WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The alleged ringleader of a foiled plot to massacre Somali Muslims in southwest Kansas is appealing his conviction and prison sentence.

The attorney representing Patrick Stein on Monday filed a notice of appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Stein was among three militia members convicted of plotting in 2016 to blow up a mosque and apartments housing Somalis in Garden City.

A judge last month sentenced Stein to 30 years in prison for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and 10 years for conspiracy against civil rights. The sentences will run concurrently.

Stein will return to federal court on Feb. 22 for a change-of-plea hearing and sentencing in a separate indictment alleging possession of child pornography. The material was discovered during searches in the bomb case.

By STEPHEN KORANDA

Republican leaders in the Kansas Senate are forging ahead with plans to plow millions into tax relief that would largely benefit big business. Some Democrats and more moderate Republicans suspect it’s also a strategy to deprive the governor of the money to fund her priorities.

Carving out chunks of the state savings account now could send lawmakers scrambling to fund schools and other services with the cash that’s left when they’re knitting up the budget later this spring.

“When we get to the end of session, then we are stuck,” Democratic Rep. Cindy Holscher said.

Republicans say there’s urgency to tackling tax relief, and that the state can afford it.

The year started with a financial picture rosier than many forecasts in recent memory. After lawmakers in 2017 reversed the tax cuts then Gov. Sam Brownback had pushed for in 2012, Kansas has seen tax collections rebound. A revenue estimatefrom November showed the state would have $900 million in the bank at the end of the current fiscal year.

But, a bad monthly revenue report for January prompted Gov. Laura Kelly to reiterate her feeling that the state needs to be picky about what it spends money on.

“We must make wise, financial prudent choices to ensure the future is bright for our children,” Kelly said in a statement.

The governor said she favors investments in schools, roads, and fixing what she points to as the “damage done” during the Brownback years.

The Senate on Thursday approved a tax relief bill that the state department of revenue estimates would cost more than $400 million over three years. That includes around $190 million this year, cutting into that projected ending balance.

Democrats in the Senate, who all voted against the bill, said the state can’t give up the revenue while staring down a Kansas Supreme Court order to adequately fund schools.

“We can’t afford this unless we do something drastic to our budget,” Democratic Sen. Tom Holland said as a committee worked on the bill before it went to the full chamber. “We have to fund our schools.”

Sen. John Skubal was one of two Republicans who joined the Democrats in voting “no.” He criticized the bill for focusing too much on corporations.

“They have had tax breaks long enough,” Skubal said after the vote. “I think we need more money right now to take care of the core functions of government.”

Republican Senate President Susan Wagle said lawmakers don’t have to choose between tax relief and funding schools.

She calls the money in question a “windfall” — an unexpected boon to the state resulting from changes to the federal tax code.

“If we don’t pass this bill,” Wagle said during committee work on the plan, “Kansas individuals, families and businesses will all have a tax increase this year.

If lawmakers do nothing, the federal tax cuts passed in 2017 could result in some corporations owing more state taxes on foreign income and some individual Kansans would owe more because they would no longer be able to take itemized deductions.

Wagle said concerns about the cost of acting to let Kansas taxpayers keep that money may be overblown because staff aren’t fully confident in their estimate of the fiscal impact.

“It’s a shot in the dark,” she said.

The Senate president and other Republicans argue too that not providing the tax relief could be detrimental to Kansas if it prompts large companies to leave the state.

“Then we’re going to lose a bunch of jobs,” Sen. Julia Lynn said. “That’s my issue, pure and simple.”

Some lawmakers expect Kelly would veto the bill should it pass the House and make it to her desk. The governor has voiced strong opposition.

“I can’t imagine why anybody who was here in 2012 and lived through the Brownback tax cuts and the experiment would even consider voting for that bill,” Kelly told reporters. “It is a redo.”

At the same time Republicans are pursuing  tax relief, they’re also showing little interest in a Kelly’s idea to give the state more spending flexibility.

The governor has proposed refinancing the debt of the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System. Her proposal would stretch out the payoff schedule. That would lower the annual payments and free up money for other priorities, such as education or expanding health coverage through the state’s Medicaid program.

But ultimately it would add billions of dollars to the state’s pension liabilities.

“This whole budget is built on a house of cards,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning said of the proposal last month.

Since then, opinions from Republican leaders haven’t improved. The chairman of the House pension committee, Steven Johnson, believes the plan is likely dead in the water for this session.

Democrats agreed to spend $115 million to make up for a missed payment to KPERS. That legislation, passed with a unanimous vote in the Senate, is heading to the House.

The governor said Kansas can afford that payment now, but insists the state has to refinance its pension debt to keep the payoff schedule manageable in the long term.

“It really is a fiscally sound thing to do,” Kelly said.

Stephen Koranda is Statehouse reporter for the Kansas News Service. Follow him on Twitter @kprkoranda.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Budget negotiators will meet Monday to revive talks over border security issues that are central to legislation to prevent key parts of the government from shutting down on Saturday, but an air of pessimism remains after talks broke down over the weekend.

They collapsed over Democratic demands to limit the number of migrants authorities can detain, and the two sides remained separated over how much to spend on President Donald Trump’s promised border wall. A Friday midnight deadline is looming to prevent a second partial government shutdown.

Key negotiators plan to meet on Monday, Democratic and GOP aides say, but for now the mood is not hopeful.

Rising to the fore on Sunday was a related dispute over curbing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the federal agency that Republicans see as an emblem of tough immigration policies and Democrats accuse of often going too far.

Trump blamed Democrats in the migrant detention dispute, tweeting, “The Democrats do not want us to detain, or send back, criminal aliens! This is a brand new demand. Crazy!”

The fight over ICE detentions goes to the core of each party’s view on immigration. Republicans favor rigid enforcement of immigration laws and have little interest in easing them if Democrats refuse to fund the Mexican border wall. Democrats despise the proposed wall and, in return for border security funds, want to curb what they see as unnecessarily harsh enforcement by ICE.

People involved in the talks say Democrats have proposed limiting the number of immigrants here illegally who are caught inside the U.S. — not at the border — that the agency can detain. Republicans say they don’t want that cap to apply to immigrants caught committing crimes, but Democrats do.

Democrats say they proposed their cap to force ICE to concentrate its internal enforcement efforts on dangerous immigrants, not those who lack legal authority to be in the country but are productive and otherwise pose no threat. Democrats have proposed reducing the current number of beds ICE uses to detain immigrants here illegally from 40,520 to 35,520.

But within that limit, they’ve also proposed limiting to 16,500 the number for immigrants here illegally caught within the U.S., including criminals. Republicans want no caps on the number of immigrants who’ve committed crimes who can be held by ICE.

Trump used the dispute to cast Democrats as soft on criminals.

“I don’t think the Dems on the Border Committee are being allowed by their leaders to make a deal. They are offering very little money for the desperately needed Border Wall & now, out of the blue, want a cap on convicted violent felons to be held in detention!” Trump tweeted Sunday.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, in appearances on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and “Fox News Sunday,” said “you absolutely cannot” eliminate the possibility of another shutdown if a deal is not reached over the wall and other border matters. The White House had asked for $5.7 billion, a figure rejected by the Democratic-controlled House, and the mood among bargainers has soured, according to people familiar with the negotiations not authorized to speak publicly about private talks.

“You cannot take a shutdown off the table, and you cannot take $5.7 (billion) off the table,” Mulvaney told NBC, “but if you end up someplace in the middle, yeah, then what you probably see is the president say, ‘Yeah, OK, and I’ll go find the money someplace else.'”

A congressional deal seemed to stall even after Mulvaney convened a bipartisan group of lawmakers at Camp David, the presidential retreat in northern Maryland. While the two sides appeared close to clinching a deal late last week, significant gaps remain and momentum appears to have slowed. Though congressional Democratic aides asserted that the dispute had caused the talks to break off, it was initially unclear how damaging the rift was. Both sides are eager to resolve the long-running battle and avert a fresh closure of dozens of federal agencies that would begin next weekend if Congress doesn’t act by Friday.

“I think talks are stalled right now,” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said on “Fox News Sunday.” ”I’m not confident we’re going to get there.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who appeared on the same program, agreed: “We are not to the point where we can announce a deal.”

But Mulvaney did signal that the White House would prefer not to have a repeat of the last shutdown, which stretched more than a month, left more than 800,000 government workers without paychecks, forced a postponement of the State of the Union address and sent Trump’s poll numbers tumbling. As support in his own party began to splinter, Trump surrendered after the shutdown hit 35 days without getting money for the wall.

The president’s supporters have suggested that Trump could use executive powers to divert money from the federal budget for wall construction, though it was unclear if he would face challenges in Congress or the courts. One provision of the law lets the Defense Department provide support for counterdrug activities.

But declaring a national emergency remained an option, Mulvaney said, even though many in the administration have cooled on the prospect. A number of powerful Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have also warned against the move, believing it usurps power from Congress and could set a precedent for a future Democratic president to declare an emergency for a liberal political cause.

As most budget disputes go, differences over hundreds of millions of dollars are usually imperceptible and easily solved. But this battle more than most is driven by political symbolism — whether Trump will be able to claim he delivered on his long-running pledge to “build the wall” or newly empowered congressional Democrats’ ability to thwart him.

Predictably each side blamed the other for the stall in negotiations.

“We were, you know, progressing well,” Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” ”I thought we were tracking pretty good over the last week. And it just seems over the last 24 hours or so the goalposts have been moving from the Democrats.”

House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., countered by saying on the same show, “The numbers are all over the place.”

“I think the big problem here is this has become pretty much an ego negotiation,” Yarmuth added. “And this really isn’t over substance.”

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SALINE COUNTY— One person died in an accident just before 12:30p.m. Sunday in Saline County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2002 Kia Sportage driven by Erica E. Jones, 36, Sweet Springs, was northbound on MO 127 just north of 245 Road.

The vehicle began sliding on the slush covered road. It traveled off the left side of the road, struck a sign post, became airborne and overturned.

A passenger in the vehicle Sherri L. Jones, 55, Sweet Springs, was pronounced dead at the scene. Sweet Springs Ambulance transported Erica Jones to Fitzgibbon Hospital. They were not wearing seat belts, according to the MSHP.

JACKSON COUNTY —Law enforcement authorities are investigating a Kansas man on child sex allegations.

The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office started the investigation after allegations were reported to the Sheriff’s Office in November of 2018. The Sheriff’s Office served search warrants on Hackathorn’s Facebook and Snapchat accounts, according to Sheriff Tim Morse.

On Thursday, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office arrested Phillip James Hackathorn, 34, of Holton  on the Jackson County District Court warrant for indecent solicitation of a child and electronic solicitation of a child.

Bond on Hackathorn was set at $50,000. Hackathorn posted bond and was released, according to the sheriff.  Hackathorn is expected to make a court appearance later this month.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — The University of Missouri System is seeing an increase in freshman applications at three campuses this fall compared to last year, according to system officials.

Mun Choi, the system’s president, announced Thursday that freshman applications grew by nearly 6 percent at the Columbia campus, from 17,864 in fall 2018 to 18,878 in 2019. Choi said the university’s freshman deposits have increased by 37 percent from last year, the Columbia Missourian reported.

“That’s the result of us changing how we did some of admissions and how we contacted people earlier,” said MU Chancellor Alexander Cartwright. “So it’s all of those little things that add up to make a big difference.”

Cartwright credits the increase in part to the university’s admission office responding to applications 48 hours after being submitted. Cartwright also pointed to the office including scholarship and student aid information in admissions to encourage students to seek financial support early.

Choi reported hikes in freshman applications of nearly 14 percent at the Rolla campus and 1 percent in St. Louis. Missouri University of Science & Technology in Rolla saw freshman application numbers grow from 4,019 in 2018 to 4,654 in 2019. Meanwhile, the University of Missouri in St. Louis tallied 2,968 freshman applications this fall, up from 2,932 in 2018.

The Kansas City campus saw a 7 percent drop in applications, from 5,832 in 2018 to 4,989 in 2019.

The University of Missouri had experienced a steep drop in freshman application and enrollment numbers in 2016, right after protests and the resignation of administrators which many viewed as the culmination of years of racial tension at the Columbia campus.

Last year was the first time in several years that application numbers had begun to rise.

“I want to caution everyone that those numbers are going to experience some melt through the months ahead,” Choi said of the recently announced figures. “But, we’re in a very good spot.”

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas has trouble keeping road equipment operators from leaving for other, better-paying jobs — so much so that supervisors worry about being able to cobble together crews to clear snow after blizzards and to fill potholes quickly.

For Department of Transportation leaders, the 100 percent annual turnover rate among entry-level equipment operators signals a problem that requires an immediate solution. For new Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, the staffing woes are a prime example of the worse-than-expected problems she says she found as she was preparing to take office last month.

Like many funding questions, it’s a Rorschach test, viewed as more or less important based on an official’s overall philosophy of government.

Kelly says it’s part of an overarching message that state government might take years to recover from damage caused by past Republican tax-cutting policies. But some Republican legislators are skeptical that KDOT faces a crisis and think Kelly is overstating problems to push the GOP-controlled Legislature into higher spending.

“We probably have a lot of work to do, but is it in as bad a shape as she’s alleging? No,” Sen. Richard Hilderbrand, a conservative Galena Republican.

The conflicting agendas leave KDOT workers and supervisors with the daily chore of filling out crews to fix potholes, repair or replace signs, pick up trash and clear highways. KDOT says it needs almost 1,200 operators to drive trucks; 640 of the jobs are filled. In Topeka, supervisor Mike Daniel is supposed to have 12 workers and has seven, with three still training to operate equipment.

“It’s just a constant trying to catch up,” said Daniel, who has worked for KDOT for 36 years. “It has gotten progressively worse, probably, in the past five to eight years.”

Kansas has had a national reputation for good highways because of its commitment to big, multi-year transportation programs since the late 1980s.

The libertarian Reason Foundation has consistently rated the Kansas system as one of the nation’s best — ranking it 2nd in 2018. Republicans have cited its reports to counter criticism that GOP officials have allowed the state’s roads fall into disrepair.

Other ratings are not as generous. The American Society of Civil Engineers said in a report last year that Kansas had consistently kept 80 percent of its roads in good condition for two decades but still gave its highway system a C-minus grade, partly over funding concerns. There’s bipartisan agreement that funding for highway programs has been shorted too much over the past decade.

The state started a 10-year transportation program in 2010 meant to tackle safety issues and modernize bottlenecked stretches. But the program became “the Bank of KDOT,” with nearly $2.5 billion diverted to other parts of state government to close budget shortfalls, almost two-thirds of the amount in the last four years.

Legislators of all political philosophies have decried the continued diversion of transportation funds, and Kelly said while running for governor last year that the state had to stop the practice.

But to reach her top goals of boosting spending on public schools and expanding state Medicaid health coverage for the needy, she’s not proposing to end the siphoning off of highway funds immediately. Her proposed spending blueprint for the next fiscal year still diverts $369 million, and her stated goal is end the practice by 2023.

Kelly raised KDOT’s staffing as an issue even before taking office. Pay is a big issue. Other parts of state government have similar concerns: Prisons have trouble keeping uniformed officers even after special efforts to boost salaries, and wages are a long-standing sore point in the court system.

KDOT promises untrained equipment operators that they’ll get commercial driver’s licenses within two months, but it starts them in metro areas at $13.33 an hour. After three years, a senior equipment operator would earn a little more than $14 an hour.

The city of Topeka just bumped its starting pay for street maintenance workers by nearly $2 an hour, to $15. Daniel said area contractors will pay laborers — who don’t need a commercial driver’s license — from $15 to $18 an hour.

“I’m really worried about churning people like we’re churning them,” said interim Transportation Secretary Julie Lorenz. “We currently have stuff cobbled together, and that’s not where we want to be.”

Rep. J.R. Claeys, a conservative Salina Republican who was chairman of a House budget committee on transportation funding for four years, questioned whether the department needs as many equipment operators as it says.

“I drive Kansas interstates frequently, and I know that they are doing an excellent job, a. keeping the ditches mowed and b., keeping our roads clear and safe,” said Claeys.

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