RICE COUNTY — Authorities are working to determine the cause of a fatal fire in Rice County and have identified the man who died.

Late Friday, fire crews responded to the fire at a home in the 400 Block of Southerland Street in Chase, according to Rice County Sheriff Bryant Evans.

Beverly G. Boatright, 66, was pronounced dead at the scene. Andrea Dry, 59, was transported to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, according to Evans.

The family dog also died in the blaze. The home is considered a total loss, according to Evans.

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RICE COUNTY — Authorities are working to determine the cause of a fatal fire in Rice County.

Late Friday, fire crews responded to the fire at a home in Chase on U.S. 56 approximately 25 miles east of Great Bend, according to Rice County Sheriff Bryant Evans.

One occupant of the home died and another was transported for treatment. Authorities have not identified the victims.

Sheriff Evans  will release additional details on the fire Monday.

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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SHAWNEE COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities are investigating an attempted armed-robbery and searching for a suspect.

Just after midnight Monday, police responded to an attempted aggravated robbery to employees of Pizza Hut, 2007 SE 29th in Topeka as they left the business, according to Lt. John Trimble.

The victims stated that a white or light skinned black male wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, and a black and white mask approached them as they were getting to their cars.

The suspect then brandished a handgun and asked them for all of their money. The victims had no money to give and the suspect left the area on foot.

Police have not located the suspect, according to Trimble.

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.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A jury has found a 22-year-old Topeka man guilty of murder and other crimes for the shooting death of another man last year.

Zachary Buck-Schrag was convicted Friday of first-degree murder, assault and weapons and other counts following a four-day trial. He faces up to life in prison when he’s sentenced at a later date.

Buck-Schrag had argued he shot 37-year-old Travis Larsen in self-defense on Jan. 14, 2017.

Buck-Schrag contended Larsen and another man threatened him and a friend by flashing an ammunition clip and making unfriendly remarks. Buck-Schrag said he showed the people in the other car a gun as Larsen’s car pursued his. Eventually, Larsen’s car hit Buck-Schrag’s vehicle and Buck-Schrag fired four times, hitting Larsen in the head.

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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KANSAS CITY (AP) — The country’s top child abuse hotline recently launched its first text line, and now the nonprofit is looking to Missouri for help determining the efficiency of the service.

The new text line is part of national child advocacy nonprofit Childhelp’s efforts to reach more young people, who may be less comfortable or unable to report abuse over the phone.

Michelle Fingerman, Childhelp’s national director, told the Kansas City Star that the majority of people calling the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline are adults speaking on children’s behalf. But informal testing of text lines in recent years found that more than 80 percent of users were younger than 18 years old, Fingerman said.

“It confirmed what we were suspecting,” Fingerman said. “That youth weren’t calling, because they were comfortable reaching out in other ways . including text.”

Childhelp officials plan to study what works for text line counselors in Missouri, which ranks third in the country for helpline calls made per capita.

The ranking doesn’t reflect higher abuse rates than other states. Missouri’s rates of substantiated abuse cases dropped to 3 percent in 2017, below the country’s 9 percent rate, according to hotline data, federal statistics and the census.

With the state’s strong history of using the national hotline, Childhelp leaders said testing the text line’s success in Missouri will be key to understanding and improving the service.

Trained counselors face unique challenges when collecting crisis information via text, which could take longer than 45 minutes compared to an average hotline call that lasts about nine minutes. Hotline operators could face difficulties conveying tone or inflection that offers comfort over text or live chats.

“For us it is leveraging technology in a positive way,” Fingerman said. “If we know if this is how youth connect at this point, I think our priority is to meet them where they are at.”

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KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A man found guilty of sexually assaulting and burglarizing victims at a Kansas City, Kansas, apartment complex has been sentenced to more than 33 years in prison.

Wyandotte County District Attorney’s office announced 36-year-old Adalberto Mata-Deras was sentenced Friday. A judge ordered lifetime post-release supervision and registration as a sex offender for Meta-Deras

Mata-Deras was convicted last April of two counts of rape, aggravated sexual battery, three counts of aggravated burglary and interference with law enforcement.

The case stemmed from multiple sexual assaults and burglaries reported at Woodview Apartments between August 2014 and October 2016.

Prosecutors say DNA evidence linked Mata-Deras to one of the victim’s apartments.

By DAN MARGOLIES

Another hospital led by EmpowerHMS, the North Kansas City company that has defaulted on its bills and missed payroll at its hospitals over the last couple of months, is under new management.

City officials said that Fulton Medical Center, a 37-bed acute-care hospital in Fulton, Missouri, is now being run by a management team led by its CEO, Mike Reece.

Bruce Hackmann, economic development director of the Callaway Chamber of Commerce, told KCUR that EmpowerHMS’ contract to run the hospital had expired and not been renewed.

“We’re now hearing very good things about how the hospital is performing and that’s the main thing to us, because we have jobs at stake and a hospital means a lot to a community our size,” Hackmann said.

News of the takeover was first reported by the Fulton Sun.

The Fulton hospital was on the verge of closure in September 2017 when Empower, led by Florida resident Jorge Perez, stepped in to say Empower had taken over the hospital and would keep it open.

In fact, Empower had not acquired the hospital. Rather, it had a contract with Leawood, Kansas,-based NueTerra, the hospital’s owner, to manage the hospital and an option to buy it. But those agreements expired sometime last year, according to Hackmann, and NueTerra did not renew them.

NueTerra officials did not return calls seeking comment.

Missed payments

Empower and other companies affiliated with Perez own around 20 rural hospitals in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and elsewhere. Since late last year, various news outlets have reported that Empower has missed payments to its hospitals’ creditors and been late in paying hospital employees.

Last month, a Kansas state judge appointed a receiver to run Hillsboro Community Hospital in Hillsboro, Kansas, about 50 miles north of Wichita, after it defaulted on a bank loan and the bank foreclosed on the hospital. Around the same time, a Tennessee state judge appointed a special master to temporarily oversee the finances of Lauderdale Community Hospital in Ripley, Tennessee.

More recently, The Kansas City Star reported that employees of Horton Community Hospital in northeast Kansas did not receive their paychecks last week and were dipping into their own pockets to pay for supplies. Other Empower hospitals in Oklahoma have experienced similar financial woes recently.

The CEO of Horton Community Hospital, Ty Compton, told the Topeka Capital-Journal this week that a clerical error caused paychecks to be deposited late. He also blamed the hospital’s woes on the problems afflicting rural hospitals nationwide.

“It’s at risk in every rural community,” Compton told the newspaper. “The facility in Fort Scott and the facility in Independence, Kansas, both closed and those are much bigger towns than Horton is. So we’d be naive to say that health care’s not in a crisis. It certainly is in a crisis. Rural America, in general, is in a crisis.”

Since 2010, 95 rural hospitals have closed in 26 states, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. Another 673 are vulnerable to closure, according to a report by iVantage Analytics.

Related: Rural Hospitals’ Plea to Federal Government: Help Us Stay Open

The U.S. Government Accountability Office last year said that rural hospital closures were generally preceded and caused by financial distress. That distress, it said, was due to multiple factors, including the higher percentage of elderly residents in rural areas, the higher percentage of residents with chronic conditions, lower median household incomes, decreasing populations and slow employment growth.

Lab billing backlash

George Ross, senior marketing director at Empower, blamed Empower’s cash flow problems on insurers’ unwillingness to pay Empower’s hospitals in the wake of questions raised about lab billing arrangements at other hospitals owned by groups affiliated with Perez.

“There’s so much backlash right now that it’s real hard for him to receive his money,” Ross said. “Yet he tries to find a way to pay the bills even though he’s not receiving money.”

One of Perez’s hospitals, Putnam County Memorial Hospital in Unionville, Missouri, was the subject of a highly critical audit by Missouri State Auditor Nichole Galloway in 2017. Galloway questioned the legality of the lab billing arrangement, under which the tiny hospital billed insurers for lab tests for patients who had never set foot in the hospital.

“Based on our review of hospital accounts, the vast majority of laboratory billings are for out-of-state lab activity for individuals who are not patients of hospital physicians,” the audit stated.

Perez, through a company called Hospital Partners Inc., took over Putnam County Memorial Hospital in late 2016. At the time, the hospital was on the verge of closing. The hospital is now under different management and Hospital Partners has since sued the hospital for breach of contract and Galloway for exceeding her authority.

Ross said Perez had taken out personal loans to cover bills and payroll, all the while awaiting delayed reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid.

“See, if these hospitals are little gold mines feeding him money, or if there’s no money coming in, right? And I don’t have to tell you, if there’s no money coming in, then the guy’s going above and beyond to make it happen,” Ross said.

Ross insisted the lab billing arrangement at Putnam County Memorial Hospital was perfectly legitimate.

“He had all his hospitals send their samples to that hospital,” Ross said. “He basically invested money into lab equipment (at Putnam County Memorial Hospital) in order to be able to process what you’d normally send” to Quest Diagnostics, the giant lab testing company.

A federal judge recently declined to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the lab billing scheme was fraudulent. The suit was brought last year by RightChoice Managed Care and dozens of Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance plans.

The suit charges that Hospital Partners and individual defendants, including Perez, defrauded RightChoice by billing it for blood, urine drug and other lab tests run through Putnam County Memorial Hospital, even though the tests were performed at outside labs throughout the country.

RightChoice alleges the scheme defrauded it of more than $73 million — a staggering sum for a hospital that in fiscal 2016, before it was taken over by Hospital Partners, posted operating revenues of just $7.5 million.

Dan Margolies is a senior reporter and editor in conjunction with the Kansas News Service. You can reach him on Twitter @DanMargolies.

TOPEKA, KAN. – A Kansas man with a felony conviction record was sentenced this week to seven years in federal prison for a firearm violation, according to U.S. Attorney Stephan McAllister.

Lucas Adam Wade Hall, 32, Hutchinson, pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. In his plea, he admitted that he was arrested with a Taurus 9 mm pistol, a Beretta 9 mm pistol and a Smith & Wesson .44 caliber revolver.

In April 2011, Hall was convicted in Reno County District Court of attempted kidnapping, aggravated intimidation of a witness and aggravated battery. In September 2014, he was convicted in Reno County District Court of aggravated assault.

This case was prosecuted as part of Department of Justice’s Project Safe Neighborhood, which targets armed offenders with a record of felony convictions.  Hall has eight previous convictions including aggravated assault, aggravated intimidation of a witness, aggravated battery, criminal damage to property and kidnapping, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections.

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A 51-year-old former Olathe nursing home employee pleaded guilty to stealing jewelry from a resident suffering from dementia.

Tonette Raylene Ealy, of Kansas City, Kansas, pleaded guilty Friday to a misdemeanor count of mistreatment of a dependent adult. She also was ordered to pay restitution to the victim.

As part of the plea deal, a second count was dismissed.

Ealy was placed on probation for one year. She will serve 30 days as a condition of the probation.

She was charged last year with stealing jewelry worth less than $1,500 from two patients and selling the items at a pawn shop.