SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — Springfield police are investigating the death of a man dropped off at an area hospital with gunshot wounds.

The Springfield News-Leader reports  33-year-old Matthew Cline died on Monday after a man took him to the emergency room. It’s unclear how many times he was shot.

No arrests have been reported.

Raleigh, N.C. – Public Policy Polling’s final polls, conducted over the weekend, for the Senate and Governor in Kansas found both of the races couldn’t be much closer.

Paul Davis leads Sam Brownback 46/45 and Greg Orman leads Pat Roberts 47/46. What’s interesting is that even though the top of the ticket is incredibly competitive, everything else in Kansas pretty much looks like a normal election- Secretary of State Kris Kobach has a 5 point advantage and beyond that the Republican candidates for down ballot offices lead by 11 points for Insurance Commissioner, 27 points for Attorney General, and 28 points for Treasurer, pretty normal sorts of numbers for elections in Kansas.

It continues to be Brownback and Roberts’ unique unpopularity that’s making their races so competitive. Brownback has a 37/54 approval spread, and Roberts’ is 34/54. Usually politicians with those kinds of approval ratings are doomed for reelection but Kansas’ deep red hue is still giving them a shot.

WARRENSBURG (AP) – The Missouri State Highway Patrol says a 28-year-old man has died after he crashed his truck into the back of a dump truck.

Troopers say John Stewart was pronounced dead Monday at the scene near Warrensburg on U.S. Route 50. They say his truck caught fire after responders removed him from it.

The 52-year-old dump truck driver suffered minor injuries. She sought her own medical treatment.

It’s unclear what caused the crash.

WARRENSBURG, Mo. (AP) — Prosecutors have charged a Johnson County commissioner with arson after they say he tried to burn down his own business.
KCTV-TV reports Commissioner Scott Sader was arrested on Oct. 31 and charged with second-degree arson. Police say he tried to burn down Scooter’s gas station in October 2013.

Authorities say surveillance footage from the store shows Sader alone in the building near where the fire started. They say flames broke out in multiple locations less than two minutes after Sader left.

Sader didn’t attend Monday’s commission meeting and he wasn’t available for comment when a reporter from the station went to his home.
The Johnson County presiding commissioner says there are no plans to take disciplinary action against Sader. He questioned the validity of the charge.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Republicans were expected to hold on to their sizable majorities in the Missouri House and Senate in Tuesday’s elections, but Democrats hoped to win enough seats to deny them veto-proof powers.
Republicans were seeking to retain supermajorities of at least two-thirds of the seats in each chamber, a threshold that allows them to override vetoes of Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon without having to get any support from Democratic lawmakers.

Half of the 34 Senate seats and all 163 House seats are up for election, though only a portion of those featured competitive races.
Before the voting even began, Republicans were assured of keeping a Senate majority because of their number of unopposed candidates and incumbents not up for re-election. In the House, Republicans were assured of holding at least one-third of the seats and Democrats one-quarter of the seats because of unopposed candidates.

It takes 18 Senate seats and 82 House seats for a political party to hold a majority. A two-thirds majority requires at least 23 Senate seats and 109 House seats. Republicans just barely exceeded those marks during the past year, controlling up 24 Senate seats and 110 House seats at any given time.

During the 2014 session, Republicans used their large majorities to cut income tax rates, lengthen the mandatory abortion waiting period and enact a training program for teachers to carry concealed guns in classrooms. They overrode Nixon’s vetoes in each case but never by a purely partisan vote, because they always picked up support from at least one Democratic lawmaker.

Republicans were hopeful that Tuesday’s elections would give them an even larger majority for the 2015 session, which would allow them more leeway to enact their agenda even if some GOP lawmakers were absent or disagreed on certain votes.

If Democrats are able to gain just a few seats, they could force Republicans to compromise more often in order to assure there is enough support to pass bills that are potential veto targets.

U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill had contributed $590,000 to the Missouri Democratic State Committee heading into the final week before election with the intent of helping to finance Democratic state legislative candidates. Other top Democratic officials, including Gov. Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster, also had contributed to the state party’s efforts.

JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – Missouri conservation officials say hunters took nearly 5,700 turkeys during fall firearms season, down about 200 from last year.

The season ran Oct. 1 through Oct. 31. The Conservation Department said Monday that Greene County had the highest number of turkeys checked at 165, followed closely by Franklin and St. Clair counties.

The agency also reported selling about 14,000 fall firearms turkey hunting permits this year. That’s a decline of 5 percent from last year.

Central Missouri saw an 8 percent increase in the number of turkeys checked. Most other regions recorded decreases from last year.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas political legend Bob Dole says that recent stops in his just-finished tour of the state have him thinking that U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts’ chances of winning re-election are “looking better.”

Dole told The Associated Press on Monday that he believes Roberts has picked up a little momentum and has been getting a good reception at recent events.

The 91-year-old former senator last week finished a months-long tour of all 105 Kansas counties and spoke by telephone from Washington. He was the GOP presidential nominee in 1996 and is a former U.S. Senate majority leader.

Dole made multiple campaign appearances for Roberts and Republican Gov. Sam Brownback.

Roberts is in a close race against independent candidate Greg Orman. The challenger told reporters Monday that he greatly respects Dole.

POTOSI (AP) – A 75-year-old man who was given the death penalty for killing his wife in a 1992 courthouse shooting rampage has died at a Missouri prison.

The state Department of Corrections on Monday said Kenneth Baumruk died of apparent natural causes late Friday at the Potosi Correctional Center in southeast Missouri.

Baumruk shot and killed his wife, Mary, at the St. Louis County courthouse in Clayton on May 5, 1992, as their divorce hearing was about to begin. He also wounded both of their lawyers, a security guard and a bailiff, and fired shots at the judge, three police officers and others.

Police returned fire, striking Baumruk nine times, including twice in the head.

Prosecutors said Baumruk had flown to Missouri from his home in Seattle with two handguns in his luggage.

By Jim McLean
and
Dave Ranney
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — Poverty is a political issue in Kansas.

Gov. Sam Brownback campaigned in 2010 on a platform that included as one of its main goals reducing childhood poverty. And since taking office, he has aggressively pursued that goal. But he’s done it his way.

Rather than putting millions more dollars into traditional public assistance programs, he has instituted policies that effectively limited access to them and instead steered would-be beneficiaries into welfare-to-work programs. The key to reducing poverty, he said, was getting people off the assistance rolls and into the workforce.

A Brownback commercial airing for his re-election campaign claims the strategy is working. It says that “welfare has been cut in half” by the governor’s welfare-to-work program.

The claim refers to a reduction in the number of Kansans enrolled in the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. According to the Kansas Department for Children and Families, TANF enrollment has fallen by 54 percent over the past four years, dropping from 38,963 in the 2011 budget year to 17,681 in the 2014 budget year.

Similarly, the number of low-income parents – single mothers, mostly – receiving monthly child care subsidy payments has dropped by 27 percent during the same four-year period.

“We’re seeing individuals moving out of poverty through employment,” said Theresa Freed, a DCF spokesperson.
Reducing the number of Kansans receiving public assistance isn’t the same thing as reducing poverty, said Shannon Cotsoradis, president and CEO of the advocacy group Kansas Action for Children. The recent KIDS COUNT report compiled by KAC shows that Kansas’ childhood poverty rate declined by 2 percent from 2012 to 2013. But other economic indicators showed more Kansas families struggling to make ends meet.

The percentage of Kansas children receiving free or reduced-price lunches at school is a good barometer, Cotsoradis said. In the 2010-2011 school year, about 47 percent of Kansas children qualified for free or subsidized lunches. Now, for the first time, more than 50 percent qualify.

“So here we have more kids relying on free and reduced school meals, and at the same time we’re seeing significant declines in the numbers of families that are accessing TANF and child care subsidies,” Cotsoradis said. “I don’t see how that’s good news. It means fewer poor people are receiving services that are meant to lift them out of poverty.”

Children are eligible for free school meals if they’re living in households with incomes below 130 percent of poverty and eligible for reduced-price meals if they’re in households with incomes between 131 percent and 185 percent of poverty.

Recently, the Brownback administration claimed in a DCF news release that its new welfare policies also had reduced poverty in the state.
Several days later the agency acknowledged it had made a mistake. The state’s poverty rate as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure remained essentially flat, inching up to 11.8 percent in 2013 from 11.5 percent the year before.

“Typically, when you’re look at a survey this size, anything under 1 percent is not statistically significant,” said Terri Friedline, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare who’s studied poverty statistics. “But that’s not to say it’s not meaningful, because three tenths of a percent is thousands of people.”

The Supplemental Poverty Measure uses a formula designed to calculate the effects that regional cost-of-living variances and state public assistance programs have on household incomes.

Phyllis Gilmore, secretary of DCF, said while the official numbers don’t yet show it, the administration’s policies are working to reduce poverty.

“Although we would like to see a dramatic decrease in poverty, we know that our efforts are effective,” Gilmore said in an email. “Every day, we hear from individuals who seek benefits and with the help of our employment services, they are finding jobs and achieving self-sufficiency.”

One doesn’t necessarily follow the other, said Annie McKay, executive director of the Kansas Center for Economic Growth, a nonpartisan think tank formed as a counter to conservative groups that lobby for lower taxes and smaller government.

Many of the jobs being filled by former welfare recipients pay wages that keep them in poverty, McKay said. She said more than 25 percent of working Kansans need some kind of help to pay for food, utilities, transportation and child care.

“If we continue to funnel Kansans into low-wage jobs, it’s not going to help them get ahead,” McKay said. “It’s not a path to prosperity, it’s a detour to poverty.”

Debbie Snapp, who runs the Catholic Social Service office in Dodge City, works with struggling families every day. She said most of those who need help have jobs.

“But they’re struggling because they’re working low-wage jobs, especially single moms,” Snapp said. “They’re still poor. They still can’t put enough food on the table. But instead of asking the state for help, they’re having to turn to charitable organizations like us.”

Jan Haberly oversees The Lord’s Diner, a Catholic Diocese of Wichita-sponsored program that each day prepares and serves 2,700 evening meals to the city’s homeless and low-income.

“All of our numbers are increasing,” she said. “We’ve been reaching out to more people, but even if we weren’t, our numbers are increasing. If there’s been a drop in poverty, we’re not reflecting it.”

Haberly said she’s long questioned the practice of using the federal poverty level to define whether someone is poor.

“You can be above 100 percent of poverty and still be poor,” she said. “So when there’s a report that says poverty is down, it may mean there aren’t as many people below 100 percent of poverty. But it doesn’t mean there are fewer poor people. We see all kinds of people – people and families – who are working but who are still poor.”

Jim McLean and Dave Ranney are reporters for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.