say. He seems to say an awful lot,” said Brunner.

In one of his recent campaign stops, Trump mentioned the Show-Me state, and not in a positive way. He alleged that Ferguson is one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

The candidates also say the University of Missouri is hurting and must improve. Their comments are in response to last year’s protests on campus over racial issues and leadership resignations that followed.

Kinder says some major donors wanted Mizzou’s budget cut to show their disapproval for the way leaders handled last fall’s turmoil.

“The passage of time since November has not made it better,” said Kinder. “They are adrift. They are not getting the message.”

Brunner disagrees with those who wanted Mizzou’s budget cut.

“I agree that accountability is clear. You can’t cut your way to prosperity,” said Brunner. “Slashing and cutting budget do not solve problems.”

Hanaway says the university must stop spending on unnecessary items.

“We just hired another new Chief Executive Officer of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity for $235,000 a year,” said Hanaway.

Greitens says the university must focus on its strengths.

“You focus on cutting administrative costs and investing in quality research and quality teaching,” said Greitens.

The candidates covered a number of other topics, including tax incentives for businesses, the need for “right to work” legislation and the state’s crime rate.

The debate was co-sponsored by Fox 2 in St. Louis, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Fox 4 in Kansas City.

John Brunner is a businessman and former Marine, Peter Kinder is Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor, Hanaway is a former Missouri House speaker and U.S. attorney and Eric Greitens is a former Navy SEAL and founder of a Missouri non-profit aimed at helping veterans.

Attorney General Chris Koster is the only Democrat seeking the nomination for Governor.

Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) is questioning what she calls “excessive” bonuses awarded to Transportation Security Administration officials, but calls it a symptom of a larger issue across federal agencies.

During a Senate committee hearing on recent issues with TSA – including delays that have caused people to miss flights and undercover agents successfully sneaking 67 out of 70 weapons, explosives, and other forbidden items by TSA screeners – Senator McCaskill questioned bonuses for TSA officials including a $100,000 bonus to a top administrator that was awarded incrementally, which she said was a way to hide it and skirt a 20-percent cap.

“Is there any connection to bonuses paid on whether the agency is succeeding? You know in the private sector the bonus pool changes based on how the company did, and that’s not been the way in government,” said McCaskill. “I don’t think anybody looking objectively at TSA over the last couple of years would say that the bonus pool should be really big.”

TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger said bonuses are now based on agency and individual performance.

“I’ve severely limited both the type and the number of bonuses that can be handed out in an agency, and I’ve put controls on it above me,” said Neffenger. “My concern was that the agency had the ability to independently assign bonuses. I now require department oversight for that.”
McCaskill applauds those changes with TSA but wants a review of senior federal executives across more agencies.

“This is really a symptom of this SES service I think, and the lack of reform that has occurred with the Senior Executive Service,” said McCaskill.

She said SES began as a way to get talent in management and government by hiring competitively to the private sector and that managers would move from agency to agency gathering experience.

“Well that’s long since been abandoned. These are people who’ve burrowed in to one agency that hang out long enough to figure out how to get SES and then they get paid a lot more and this is where we’ve seen a lot of abuse in terms of bonuses,” said McCaskill.

She also expressed concern with how TSA treats whistleblowers – employees who call attention to issues within in the Administration – citing a report in which a TSA whistleblower’s lawsuit took ten years to go through the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court found in his favor, but in that time he was passed over for promotions.

“TSA said, ‘Well we can’t speculate how much he would have been promoted in ten years,’” said McCaskill. “They put him back at his other job and frankly he’s still getting passed over to this day.”

A TSA official said he would review how the agency compares to other Homeland Security agencies in whistleblower complaints and retaliation complaints.

(Missourinet) – A former employee of the University of Missouri’s Southwest Research Center pleaded guilty Monday to embezzling $716,665 from the University over a nine-year period.

Carla Rathmann of Mount Vernon pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of credit card fraud. Tammy Dickinson, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, said Rathmann faces up to 30 years in federal prison without parole.

Rathmann, 54, was fired in September after a new superintendent at the Center became suspicious of her financial activities and her unwillingness to share financial information with him. After noting she was making personal transactions using her university credit card, she was fired and an internal investigation began. The Highway Patrol and FBI later became involved.

Rathmann admitted to submitting fake and fraudulent invoices to the university and to using her university card for about $146,144 in personal expenses.

The University says its insurance carrier is expected to reimburse about $650,000.

Rathmann created three fake companies that were registered with the Secretary of State’s Office, listing her or her husband as the owners, but those companies never made any products or performed any services. She then submitted invoices from those companies to the university. She often then approved the invoices herself and deposited the checks from the university into her personal bank account. Those payments added up to $570,521.

Also on Monday the University released the findings of an internal audit of the Research Center. It proposed several changes within the College of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources, in response to issues the university says kept Rathmann’s activities from being caught.

Those include obtaining pre-approvals for all CAFNR purchase orders; mandatory fiscal training and annual financial certifications for all CAFNR supervisors; requiring quarterly financial reviews for all CAFNR divisions and departments; and performing on-site visits to inspect financial processes and transactions for all remote locations, such as the Research Center.

The university says other factors that contributed to the fraud not being detected included limited staffing in a remote location; lack of an on-site superintendent for extended periods; weak internal controls; and a failure to follow university policies.

The university notes Rathmann’s former immediate supervisors have retired.

(Missourinet) – A highway maintenance and construction project is underway that is expected to have a major impact on Interstate 70 traffic this summer. Work to repair the eastbound and westbound I-70 bridges over the Lamine River west of Boonville began Tuesday. Patty Lemongelli with the Missouri Department of Transportation says overnight closures are occurring at the bridge.

“Probably not real big in terms of scale and scope of work but as far as impact, pretty big,” said Lemongelli. “This is what I would call just some major maintenance in order to preserve these bridges to last another 25 years or so.”

Motorists will encounter nightly lane closures on and near the bridge from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m. until early July. One lane of I-70 in each direction will be open at all times. Contractors will be working under the bridge and will be building crossovers for use later this summer, when the work will require full bridge closures.

The full closures will eventually reduce I-70 traffic to one lane in each direction continuously. Work requiring full bridge closures and head-to-head traffic on I-70 will not start until after the Fourth of July and will be completed before Labor Day. The entire project is scheduled for completion in November.

The Department encourages motorists to follow the “zipper merge” concept. When traffic is slowed or stopped, the zipper merge involves motorists using both lanes of traffic until they reach the point where the lane is closed, then take turns with other drivers to safely and smoothly ease into the remaining lane. Department officials say the overall length of the traffic backup is reduced by 40-50-percent when drivers choose this form of merging.

(Missourinet) – Some Missouri utility companies have aging infrastructure that needs to be replaced according to State Senator Ed Emery (R-Lamar). A Senate interim committee he’s chairing will begin soon to studing regulations and ratemaking of electric, water, sewer and gas utilities in other states.

“The natural gas industry has pipes in the ground that are decades old. We know that in the water industry, we have pipes in the ground that are over 100 years old. Some of it is still wooden pipe. There are a lot of possible infrastructure problems that lie around out there,” said Emery. “The question is how can we balance that infrastructure maintenance with the cost of energy and utilities, whether it’s water, natural gas, electricity or sewer? That’s the challenge.”

Upon review, the panel will make recommendations for legislation to deal with how utility companies are regulated and how they are allowed to charge consumers.

Some proposed regulation changes were offered this year, but didn’t make it through the Senate. Senator Gary Romine (R-Farmington) led filibusters to block the measures, saying they would have increased consumer rates and calling for more oversight of utility companies.

Emery says utility company profits don’t always accurately reflect the overall picture of utilities in Missouri.

“There are numbers that, if you just look at that number, they’re not fully reflective of what happens in the operational environment or what happens in the Wall Street environment when companies have to take on debt or are currently managing debt and how much that costs the customers,” said Emery.

Romine will be serving on the committee, along with Senators Ryan Silvey (R-Kansas City), Jason Holsman (D-Kansas City), Gina Walsh (D-St. Louis) and Jeanie Riddle (R-Mokane).

The committee must issue its recommendations by the end of the year.

(Missourinet) – The Missouri House twice this year killed attempts to legalize medical marijuana. A measure with the same aim could appear on the November ballot. It’s backed by a group called New Approach Missouri. Spokesman Jack Cardetti says enough signatures were collected, but they must still be reviewed for verification by the Missouri Secretary of State’s office.

“We thought the legislature was probably still a few years off from passing this,” said Cardetti. “Their voters and their constituents are far ahead of where the legislators are on this issue at this point. To basically tell cancer patients or epilepsy patients that we need to hold off and wait for three or four more years until the legislature passes it, we didn’t think that was fair.”

The measure would allow doctors to approve the drug for use by cancer, epilepsy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, and spinal cord injury patients. There are 24 states that have medical marijuana laws.

Cardetti says its proposal puts patients first. He says the group’s effort is not to try to legalize marijuana for recreational use, like some opponents might say.

“If people are opposed to this, they’re certainly not opposed to it on the basis of what’s best for patients and what’s best for the doctors. Ours is what puts those people back in charge of the medical decisions,” said Cardetti.

The measure includes safeguards so that patients prescribed the drug can’t sell it on the black or grey markets. Cardetti says a seed-to-sale computerized tracking system would be included and the Missouri Department of Health would have access to it.

Under the proposal, public use and driving under the influence of medical marijuana would be prohibited.

It includes a 4% tax on marijuana to help fund veteran healthcare services. The State Auditor’s office estimates that the tax could generate about $20 million annually.

(Missourinet) – Five years after an EF-5 tornado devastated Joplin the National Weather Service is still learning from that storm.

The storm that spawned that tornado, which left a damage path up to a mile wide through Joplin and killed 161 people, seemed much less dangerous early on, Meteorologist Andy Boxell recalls.

“We knew that we had a good setup for severe weather,” Boxell told Missourinet, “but at the time it appeared that very large hail was going to be the primary threat with that.”

“We had a series of storm interactions – various mergers of different thunderstorms that occurred – and those likely combined in some way – we’re really not entirely clear how – to take what was a severe thunderstorm and turned it into really the monster that became the Joplin tornado,” said Boxell.

The Weather service has never stopped studying that storm, hoping to learn information that can help it issue potentially life-saving information to the public about future severe weather.

“Tornadoes of that strength just don’t happen but once every couple of years in many cases, and each one is very unique,” said Boxell. “We had a very rare event in terms of strength, and then unfortunately that occurred in an area that was highly populated and resulted in the incredible impacts that we saw.

Boxell said there are two things about severe weather he hopes the public learns from Joplin.
One is that even without a tornado, a severe thunderstorm still poses a threat to life and property.

“When you think about a thunderstorm that’s producing winds in excess of 70 or 80 miles per hour, maybe baseball or even softball-sized hail, even if there isn’t a tornado associated with it that’s still an incredibly dangerous situation to be in and so we encourage folks to take those severe thunderstorm warnings just as seriously as they would a tornado warning,” said Boxell.

The other thing is that large, destructive tornadoes like that in Joplin don’t always occur as part of a severe weather outbreak.

“Joplin was not a severe weather outbreak. It was really a singular, severe thunderstorm that produced an incredible amount of destruction, and so just because we’re not expecting a severe weather outbreak doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have those ingredients come together for one or two particular storms to create an incredible amount of distruction,” said Boxell.

(Missourinet) – The state legislature in the session that ended earlier this month passed two measures meant to fight human trafficking, but that fight won’t stop there.

Representative Elijah Haahr (R-Springfield) chaired a task force on human trafficking that identified several things Missouri can do to fight trafficking, which has been a growing problem in the state.

The legislature passed measures that let trafficking victims participate in a state program to hide their addresses, to help them hide from abductors; and that criminalize advertising sex with trafficking victims.

Haahr says another effort will be more budgetary.

“One of the problems with bringing somebody out of the trafficking industry is that it takes, most people say, two years of them being completely taken care of before they’re ready to reenter the work force, become a normal citizen like we are, because they’ve had such a difficult journey,” said Haahr. “That’s very expensive and very hard to do.”

So, Haahr says, there will be an effort to free up money in the state budget to go to homes that support victims.

Haahr says legislation could also be considered to expunge prior prostitution convictions for trafficking victims, to help them find employment after escaping.

“A lot of times if you have a trafficking victim that comes out of that, if they have four or five prostitution convictions there’s no way for them to go get employment or get on with their life. We’re looking at what other states have done for potential solutions on that as well,” said Haahr.

Another recommendation is that the national trafficking hotline be posted at workplaces – something Haahr says most states already recommend or require.

Filing of bills for the next session of the General Assembly begins December 1.