BY JIM MCLEAN

A deal to farm out the next new prison in Kansas to a private firm — one that would replace the outdated facility in Lansing and lease it to the state — hit a delay Thursday.

The State Finance Council, which would have to sign off lease-to-buy contract, said it needs two weeks to further study the details of a plan to pay CoreCivic Inc. $362 million over 20 years.

Several members of the council said they didn’t want to approve the deal until the state and the company finalized their contract negotiations.

“I don’t want something inserted tomorrow after we sign off today,” said Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning, an Overland Park Republican.

The concerns of some council members go beyond the contract. House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat running for governor, said he didn’t consider CoreCivic a “reliable partner.”

“They have a history of not telling the truth,” Ward said, citing a report issued in 2016 by the U.S. Department of Justice inspector general that was critical of the company’s security record and a lawsuit filed by CoreCivic shareholders contending that the company’s leadership had failed to disclose information about risks to its government contracts.

Damon Hininger, CEO of Nashville, Tenn.,-based CoreCivic, said the vast majority of its government clients renew their contracts.

“If we’re not doing a good job, if we’re not making the mark on quality, if we’re not being cost effective,” he said, “they’re going to cancel our contracts.”

A new prison would lower the cost of housing inmates in Lansing and that the lease agreement would protect the state from cost overruns and spiraling maintenance costs, Kansas Corrections Secretary Joe Norwood told the council.

In September, corrections officials said they wanted to sign an agreement by the end of 2017.

A state audit completed in the summer of 2017 challenged prison officials’ argument that a lease-purchase deal would prove cheaper than a state-built facility financed with bonds. But Norwood said the auditors used faulty assumptions to reach that conclusion, noting that their calculations mistakenly included a balloon payment at the end of the lease.

The new Lansing facility, located on the outskirts of Kansas City, would hold about 2,400 inmates, about 100 more prisoners than the existing compound.

Norwood said most of the construction dollars would stay in the state, listing Kansas City’s J.E. Dunn as the general contractor and a handful of companies from Johnson County and Topeka as the architects, plumbers, electricians and concrete specialists.

The new facility would cut the labor needed to man the prison roughly in half to a little over to about 370 staff.

“Our estimated staff savings is a little more than $17 million per year,” Norwood said.

Ditching the deal, he said, would burden the state with the cost of urgently needed renovations at the state’s 155-year-old prison.

Republican Gov. Sam Brownback didn’t object to the delay but said the state badly needs a new prison, noting that the existing facility “predates Abraham Lincoln.”

“It desperately needs help,” Brownback said. “It smells. It needs a lot of work.”

The Republican-controlled Legislature approved a new Lansing prison last year, but before the Finance Council scrutinized any contract. In December, top GOP lawmakers said they were on board with a lease with CoreCivic.

Members of the Finance Council are Brownback, and eight legislative leaders, six Republicans and two Democrats.

The buy-or-lease decision comes as the state’s prison system appears increasingly beleaguered. It’s overcrowded and some inmates were moved from Lansing to El Dorado Correctional Facility, which then saw an hours-long uprising in June.

Jim McLean is managing director of the Kansas News Service. You can reach him on Twitter @jmcleanks.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) – A Missouri man suspected of stopping an Amtrak train in southwest Nebraska has been charged with terrorism.

Documents unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Lincoln say 26-year-old Taylor Wilson, of St. Charles, Missouri, has ties to a white supremacist group. He’s charged with terrorism attacks and other violence against railroad carriers and mass transportation systems. His attorney in a related state case didn’t immediately return a call Friday from The Associated Press.

The eastbound train with about 175 people aboard halted early Oct. 22 in Oxford, Nebraska, about 45 miles north of Phillipsburg, Kansas.  Court documents say a Furnas County deputy sent to the scene found Amtrak employees holding Wilson. The deputy says he found a loaded handgun in Wilson’s waistband

BARTON COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating a suspect on drug charges after a traffic stop.

Just before 2:30 a.m. Friday, a Barton County Sheriff’s Deputy stopped a 2001 Pontiac Grand Am for an equipment violation on K4 Highway near Claflin, according to a media release.

The officer discovered the driver, identified as Crystal Horton, 33 of Wichita, was operating the car with a suspended driver’s license.

Based on further investigation a K-9 officer was called from the City of Great Bend. As a result of the investigation, methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia were eventually located.

Horton was arrested and transported to the Barton County Jail where she is being held in lieu of $10,000 bond. Sheriff’s Deputies were assisted at the scene by the Great Bend Police Department K-9 officer. A male passenger in the vehicle was released.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Sedgwick County officials have identified two workers killed when they were buried by grain at a Wichita-area grain elevator.

Authorities say 32-year-old Marcus Tice and 28-year-old Joshua Rasbold died Tuesday at the Gavilon Grain elevator in south Wichita.

Their bodies were recovered about three hours after the men were buried under 20 to 25 feet of grain. It isn’t clear how they got into the bin and what caused them to become trapped.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating.

ATCHISON, Kan. (AP) — Federal investigators say ordinary key rings that were missing from chemical storage tanks were a primary reason a chemical cloud spread over Atchison in 2016, sending more than 140 people to the hospital.

MGPI Processing used metal key rings to secure pipelines to chemical storage tanks at its Atchison plant. The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board says in a report released Wednesday that in October 2016, an employee opened one line to take delivery of sulfuric acid. Two other lines were open because the rings were missing.

The Kansas City Star reports a delivery driver, expecting to find only one unlocked line, sent sulfuric acid into a tank containing sodium hypochlorite. The incompatible chemicals erupted into a cloud that spread over the Atchison area.