SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California and 15 other states filed a lawsuit Monday against President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration to fund a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
President Trump during Friday’s emergency wall declaration -White House courtesy photo
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra released a statement Monday saying the suit alleges the Trump administration’s action violates the Constitution.
“President Trump treats the rule of law with utter contempt,” Becerra said. “He knows there is no border crisis, he knows his emergency declaration is unwarranted, and he admits that he will likely lose this case in court.”
Joining California in filing the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Virginia.
Trump declared a national emergency to fulfill his promise of completing the wall.
The move allows the president to bypass Congress to use money from the Pentagon and other budgets.
California has repeatedly challenged Trump in court.
“President Trump is manufacturing a crisis and declaring a made-up ‘national emergency’ in order to seize power and undermine the Constitution,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement. “This ’emergency’ is a national disgrace.”
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Topeka police say a plaque honoring a civil rights icon has been stolen from a Topeka bridge.
Thurgood Marshall -photo courtesy Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site
Police say the plaque was taken from a bridge named for Ken Marshall, the first black person elected to the Kansas Legislature from Topeka. The report was received Saturday but it’s unclear when the plaque was stolen.
Topeka police spokeswoman Gretchen Koenen said the police report said the plaque was taken from the Ken Marshall bridge, where a similar plaque was stolen in August 2018.
However, civil rights activist Sonny Scroggins says he reported Saturday that the plaque was taken from a bridge named to honor former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall
And a plaque designating the former Sumner Elementary School as a National Historic Landmark was stolen in 2012.
CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY– The Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) and the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office are investigating a fatal shooting that occurred Sunday night at a residence near Peru, Kansas.
Image courtesy KBI
According to a KBI media release, the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office requested KBI assistance Sunday at approximately 6:30 p.m. Special agents responded to the scene to assist.
Preliminary information indicates that on Sunday, Feb. 17 at approximately 6:15 p.m., the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office received a call that a man had been shot. When they responded to the residence at 863 Road 26 in Sedan, Kan., deputies found a male gunshot victim inside the home. EMS rendered aid to the man and transported him to the Sedan City Hospital where he was pronounced dead. He has been identified as 46-year-old Joe Corman, of Peru, Kan.
Authorities quickly identified and located a shooting suspect. Sheriff’s deputies arrested Travis W. Dickson, 43, at approximately 7:10 p.m. Sunday at his home in Niotaze, Kan., and booked him into the Chautauqua County Jail for driving under the influence. On Monday, a first-degree murder charge was filed against Dickson.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — University of Missouri officials say a student on the Columbia campus has active tuberculosis and may have infected other people.
CDC image
The school announced Monday that the Boone County health department is working with university health officials to determine whether other students and staff need testing.
Privacy laws prohibit the release of any information about the student.
The ill student left campus voluntarily. Only students with active infections can spread the disease to other through close contact.
So far this year, six cases of active tuberculosis have been reported in Missouri.
Before Laura Kelly took over as governor, the Kansas Department for Children and Families overhauled which private companies would manage its child welfare system, and how the department would oversee their work.
Gov. Laura Kelly, left, and Department for Children and Families Secretary Laura Howard announce they are canceling grants for family preservation services and renegotiating foster care grants. JIM MCLEAN / KANSAS NEWS SERVICE
Kelly put the brakes on that whole plan in December.
Last week she announced she’d be rolling back major parts of the changes. She canceled grants with two companies and said the state would renegotiate grants with three companies.
The main child welfare programs that DCF outsources fall into two categories: services to kids who have been removed from their homes, and programs aimed to help keep kids safely with their families.
The grants for that family preservation have been scrapped entirely. DCF Secretary Laura Howard said she had concerns about how they were awarded. One company received three regions despite not bidding on one of the regions, and receiving far lower scores in the other two regions than any other company reviewed by the agency.
The Kansas City Star reported Wednesday that that company was Eckerd Connects and that it received the grants because it had underbid its competitors.
Howard said DCF will change the family preservation grants — mostly to take advantage of federal funding from the Family First Preservation Services Act — and put out a new call for applicants.
She said many bidders “just didn’t come to the table” because the grant expectations were higher than was feasible with the amount of money DCF was looking to spend.
“We do need to align outcomes and money,” she said.
In the meantime, the two current family preservation contractors, KVC Kansas and St. Francis Community Services, will have their contracts extended by six months to the end of 2019.
Howard said she didn’t see the same mismatch of grants being awarded to low-scoring applicants on the foster care side. So those grants will just be renegotiated, not scrapped and rebid. DCF is still extending the current foster care contracts — also with KVC and St. Francis — but only by three months.
Bringing in oversight
When the new grant system was announced, then-DCF Secretary Gina Meier-Hummel promised it would improve accountability and oversight. She said it would also offer more transparency into who was tasked with taking care of kids, and how.
But many lawmakers and child welfare advocates don’t think she delivered.
Rather than going through a contract bid process with the Department of Administration — which has previously evaluated companies’ bids, scored them, and awarded contracts — DCF’s new grant process allowed them to pick the companies in-house without that oversight.
The idea was to let the department that knew child welfare best pick the best child welfare providers.
Instead, foster care watchers were flummoxed when grants were awarded to Eckerd Connects. It had many problems familiar to Kansas, including kids sleeping in offices and bouncing from home to home, in its Florida foster care operations. Child welfare advocates were even more perplexed when the Star revealed Eckerd got the grants despite low scores.
“There needs to be a full accounting,” said Benet Magnuson, head of the nonprofit advocacy organization Kansas Appleseed. “I’m encouraged to see the governor seems determined to shine a light on what happened, and why.”
Kelly and Howard are bringing the Department of Administration back into the mix. That department, not DCF, will put out the call for new family preservation providers. And representatives from that department will join DCF staff during renegotiations of the foster care grants.
Why does it matter?
The state is obligated to provide care and services to foster kids in its custody, even when it has outsourced those responsibilities to private companies. Those services aren’t supposed to disappear or get delayed because of who’s handling them.
The grant system proposed by the previous DCF administration was meant to give DCF more control over the companies it was paying to meet care for children. It was also intended to bring more companies to the table with the hope that more players would mean more resources, more ideas, and better outcomes.
The new system would also mean multiple changes at once — to which companies handled foster care and family preservation, as well as which providers would be responsible for various regions of Kansas. Transitions are chaotic, raising fears about what that upheaval would mean for children already in crisis.
Child welfare advocates are quick to add that that doesn’t mean changes should never be made. In a privatized system, DCF’s ability to reduce the role of or outright drop a private company is one of its tools to make sure that a company delivers on its obligations to kids.
And some were hoping for change, even if it did mean disruption.
Some foster parents are frustrated that they can’t get the services they need from current contractors. Though some were encouraged that Kelly’s administration was taking a hard look at who had been awarded grants, putting the grants on pause left them in limbo about whether changes would be made.
Many advocates, lawmakers and other child welfare observers questioned the necessity of so much transition at once — and whether the changes would actually make foster kids’ experiences in the system any better.
Joni Hiatt, director of Kansas programs for the foster care advocacy group FosterAdopt Connect, says she wasn’t surprised by reports that Eckerd had been chosen over groups that were deemed more qualified by the teams who reviewed family preservation proposals.
“To find out that this was how these contracts were chosen,” she said, “that’s so disappointing in so many ways.”
Putting the grants on hold left foster and birth parents in regions where new companies had been awarded grants in a holding pattern. They had to wait to see if they would have the same company handling their kids’ cases, or if it would change.
With the Kelly administration’s decision to extend out the current contracts for a little while longer, and renegotiate foster care and rebid family preservation, many are hopeful for better outcomes. But that process will take time.
“Children, their birth families, foster and adoptive parents,” Hiatt said, “they’re going to have to wait that much longer to access quality services and promised accountability.”
DOUGLAS COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating a scam.
According to a social media report from police in Lawrence, individuals have received packages via UPS that request that they serve as a “secret shopper”.
The package includes two letters and a check for $2,900.
The victims are instructed to cash the check, keep $500 as commission, purchase $2,400 in Walmart gift cards, and then send the gift cards to a Mr. Knower.
“This is a scam. The check will bounce and you will owe your bank $2,900.”
Police reminded, “if it is too good to be true, then it probably is.”
It’s been a tough winter for farmers, especially for beef and dairy producers. Extreme weather across a good chunk of the nation have resulted in some excessive livestock deaths. Ranchers who have experienced those losses may be eligible to recover some of those losses, thanks to the Livestock Indemnity Program.
A Drovers article says the program provides needed benefits to eligible livestock producers who suffer the deaths of livestock outside the normal range of mortality, due to conditions like adverse weather, disease, and predator attacks. Eligible losses don’t automatically trigger payments. Livestock owners must provide evidence of such losses to the Farm Service Agency. To qualify for program benefits, livestock must have died in excess of normal mortality rates as a direct result of eligible loss conditions, such as weather or predators.
Livestock farmers also qualify for the benefit if livestock were injured due to an eligible loss condition and were sold at a reduced price because of that injury. If death losses occur, producers are reminded to record the date, take pictures, and report it directly to the Farm Service Agency.
The U.S. and China will continue talks this week that will hopefully lead to an end to the trade war between the two economic superpowers. A Reuters article says sources from both sides feel the recent negotiations kept things moving forward. The Trump Administration still seems committed to the March 1 deadline to reach a deal or raise tariffs on more Chinese imports.
President Donald Trump had said recently that he’s “reluctantly willing to let the target date slide.” The recent talks focused on agriculture, property rights, technology, non-tariff barriers, and currency. Chinese President Xi Jinping met Friday with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin after a full week of talks that included lower-level officials.
If the two sides don’t’ reach a deal and the deadline isn’t extended, tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports will rise from 10 percent to 25 percent. After the conclusion of talks on Thursday, which included a banquet for officials, Mnuchin said on Twitter that he and Lighthizer held “productive meetings with President Xi’s top economic adviser.” Lighthizer says they’ve made good progress on important and difficult issues. While there’s additional work to do, Lighthizer describes U.S. officials as hopeful.
Kansas Representative of the 113th District Greg Lewis announced his resignation from the Legislature effective Friday, February 22nd, 2019. Lewis is a farmer and cattle rancher from St. John.
In a media release, Lewis wrote: To the people of the 113th District, I share with you below what I just shared on the House floor in Topeka:
What I’m about to share I do so only that it may in some way be an encouragement to you. Proverbs 19:21 says “Many are the plans of a man’s heart but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” That certainly speaks of where my heart was Christmas Morning 2018 . . .
The afternoon of Christmas Eve, Susan, myself and our golden retriever, Zoee departed for Kansas City to spend Christmas with our son.
Zoee & I went for our morning walk on Christmas. After returning upstairs I began having problems with my vision, became lightheaded and unstable on my feet.
I told Susan what was going on and that I was headed downstairs while I could still get there on my own. Susan came down and I told her I didn’t know what was happening but I thought we should go to a medical facility. Susan called our son. We went by and picked him up and he told us which hospital to go to due to a short wait time. It was a God thing that we ended up at that medical facility which turned out to be a trauma center for strokes, which also means they have a good neurological team. They thought I was having a stroke but after an MRI, it showed I had a mass on the right side of my brain.
Christmas Day as I sat in the middle of Kansas City at a major medical facility, and thanks to telemedicine that the legislature had just worked on, I found myself speaking to a doctor in Denver, CO. From time to time we do get some things right in the Legislature.
This mass turned out to be a glioblastoma, high grade level IV, which is a cancerous brain tumor that grows exponentially . . . But that is OK. I know this tumor cannot defeat my God or His plan of salvation for me and you.
At this point, I have had 3 craniotomies and am currently taking chemotherapy and radiation.
Philippians 4:7 talks about a peace that transcends all understanding. I can testify to this truth. God has granted me a great peace with all that has occurred and at times even a JOY which I know comes from my relationship with Him.
My parting advice to you is to enjoy each day, enjoy your family, your friends, your fellow legislators. . . but do not take yourself too seriously.
Serve your District with a servant’s heart.
This is the House of Representatives.
This is not the house of self Interest.
This is not the house of special interest.
This is the People’s House; long may it serve the People and this Great State of Kansas.
It has been an honor to have known and worked with many of you. Though being a legislator was never on my bucket list, reflecting back, this has been a great honor and experience, one which I am grateful for. Susan and I wish to thank all of you for the many phone calls, cards, emails, texts, visits, even help moving offices. But we especially want to thank you for your prayers.
It has become clearly apparent to me that I cannot represent & serve my District and the people of my District at the level they so deserve. Therefore, I am tendering my resignation as State Representative of the 113th Kansas House District effective Friday, February 22nd.
And now to the people of the 113th District- it has been an unexpected journey but a true pleasure to serve you and our rural interests. I hope to pass the torch on to another like-minded servant willing to stand up for our rural way of life and carry on the legacy we have built for our community and our children.
Thank you for the honor to serve you. Susan and I will be forever grateful.
SARCOXIE, Mo. (AP) — Some Sarcoxie veterans are halfway to their goal of raising $22,000 to renovate the town’s Veterans Memorial.
image courtesy city of Sarcoxie
The memorial, dedicated in September 1997, is on the southwest Missouri town’s square, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Cole Cummins, a Vietnam veteran, created a design rendering for the renovation.
The design has the original monument surrounded by eight monoliths that will feature plaques of veterans from all wars. Flags for the five military branches, the American flag and a prisoner-of-war flag will be displayed.
Sidewalks will connect the original structure with the new additions and offer easier accessibility. Other features include a granite bench and vegetation around the monument.
Cummins said the group hopes to break ground in the spring.
The U.S. and China will continue talks this week that will hopefully lead to an end to the trade war between the two economic superpowers. A Reuters article says sources from both sides feel the recent negotiations kept things moving forward. The Trump Administration still seems committed to the March 1 deadline to reach a deal or raise tariffs on more Chinese imports.
