KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Hall of Fame quarterback and broadcaster Len Dawson will be honored with the Lamar Hunt Award for Professional Football at the 101 Awards gala on Saturday.
The award was created in 2007 to honor the life and legacy of the Chiefs founder. It goes to an individual or group that has played a role in shaping the NFL.
Dawson led the Chiefs to its only Super Bowl championship and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1987. He began broadcasting Chiefs games in 1985, and in 2012 was awarded the hall’s Pete Rozelle Award for radio and television contributions.
Previous winners include The Foolish Club, the name taken on by the eight original AFL owners; coaches Tony Dungy and Don Shula; quarterback Roger Staubach; and Monday Night Football.
Update: One Southbound lane is now open but traffic in the area is very slow. Please avoid it if possible.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The southbound lanes of Interstate 35 in Kansas City’s downtown loop are closed after a fiery accident involving a tractor-trailer truck.
The truck overturned and erupted in flames about 7 a.m. Tuesday near the Cambridge Circle exit. The interstate is expected to be closed for several hours while the scene is investigated and repaired.
Missouri transportation officials say the tractor-trailer was hauling heavy rock and some of the rock was thrown out of the vehicle. The driver was taken to the hospital. The extent of his injuries was not immediately known.
The northbound lanes were briefly closed to pick up debris but those lanes are now open.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Eric Holder says state attorneys general are not obligated to defend laws in their states banning same sex-marriage if they don’t believe in them.
Holder made the remarks Tuesday at a winter meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General.
He says decisions not to defend state laws should not be steeped in political disagreements and instead but “must be reserved only for exceptional circumstances.” But Holder says “we must be suspicious of legal classifications based solely on sexual orientation” and that upholding equal rights is an important principle.
Democratic attorneys general in five states — Virginia, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and Nevada — have declined to defend same-sex marriage bans against lawsuits filed by gay couples
(AP) — Missouri corrections officials say they will use a lethal drug provided by a new supplier in the state’s fourth execution in four months.
Convicted killer Michael Taylor is scheduled to die at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. Several court appeals have been filed seeking to spare his life, and Gov. Jay Nixon is weighing a clemency request.
Taylor’s attorneys are questioning Missouri’s use of the new, unnamed compounding pharmacy to provide the pentobarbital for his execution. They also allege that the state executes men before appeals are complete, and say Taylor’s trial attorney was ineffective.
Taylor and Roderick Nunley were convicted of abducting 15-year-old Ann Harrison as she waited for a Kansas City school bus in 1989, then raping and killing her. Nunley is also on death row.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A plan to build a commuter rail system in Kansas City has received a boost with a new option agreement for Jackson County to buy an important rail corridor.
Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders called the memorandum of understanding between the county and Union Pacific Railroad Co. the most significant milestone to date in the effort to connect Kansas City with its eastern suburbs by rail.
He says the agreement makes the rail plan a real possibility.
The Kansas City Star reports the agreement would allow the county to buy two pieces of unused rail corridor totaling 19 miles. The price for both pieces would total $59.9 million, or about half of what UP had initially asked for the property at the start of nearly two years of negotiations.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Stephens College has received a $15 million donation, the largest gift in the central Missouri school’s history.
The Columbia Daily Tribune reports the $15 million gift was from an anonymous donor and isn’t tied to a particular program or purpose.
Stephens President Dianne Lynch will make recommendations to the trustees about where the dollars should go. Lynch says the money isn’t being treated as replacement dollars, and the funding “will shape Stephens College into its next century.”
The second-largest gift the college received in its 180-year history was a $3 million donation in 2006 from Carolyn Boone and her late husband, Jack. That money was used to fund the final phase of Lela Raney Wood Hall renovations, and the administrative third floor is named in Carolyn Boone’s honor.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Sam Graves (MO-06), Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, released the following statement on the Office of the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) report on the impact of the health care law on small business health care plans:
“Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office provided economic data that echoed what many small businesses have been telling us – that the health law is killing jobs and harming the economy. The bad news keeps mounting and our nation’s best job creators are paying the price. Also this month, the National Small Business Association released a detailed report that the overwhelming majority of small companies would suffer health insurance cost increases, and now the federal government’s CMS agrees.
“The Obama administration’s long delay of this CMS report is consistent with the rest of the law – behind schedule and bad news for small business. The fact that two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see premium increases because of the health law is devastating news. This is one more in a long line of broken promises from President Obama and Washington Democrats.”
The 2011 Budget Control Act mandated that this report be completed 90 days after enactment of that law. However, two years later, the report was posted by the Obama administration late on Friday, February 21, 2014.
Ken McCauley, a Doniphan County farmer, said he doesn’t see the sense in building a 350 mile canal or aqueduct to carry water from the Missouri River to western Kansas so that farmers there can continue to irrigate corn after they have depleted the Ogallala Aquifer. The Kansas Water Office is helping to pay to update a feasibility study of the water transfer project. In 1982, the project was estimated to cost more than $4 billion.-Photo by Trevor Graff
By Trevor Graff
KHI News Service
DONIPHAN COUNTY — Ken McCauley parked his Chevy pickup in the middle of a dirt road overlooking some of the world’s best corn growing acreage.
He examined a creek bed that was flanked by a narrow strip of woods and sloping hills covered with stubble from last year’s crop.
McCauley said his family has farmed here six generations. The 4,600-acre operation includes corn and soybean production.
“They picked a good place to stop,” McCauley said of his ancestors.
But it wasn’t family history or 220 bushels-per-acre corn that was the hot topic this particular day on this particular piece of Missouri River bottomland.
“I’ve said since I was a kid that we’d be fighting over water,” McCauley said. “When you start talking about an aqueduct, open water going across the state it’s enough to get everybody riled up in a hurry.”
Kansas officials are studying the possibility of an aqueduct, pipeline or canal that would carry water — perhaps across McCauley’s land — from the Missouri River at White Cloud to Ness County, 360 miles to the southwest.
McCauley’s farm is closer to St. Louis, Mo. or Cedar Rapids, Iowa than it is to Ness City.
Pumping uphill
The audacious project, if realized, would surpass in distance and cost the 336-mile Central Arizona Project, which is still considered the most expensive water transfer system ever built in the United States.
The Arizona project — started in 1973 — took 20 years and $4 billion to construct. It carries 1.5 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River to Tucson and irrigates about 1 million acres of farmland. The federal government paid for it.
An earlier U.S. Corps of Engineers study looking at the feasibility of tapping the Missouri River to water western Kansas estimated it would cost $4.4 billion to build a system and about $475 million a year to operate it. Those were 1982 estimates.
McCauley said he and others he knows consider the idea of moving massive quantities of water uphill across the state a bad one and he doesn’t understand why western Kansas farmers can’t find better solutions to their water problems.
But the part of Kansas where McCauley lives gets about 35 inches of rainfall a year, enough most years to grow corn without irrigation.
In Ness County, on the High Plains, average annual rainfall is 22 inches and that diminishes as you move west.
Irrigation from the Ogallala Aquifer is what has sustained corn and other water-gulping crops in western Kansas and other portions of the Great Plains for more than 60 years — but the end is in sight for what some have called “water mining.”
“We’re looking at about 50 years to make some kind of changes in the way agriculture is done out there,” said Prof. James Sherow, an environmental historian at Kansas State University who wrote a 1990 book about the history of water use in the Arkansas River Valley.
“In other words, thinking about recapitalization and what new forms of agriculture need to take the place of this current one once the water situation no longer supports what’s going on today.”
Since the invention of center-pivot irrigation in the late 1940s, Kansas farmers have been drawing water from the aquifer far more rapidly than it is naturally recharged.
In some areas, the Ogallala, which is part of the larger High Plains Aquifer, can regain four to six inches of water a year. But that natural recharging falls well short of replacing what is being siphoned out of the ancient underground reservoir.
From 1996 to 2012, the average level of the aquifer in Kansas dropped 14 feet, according to the Kansas Geological Survey — and average of 9.33 inches per year. It dropped more than 51 inches in 2012 alone.
Scientists project that it would take more than 100,000 years to recharge some parts of the Ogallala that for practical purposes already have been tapped out.
Without the bounty of the Ogallala, western Kansas fields would revert to producing the relatively paltry yields of dry land farming and the natural aridity that prompted 19th century geographers to label it part of the Great American Desert — hence the strong interest in keeping the spigot on.
Others eye the Missouri
GMD No. 3 isn’t the only western entity with a covetous eye on the Missouri River.
The U.S. Department of the Interior in 2012 released a study of future water needs in the Colorado River Basin, which includes two Mexican and seven U.S. states, and concluded there wouldn’t be enough.
One of the proposed solutions was a pipeline from the Missouri River to help supply the Colorado Front Range, including Denver, which happens to be the largest city in the Missouri River Basin
But given the history of water struggles in the western U.S., no one can imagine major diversions from the Missouri could occur without a fight.
Shortly after the Kansas aqueduct idea was revived for discussion, Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri responded with threats of litigation.
Kansas water officials say they haven’t started talking about it with their counterparts in Missouri or the several other states that bank North America’s longest stream.
“We haven’t had an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with our downstream neighbors,” said Tracy Streeter, director of the Kansas Water Office. “I’d anticipate that their first move would be negative. I’d like to think that we could explain what we’re talking about and maybe find some benefit.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) issued the following statement in response to U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Chuck Hagel’s announcement that he plans to drastically reduce the size of the U.S. Army to pre-WWII levels and eliminate attack aviation assets in the Army National Guard. Blunt serves as a member of both the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense:
“Missouri serves a vital role in the defense of our country. Our state is the home to hundreds of thousands of active duty servicemen and women, civilian defense employees, military families, and private sector contractors. I have concerns about Secretary Hagel’s announcement today and its potential to harm America’s military readiness. We must ensure that our men and women in uniform have the resources they need to protect the country, and we should not slash defense funding in a way that jeopardizes our national security.”
(AP) — Former Republican Sen. Kit Bond is attempting to make the case for Medicaid expansion to reluctant state lawmakers.
Bond is to be part of a panel discussion Tuesday about Medicaid expansion hosted by the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The former longtime U.S. senator has been hired by the chamber to lobby fellow Republicans in the state Capitol who have repeatedly defeated a Medicaid expansion.
States that expand Medicaid eligibility to more low-income adults can receive billions of dollars of additional federal money under the terms of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Bond has said the federal money is important to the financial survival of some hospitals.
Republican state lawmakers have expressed concerns about the potential long-term cost to the state.
