TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A new center aimed at creating a safe space for the LGBT community is in the first stages of becoming a reality.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that the Capital City Equality Center received 501(c)(3) status, designating it as a public charity. The center will provide a place for people to meet, share experiences and support one another.
Organizers began working on the project in May 2015.
The center may provide resources for people to find jobs, for groups to host meetings or for businesses and organizations to gain awareness of the issues the LGBT community faces through programming. The organization might also open a clothing and food bank.
Stephanie Mott, the center’s board president, says she hopes that establishing a safe space will reduce self-harm and suicides.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Police are investigating after a man was fatally shot in northern Wichita.
The Wichita Eagle reports that police received a report around 5 a.m. Sunday of shots fired. Wichita Sgt. Joe Kennedy says responding officers found a 26-year-old man lying in the street. Emergency workers pronounced him dead at the scene.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Former Dallas Cowboys running back Joseph Randle is jailed in Kansas on suspicion of aggravated battery, drug possession and criminal damage to property.
An official at the Sedgwick County Jail in Randle’s hometown of Wichita says the 24-year-old was arrested and booked around 8:15 a.m. Sunday. Bond is set at $100,000. It wasn’t immediately clear if Randle had an attorney.
Wichita Police Lt. James Espinoza didn’t immediately return a phone message seeking more information about the charges.
Randle has had a string of run-ins with the law, beginning with a 2014 shoplifting arrest. He’s also charged in neighboring Sumner County in a November disturbance at a casino. Earlier this month, he was arrested in Irving, Texas, after it was determined he was wanted for speeding.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A bill in the Kansas Legislature would change the current forfeiture law and require that a person has to be convicted of a crime before the state can take their property.
Kansas’ current forfeiture law does not require a person to be convicted of a crime before law enforcement can take property they believe was used in a crime.
The Lawrence Journal World reports a forfeiture case is civil, not criminal, and law enforcement must prove by a preponderance of evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt that the seized property was used in a crime.
The new measure would require individuals be convicted of a crime before they can have their property taken.
Several law enforcement agencies oppose the measure because forfeitures provide police agencies with needed funding.
HUTCHINSON— The preliminary hearing for a Kansas man arrested after two domestic incidents, one where he held police at bay on Christmas eve for nearly six hours was bound over as charged Friday.
Charles Mendenhall III, 34, Hutchinson, faces arraignment next month on both cases.
The victim returned to the stand Friday and testified that she didn’t feel like she was being held against her will during the standoff on Christmas Eve.
She said she was staying with him trying to get the guns away from him and to keep police from shooting him.
At some point during the incident, the two came to doorway and she was in front of him. Police believe he had a gun to her back, but she testified that he had the gun, but wasn’t sure where he had it.
During cross examination, the state said those statements in court are contrary to other testimony and what she told law enforcement.
The victim had an attorney with her because she had indicated in an earlier hearing that she felt she might incriminate herself with a crime.
Apparently, when the defendant was crawling through a window of the home during the incident on January 10, she struck him and was worried she might be charged with battery, domestic violence. The state indicated in court they wouldn’t consider that a crime since he entered the residence when he wasn’t supposed to be there and she had a right to defend herself.
The defense noted it was his home and doesn’t believe he committed aggravated burglary.
Mendenhall is charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, criminal discharge of a firearm, criminal threat and two counts of aggravated endangerment of a child in the Christmas Eve incident. In the case from January, he’s charged with aggravated battery, aggravated burglary, interference with law enforcement, violation of a protection from abuse order, criminal restraint and battery of Hutchinson Police Officer Josh Long.
Nearly 90 percent of the patients at HealthCore Clinic in Wichita live at or below the federal poverty level. BRYAN THOMPSON / HEARTLAND HEALTH MONITOR
A recent national report credits the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, for helping to reduce racial and ethnic inequalities in health insurance coverage. But Kansas has not made as much progress as other states.
Before the Affordable Care Act, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and Asian-Americans were much more likely than whites to be uninsured. But an analysis by the nonprofit Center for Global Policy Solutions shows that gap has narrowed because of the health reform law.
Ocie Corner is one example. The African-American woman lives in Bel Aire, a suburb on the northeast side of Wichita, and had been uninsured since 2012. She says she just kept her fingers crossed.
“You just hope you don’t get sick and have to go someplace, because you don’t … you really don’t know where to go. You really don’t,” she says. “You just kind of, ‘Well, it’ll work out. It’ll work out.’ And, you know, sometimes it don’t work out.”
Corner wasn’t aware of the federal insurance marketplace that became available in 2014. But a few weeks before Christmas, she saw a message on TV about the penalty people have to pay if they don’t have health insurance.
“I wasn’t paying no $600, so it got me to sign up,” Corner says.
And it’s a good thing she did. Corner went to HealthCore Clinic in Wichita a couple of weeks later for treatment of a burn that wasn’t healing. They referred her to specialty care, which Corner says she couldn’t afford to pay for on her own.
While her burn was being evaluated, she learned that her blood pressure was too high and causing damage to her eyes. Her insurance will help her pay for the care she needs.
But that peace of mind continues to elude a disproportional share of minority Kansans. A recent analysis by the Kansas Health Institute found that 17.4 percent of black Kansans were uninsured in 2014, compared to 7.6 percent of white Kansans. That’s a larger gap than in any other state. Nationwide, 13.6 percent of black Americans were uninsured in 2014, significantly lower than the rate in Kansas.
Teresa Lovelady heads HealthCore Clinic, a federally funded safety net clinic in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in northeast Wichita. She says 88 percent of the clinic’s patients live at or below the federal poverty level.
“These are individuals that will not qualify for the insurance marketplace,” Lovelady says.
By that, she means they don’t make enough money to qualify for federal subsidies to help cover the cost of their insurance premiums.
The ACA extended Medicaid to adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. But Gov. Sam Brownback and legislative leaders have blocked efforts to make more low-income adults eligible for KanCare, the state’s privatized Medicaid program.
Lovelady thinks that’s the main reason for the racial disparity in insurance coverage. And she says those left without insurance are hard-working Kansans.
“Their income was too low to meet the federal threshold, but they were too rich to qualify for Medicaid in the state of Kansas,” she says. “And because we did not expand Medicaid in Kansas, it disproportionately impacted the patients that we serve here at HealthCore.”
While the disparity between whites and blacks was higher in Kansas than in any other state, the largest uninsured gap in Kansas was between whites, at 7.6 percent, and Hispanics, at 24.2 percent. That’s more than a threefold difference.
KanCare doesn’t cover non-disabled, childless adults no matter how poor they are. Brownback and many Republican legislative leaders say the state shouldn’t extend coverage to them while Kansans with disabilities remain on waiting lists even though those waiting lists are for disability support services, not medical care.
There is mounting evidence showing that states that have not expanded Medicaid are lagging when it comes to reducing the uninsured rate and narrowing racial and ethnic gaps in coverage.
As the KHI analysis summarized, the average decrease in the uninsured rate for states that expanded Medicaid was 25.6 percent. In states like Kansas that did not expand Medicaid, the uninsured rate declined by an average of 13.8 percent.
The Center for Global Policy Solutions report, meanwhile, concludes that eliminating the disparities in coverage between minorities and whites will not happen unless government coverage, like Medicaid or Medicare, is extensively expanded.
Editor’s note: The Kansas Health Institute is the parent organization of the editorially independent KHI News Service.
Bryan Thompson is a reporter for KHI News Service in Topeka, a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor team.
PRATT-Just six hunting-related incidents were reported in Kansas in 2015, tying the record low set in 2013. Unfortunately, one hunter lost his life.
While six incidents is an amazingly low number considering hunters recorded more than 5 million hunter-days last year, it doesn’t lessen the impact on a family and community who lost one of their members.
Once again, most of incidents were the result of careless firearm handling. These types of incidents concern those involved in hunter education because they are preventable and stem from a violation of one of the four basic firearm safety rules: treat every firearm as if it loaded; always point the muzzle in a safe direction; keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire; and never climb a fence or other obstacle with a loaded gun. All hunters must remember to: “Load your brain before you load your gun,” because the most important piece of safety equipment a hunter can have in the field is between his or her ears.
There were also five elevated stand incidents, including one fatality, reported last year. A full body harness/fall arrest system should becorrectly usedany time a hunter leaves the ground. But a full body harness/fall arrest system is not a parachute, so it will not protect a hunter if not attached to the tree.
When you compare hunting-related incidents to the number of incidents reported for other activities per 100,000 participants, hunting is safer than cheerleading. And the trend in safe hunting can be directly attributed to the dedicated efforts of the 700 Kansas Hunter Education Program volunteer instructors, who have taught and certified more than 500,000 Kansas students since 1973.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — McConnell Air Force Base officials say the new Boeing KC-46A refueling tankers will arrive at the base in Wichita later than expected.
The first of the new tankers, which will replace the aging KC-135 tanker, will not arrive until the spring of 2017. They originally had been expected to begin arriving early this year, which was then postponed until August.
The Wichita Eagle reports the delay is being attributed to production delays by Boeing. The KC-46 tankers are the military version of Boeing’s 767 airliner.
Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas said in an email that the Air Force has assured him that the first 18 KC-46s will be delivered to McConnell by August 2017.
The base is scheduled to receive 36 of the new planes by 202
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The University of Kansas Cancer Center is joining nearly 70 other cancer centers in sounding an alarm about the high number of children not getting the HPV vaccine.
The Kansas City Star reports Kansas is last in the nation in the percentage of girls who have received the vaccine, which protects against a virus that causes cancer. The Centers for Disease Control says Missouri isn’t far behind, and both states also rank low in the number of boys who are vaccinated.
Dr. Terry Tsue at the Kansas Cancer Center says he’s troubled that so many children are not getting the vaccine.
He says some people some don’t think their children need the vaccine because they don’t have sex, while others think it will make their kids promiscuous.
PRATT–Does a park in your neighborhood need a new playground? Has your community been waiting for the right time to put in a new picnic shelter, ball fields or a dog park? Now, with the reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act (LWCF), the time is right to make those projects happen.
LWCF grants have provided funding for more than 700 outdoor recreation projects throughout Kansas since its inception in 1965. Kansas has received more than $50 million that has helped create and enhance outdoor recreation opportunities in almost every county.
Grants require 50 percent matches, and properties where grants are used must remain in pubic recreational use for perpetuity. Grants are available to cities, counties, school districts and other government entities. Funding is administered by the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism, through the National Park Service.
The application deadline is April 15, 2016, and competition for grants is intense, so it’s important that applications be accurately and thoroughly completed. To learn more about the application process and to download an application, go to ksoutdoors.com/KDWPT-Info/Grants.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas agency that represents residential and small-business customers in utility cases has hired a new consumer counsel.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports the Citizens’ Utility Ratepayers Board unanimously hired a new counsel on Friday. The person’s name was not released but is expected to be made public on Wednesday.
The board’s chief consumer counsel, David Springe, resigned in December. The board then fired its acting chief counsel, Nikki Christopher, who had been an attorney for the board for 15 years.
Before her firing, the board restricted Christopher’s authority to represent the agency in the Kansas Legislature and with the media.
The board has been debating its role and future mission for the past several weeks but there was no discussion of that topic Friday.
HARVEY COUNTY – A Kansas teen was injured in an accident just before 8 a.m. on Saturday in Harvey County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2009 Mitsubishi Galant driven by Tanisha M. Willbourn,18, Moundridge, was northbound on Hesston Road three miles south of Hesston.
The driver lost control of the vehicle. It veered off the left side of the roadway, rolled three times, and came to rest in the roadway.
Wilbourn was transported to St. Francis Medical Center.
She was properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.
