Government

In 2003, Scott Wagner moved to the city's historic Northeast and got interested in neighborhood issues. A year later, Wagner joined the mayor-appointed Kansas City Museum Advisory Board. "I've been involved now for nine years. I've seen quite a bit in that time," he laughs.

The Kansas City Museum Advisory Board has formally approved the business plan calling for the city to break Kansas City Museum's ties with Union Station Kansas City.

Missouri’s House Committee for Downsizing State Government has finished holding a series of public hearings around the state for citizens to share their ideas on how to cut down on state government spending. 

The committee began the hearings Tuesday in St. Louis, and finished up Thursday at the Capitol. 

Republican Representative Paul Curtman, the committee’s chairman, says citizens across the state turned out to express concerns and ideas about reducing the size of state government.

Kansas Senators Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts say funding for a federal lab to be built in Manhattan has passed an important hurdle.

The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, or NBAF, will study diseases that could be used to attack the nation's food supply. A Senate subcommittee voted earlier this week to approve more than $400 million for the lab.

Moran says that a full Senate committee has now also voted to approve the funding.

“It is a determining factor in NBAF’s future,” says Moran.

Traffic lights, animal cruelty and backyard chickens highlighted Thursday's Kansas City, Mo. city council meeting.

City yields on traffic signals

Half of the Kansas City traffic signals that were turned off late last year will be turned back on, as the city yielded to neighborhood pressure.

Thirty seven traffic lights were turned off in the first wave of phasing out signals at intersections where federal standards say are no longer needed. The lights were also old and in need of replacement at a cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

The two Kansas Cities have won a $600,000 federal grant from the Environmental  Protection Agency to restore a score or more environmentally blighted areas. 

The project to be called One-KC Brownfields Coalition will include hazard cleanup, urban farms, orchards and gardens.

The properties are in a swath across state line. They lie in the central city of Kansas City Kansas and roughly bordered by  the Missouri River and 31st in Kansas City, Mo. 

Three years after taking effect, the Clean Indoor Air Act remains overwhelmingly popular among Kansas voters, according to a statewide public opinion poll. It finds that 78 percent of Kansas voters approve of the law that prohibits smoking in most public places. 

One of the tradeoffs made to get the law passed exempts state-operated casinos from the smoking ban.

Perplexed by the inner workings of our nation’s capital? Baffled by Beltway politics?

Mike Allen, the man behind the daily Politico Playbook knows how to untangle it all. 

If the Kansas City Council agrees, city pension system funds will  not be invested in companies that make guns. 

The resolution passed a Council Committee with one dissenting vote.

The police commission retirement board will be asked to do the same.

The Finance, Governance and Ethics Committee voted to forward the resolution after hearing Mayor Sly James argue it’s  time to send a message to gun manufacturers.

A state regulatory board has rejected a proposed change to voter registration rules requiring Kansans to show proof of citizenship.

The rules took effect in January. Since then, around 12,000 voter registration applications have been missing citizenship documents. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach pushed for the citizenship law, and for the proposed rule change.

The Kansas City Court of Appeals has taken testimony to help judges decide factors that will affect timely construction of a new downtown streetcar. 

The case centers on protests of taxes to support building and operating the line.

On one hand, City Hall argues the cutoff date to contest the vote on a taxing district is long past.

On the other, lawyers for two property owners think opponents of the 1 cent sales tax and a property tax increase had proper time to object.  That’s the heart of it.

Kansas City, Mo. started a collaborative process in January 2013 when the public was invited to a series of brainstorming sessions to map out the city’s role in arts and culture. Top recommendations were announced on Monday.

The draft report, revealed in the auditorium at the Kansas City Public Library's Plaza branch, includes 10 goals, with strategies based on public input and subcommittees of the Mayor’s Task Force for the Arts.

 America has had a long and complicated history with foreign oil, with a specific impact on our political relationships abroad.

Tuesday on Up To Date, we're joined by Jay Hakes to discuss the role that oil has played in our foreign relations. He’s an energy analyst and director of the Carter Presidential Library and Museum and the author of a book about what freedom from foreign oil can do for our country. 

A city council committee set a hot button issue aside to cool for another week. The debate is over the city turning off 37 traffic lights in east-central Kansas City which by federal standards are no longer needed.

Traffic light changes stopped for one week

Some area residents did not agree with the city manager that four-way stop signs would be safer at intersections that were near schools. And a resolution to turn 23 of the 37 back on was introduced.

The commission assigned the job of deciding whether the City Charter for Kansas City, Mo. needs change heard an admonition Wednesday from a longtime civic activist.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon signed several pieces of legislation on Wednesday aimed to benefit veterans and their families on a tour that included stops at Cape Giardeau and Springfield.  

The Kansas State Board of Education will be asking lawmakers to increase school funding by more than $600 million in the coming fiscal year. That would be an increase of more than 20 percent. That decision came at a meeting in Topeka Tuesday.

The board members voted 7-3 to make the request for increased funding. More than $400 million would go to the base state aid per student that is paid to districts. The money would also increase funding for professional development and school lunch programs.

Eight arts groups, including one in Olathe, will receive funding from the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission. This marks the first round of grants from the organization that rose from the ashes of the former state arts agency.

Update, 11:30 a.m.: "We are unchanged in our commitment in working with the city and our management contract to deliver programming for Kansas City Museum, both at Corinthian Hall and elsewhere," said Jerry Baber, chief financial officer of Union Station. "Our operation isn't changing, associated with the Kansas City Museum. Our relationship with the city isn't changing. This is strictly just an employment issue."

Denise Morrison, director of collections and curatorial services at Union Station, will step in as the museum's interim house director.

Missouri’s Democratic Governor and the Republican led legislature are again nose-to-nose and toe-to-toe over gun control.

Gov. Jay Nixon has vetoed what supporters of the bill call one of the most gun friendly in the country.

Local reaction was swift and heated.

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, criticized state lawmakers Tuesday for failing to pass a transportation bill, while previewing federal legislation to improve the nation’s infrastructure. 

McCaskill called the state’s $600 million construction budget to oversee 33,000 miles of roadways a “recipe for disaster.”

“We cannot have a strong economy in Missouri if we do not have an ongoing commitment to investing in our highways, our bridges, and even our lochs and dams, and projects on our great rivers,” McCaskill said.

A Democratic state senator from Topeka says Gov. Sam Brownback is packing the Kansas Board of Regents with too many Republicans.

State law requires that no more than five of the nine regents belong to the same political party. The senator says Brownback's recent appointments violate the spirit of that law.

Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley said this week that the governor is skirting the rules because one of the new appointees changed his registration from Republican to unaffiliated in February.

Brownback says Hensley’s criticism is not accurate.

With May's lobbying numbers in, and Missouri's legislative session completely behind us, we now have a complete picture of Missouri's lobbying system.

With the final tally, legislators took in $731,000 from lobbyists hoping to gain influence. All of this took place in just five months.

May's findings

As usual, the vast majority of May's lobbyist spending went to groups instead of individual legislators. Lobbyists spent about $70,000 on groups and committees, which don't disclose the recipients.

A few noteworthy gifts in May:

Perhaps in an effort to put an end to an ongoing political battle over the practice, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has signed legislation blocking the state Department of Revenue from scanning and storing documents required to get a driver's license.

Kansas City International Airport is looking at a potentially major change-- tearing down the current three terminals and moving to a single, new terminal.  

The one terminal idea came to a head in 2008 when the Master Plan called for a new, central terminal south of the current airport.  That came just 4 years after the airport wrapped up nearly $260 million in renovations.

From the crackdowns on the drug in the 1950s and ’60s to its legalization for recreational use in two states last year, marijuana has a complicated past in America.

Some have called marijuana legalization the next big civil rights issue. Colorado and Washington have officially said it’s okay, and 19 other states allow it to be used for medical reasons.

The campaign money's flowing in Missouri. Or could you say "gushing?"

On Thursday June 27, Attorney General Chris Koster, an early favorite to become the next governor of Missouri, picked up $25,000 from a Kansas City law firm and $12,500 more from an eastern Missouri labor union.

The day before, state Auditor Tom Schweich picked up $10,000 from a St. Louis area business owner.

One day after a Missouri House committee issued subpoenas to several members of Democratic Governor Jay Nixon's administration, a Cole County judge has issued a preliminary order blocking the subpoenas.