State News from the Wichita Eagle

This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series’ name comes from the state motto, Ad astra per aspera: To the stars through difficulties. “But I believe – and my own experience bears this out – that brains and money have a market value.” – Adelaide AmbroseRead more

A coalition of business groups will propose Kansas start a new program to help some illegal immigrants remain in the state so they can hold down jobs in agriculture and other industries with labor shortages, coalition representatives disclosed Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the Washington-based Immigration Policy Council called the proposal unprecedented and questioned whether the federal government would allow such a program, though she was sympathetic toward supporters’ goals. Utah has set up a guest-worker program, but it doesn’t take effect until 2013 and was part of a broader package of initiatives on immigration. The Kansas proposal also is notable because it complicates the debate over immigration issues in the home state of Kris Kobach, the secretary of state and a former law professor who helped draft tough laws against illegal immigration in Alabama and Arizona.Read more

New documents show that the Kansas Bioscience Authority has spent about $122,000 in public funds, nearly twice as much as previously reported, on legal fees for two former executives facing a criminal investigation.KBA attorney Tariq Abdullah said several pages had been inadvertently excluded from an electronic copy of legal billing records sent to The Eagle on Friday in response to a request filed under the Kansas Open Records Act. On Saturday, The Eagle reported that the authority has paid $53,671 for former chief executive officer Tom Thornton’s attorneys and expenses, and $10,197 for lawyers for Janice Katterhenry, the former chief financial and operating officer. Read more

This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series’ name comes from the state motto, “Ad astra per aspera: "To the stars through difficulties." Annie Diggs never had the chance to vote in a national election.She died in 1916, four years before U.S. women earned their right to vote.Read more

We’ve got a state insect, bird, song, animal and tree.Now comes a proposal for a state dog – the cairn terrier, the breed that played Toto in “The Wizard of Oz.”“Kansas has a state reptile, for goodness’ sakes,” said Brenda Moore of Augusta, obedience chairwoman with the South Central Kansas Kennel Club. Read more

Kansas celebrates its 151st birthday on Sunday.Over the next few days and weeks, Kansans will celebrate with a variety of events.Here are a few: FridayRead more

The former head of the Kansas Bioscience Authority misspent agency funds and destroyed documents on his computer that had been subpoenaed by a prosecutor investigating the agency, according to an in-depth audit of the state-funded authority.The audit, by the firm BKD LLP, found that Tom Thornton, the former KBA president, used public funds to fly to Cleveland for a job interview and that employees alleged that he engaged in inappropriate intimate relations in the KBA’s office with an employee who later became his wife.The report concluded that the couple’s conduct hurt office morale, but quoted a KBA contract lawyer’s analysis that their actions didn’t appear to violate state law because KBA employees are not technically state employees. Read more

Kansas welfare officials have eliminated or slashed food stamp benefits for hundreds of low-income, U.S.-born children whose parents are illegal immigrants. The cuts are the result of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services changing the way it counts household income when determining who is eligible for the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The Kansas City Star reported that families affected by the change are those that contain a mixture of legal citizens and illegal immigrants. While illegal immigrants are not eligible for the food assistance, U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants can be. Read more

Here are some of the major issues legislators will face in the session that begins Monday.AbortionAfter passing a package of anti-abortion laws last year, the Legislature might continue to chip away at Roe v. Wade by shortening the window for women to terminate a pregnancy. Two ideas on the table: ban or substantially restrict abortions after the fetal heartbeat becomes detectable, usually six to seven weeks; put a "personhood" amendment on the ballot that would define human life as beginning at fertilization. In the past two years, voters in Colorado and Mississippi rejected personhood amendments.Read more

Here’s a quick look at changes Gov. Sam Brownback plans to pursue in the legislative session that starts Monday.TaxesBrownback wants to reduce individual state income tax rates and zap some income tax exemptions and credits to create a “flatter, simpler, fairer” tax code. His administration has hushed any further details, saving specifics for his State of the State speech Wednesday night. Income tax is the state’s largest stream of revenue. Democrats and moderate Republicans urge caution, suggesting a reduction could translate to deeper cuts in state services that have already faced big cutbacks. Brownback says his proposal won’t significantly cut state revenue. Meanwhile, Senate President Steve Morris, a moderate Republican, has set up a tax study group that will analyze tax bills and make recommendations to the Senate, which blocked an income tax reduction bill last year.Read more

Kansas Republican presidential caucus participants should see a full ballot March 10.The deadline for candidates to qualify by paying the $10,000 filing fee is 5 p.m. Saturday. Kansas Republican Party executive director Clayton Barker said filing documents for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich arrived around the middle of December, and representatives for three other candidates have said their papers will be sent by special delivery and should arrive this Thursday or Friday in Kansas.Read more

Gov. Sam Brownback says the legislature shouldn’t try to tackle gambling during the 2012 legislative session because it has too many other heavy issues to deal with.“We have got a full agenda,” the governor said in an interview with The Eagle. “This is not the time really for us to address gaming issues.”Brownback’s agenda includes plans to change the state’s tax structure, overhaul the school finance formula and the state pension system, alter Medicaid and construct new water policies. Meanwhile, the legislature must tackle redistricting during an election year.Read more

“The high plains at first gave him an overpowering impression of emptiness. Never before had he beheld such a sky — the cosmic vault of blue appeared to occupy a good three-fourths of the world, making small and unimportant the scattered farm houses with their meager clumps of ragged trees and inevitable windmills. But though the vastness at first oppressed him, eventually it distilled in him a sensation of fetterless freedom which he grew to love almost jubilantly.” —Paul I. Wellman, in “The Walls of Jericho”It’s called topophilia.Read more

Future employees in the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System and those who aren’t vested by July 2013 would have 401K-style investments that grow and shrink with the markets under a plan recommended by the KPERS Study Commission on Tuesday.Sen. Jeff King, a Republican from Independence who co-chairs the commission, said his proposal is the first step of a long process that aims to ensure that the Legislature funds benefits for teachers and government workers and doesn’t create the massive liabilities lawmakers are grappling with now.The recommendations, approved in 8-3 votes, change nothing for vested employees — those with at least five years of service — and do little to address the $8.3 billion shortfall the system faces. The commission meets again today to discuss plans for vested employees and ways to deal with the shortfall.Read more

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recently appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” encouraging President Obama to be more like Teddy Roosevelt and initiate a re-election effort aimed at rekindling the “Square Deal.”Perhaps the president and his White House staff took the historian’s advice to heart as the nation’s 44th president is scheduled to arrive in Osawatomie today calling attention to the 26th president’s 1910 stop in Osawatomie, where he delivered what some historians call “the greatest oration ever given on American soil.”The White House issued a release on Saturday indicating President Obama’s trip to Osawatomie is to give an address on the economy — and how Obama “sees this as a make-or-break moment for the middle class.”Read more