TOPEKA – Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt this week joined 15 other attorneys general and a state agency in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency for invalidating the individual air quality protection plans in those states according to a media release.

In June, the EPA issued a final rule requiring 36 states, including Kansas, to revise their individual State Implementation Plans (SIPs) governing carbon emissions during power plant startup, shutdown or malfunction.

“The Clean Air Act requires EPA to set air quality standards for pollutants but also assigns responsibility and authority to the states to develop plans for meeting those standards,” Schmidt said. “Now, after 40 years of successful state enforcement of emissions limits, the EPA arbitrarily ignores the federal-state partnership Congress wrote into the law and, instead, demands that states not only meet EPA’s new requirements but do so EPA’s way.”

The specific regulation at issue in this case governs emissions when power plants are going through startup, shutdown or malfunction. For decades, states have ensured compliance with the federal standards, but EPA’s new final rule attempts to impose changes on state compliance processes. The EPA’s final rule requiring the states to change their previously approved SIPs came after the agency agreed to settle a petition for rulemaking filed by the Sierra Club.

“Once again, the interests of states and the role of the people’s elected representatives in Congress have been ignored as EPA has taken another action complicit with the demands of a special interest group,” Schmidt said. “These wink-and-nod tactics are an end run around the democratic process. If the EPA’s action is not set aside, Kansans will again be forced to pay the cost of another unneeded rule.”

The bipartisan group of states filing the petition for review are Kansas, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia along with the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The case is State of Florida, et al. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency and Gina McCarthy, Administrator, in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Case No. 15-1267.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government says pilot reports of drone sightings so far this year are more than double last year.

The Federal Aviation Administration says in a statement that there have been more than 650 reports this year by pilots of unmanned aircraft flying near manned aircraft. There were 238 drone sightings in all of 2014.

The reports come from pilots of a variety of aircraft, including many large airliners.

There were 16 drone sightings reported in June 2014, and 36 the following month. This year, there were 138 reports from pilots flying up to 10,000 feet in altitude in June, and 137 reports in July.

Firefighters battling wildfires in the west have been forced to ground their operations on several occasions after drones were spotted.

DODGE CITY – Dodge City announced this week the name for their new aquatic park. The Long Branch Lagoon will open Memorial Day weekend 2016..

A joint committee including representatives from the City, County, Dodge City Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and two marketing professionals from the community selected the name, according to a media release from the city.

The deadline to submit entries was June 29 and a total of 186 entries were submitted.

In order to narrow the list of entries, each committee member was asked to choose their top five recommendations from the list of entries. The committee discussed their selections and established their top five choices to present to Community Facilities Advisory Board (CFAB). CFAB recommended the following three names to the Joint Commissions: Cowboy Cove, Long Branch Lagoon and Wrangler Rapids.

The winner of the naming contest received a family pass to the aquatics park for 2016.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Snowed in and scrambling during a freak storm in November, Mary Ann Murphy predicted there would be another flurry of activity in, oh, about nine months, at the Buffalo hospital where she’s in charge of maternity services.

Sure enough, a mini baby boom has begun at Mercy Hospital and officials say they expect to deliver about 250 babies before August is through. That’s up from the usual 200 or so.

The hospital saw a jaw-dropping 7 feet of snow fall during the week before Thanksgiving and serves the area hit by the storm.

“Nowhere to go, nothing to do,” is how Jason and Stephanie Brueggeman describe that week. The Lancaster couple welcomed Grace Elizabeth this week, saying they’re glad she came a little early and let them avoid the rush.

By Jim McLean

Governor Sam Brownback’s decision to divert federal funding away from a health insurance program is drawing sharp criticism from children’s advocates. Shannon Cotsoradis, president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Kansas Action for Children, said the governor is shortchanging Kansas families who depend on the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

“The dollars we are receiving as a result of the bump in the federal match are dollars that could have been reinvested in Kansas children and their families,” Cotsoradis said. “I think it’s troubling that Kansas kids continue to foot the bill for unsustainable tax cuts in our state.”

Cotsoradis was referencing income tax cuts passed at Brownback’s urging in 2012. Instead of jumpstarting the Kansas economy as Brownback promised, the tax cuts caused a steep drop in state revenue. The revenue shortfalls forced Brownback and legislators to cut spending and raise other taxes to keep the state budget in balance.

However, the increase in sales and tobacco taxes passed by lawmakers to end the 2015 legislative session – the longest in state history – weren’t enough to put this year’s budget in the black. So, Brownback and state Budget Director Shawn Sullivan were forced to come up with another $63 million in spending cuts and fund transfers.

The transfers included $17.6 million in federal funding for the CHIP program. Sullivan noted that the state learned in late June that it was going to receive a 23 percent increase in CHIP funding.

“The timing of this was pretty fortunate,” Sullivan said.

The additional funding increased the federal government’s share of Kansas CHIP funding from 70 percent to 92 percent. Elisabeth Wright Burak, senior program director at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute Center for Children and Families, said some states are using similar increases to expand their CHIP programs or fund outreach efforts to increase enrollment.

Kansas is missing an opportunity to do the same, she said. “It is federal money that’s on the table to help families,”

Wright Burak said. “It’s an opportunity to do more for kids than you have been doing.”

Approximately 54,000 Kansas children are enrolled in CHIP, about 87 percent of those thought to be eligible. The national average for CHIP participation is slightly higher, at 88.3 percent.

Sullivan acknowledged that the increase could have been used to expand CHIP services or eligibility. But he said he and Brownback determined “there is not a need for us to do that.”

Diverting the federal funds to prevent cuts in other areas won’t negatively affect CHIP, Sullivan said. “This does not lead to any sort of expenditure reduction or major change in the (CHIP) program,” he said.

Wright Burak said that doesn’t account for erosions in the eligibility threshold for the Kansas CHIP program due to an indexing provision included in a 2010 law that expanded the program.

“It’s a missed opportunity to use those freed-up funds and put them back in the system and bring the eligibility level to where it was when they passed (the extension),” she said.

The 2010 Kansas law expanded eligibility for children from 200 percent of the federal poverty level to 250 percent. In today’s dollars, 200 percent of FPL is $48,500 for a family of four, 250 percent is $60,625. However, because of the indexing feature children’s eligibility has slipped to 244 percent of FPL.

That means that some children eligible for coverage one year may not be the next as the threshold continues to drop. The failure to use the increased federal funding to restore CHIP eligibility levels is the latest in a series of budget decisions that have negatively affected Kansas children, Cotsoradis said, noting that Brownback and lawmakers also diverted money from early education programs and other children’s initiatives.

“The bottom line here is we took more than $50 million from kids during this budget cycle,” she said. “That’s a pretty hefty price tag for Kansas kids.” Sullivan said efforts were made to spare core services and programs to the extent possible. “We really tried to take the line here of trying to minimize as much as possible the impact this would have on Kansans,” he said.

Jim McLean is executive editor of KHI News Service in Topeka, a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor team.

HUTCHINSON- A Kansas man died in an accident just before 10:30a.m. on Wednesday in Reno County.

Hutchinson Police reported an SUV driven by Gene Krehbiel, 63, McPherson, was traveling in the 1000 Block of North Main Street in Hutchinson when he suffered a medical condition.

The SUV hit a parked jeep and then a church building.

Krehbiel was transported to Hutchinson Regional Medical Center where he died. A passenger in the SUV was not seriously injured.

The accident remains under investigation.