February 12, 2012

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I-70 toll road proposal introduced (AUDIO)

February 7, 2012 By

Jefferson City Senator Mike Kehoe, a former member of the sate transportation commission, has introduced legislation letting the transpiration department explore public0private partnerships to rebuild Interstate 70. Some advocates would let the private company that rebuilds the road charge tolls for decades to make up the costs and earn a profit.

Kehoe says the legislature needs to be thinking of things like this to finance rebuilding and maintaining 70 and other parts of the state system.

His plan would have the public-private partnership rebuild I-70 from the Interstate 64/Highway 40 intersection in eastern Missouri to Interstate 470 that goes around Kansas City.

Supporters say this approach would rebuild the highway in a much shorter time than the present financing system would allow. Critics say the tolls would be the equivalent of a three-dollar a gallon fuel tax increase and would hurt businesses along today’s highway

  AUDIO: Kehoe in senate 1:02

Filed Under: Featured, Human Interest, News, Transportation

Gov. Nixon kicks off Joplin Habitat (AUDIO)

February 4, 2012 By

Bernie Federko, Alan Benes, Mattt Cassel, Aaron Crow and Danario Alexander join Governor Jay Nixon in announcing the Joplin Challenge. UPI Bill Greenblatt

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon announced the 2012 Governor’s Joplin Habitat Challenge. The goal, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, is to build 35 new homes in the Joplin this year and provide continued aid to the city’s recovery.

Speaking prior to the Mizzou-Kansas basketball game on Saturday, Governor Nixon was flanked by members of the St. Louis Blues, Cardinals, Rams, Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, Kansas Speedway and Missouri Tigers. The 35 homes will be divided into seven different neighborhoods, which each neighborhood assigned a sponsor among the seven teams. Players, coaches and members of each sports organization will visit the neighborhoods throughout the year to work alongside volunteers and professional builders.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Fires/Accidents/Disasters, Human Interest, News, Sports Tagged With: , , ,

Bill would require ‘pings’ of missing persons’ cell phones

February 3, 2012 By

A House Committee has heard testimony on a bill that would clear the way for cell phone companies to provide cell phone location information to law enforcement in certain missing persons cases.

Greg and Missey Smith call the bill "Kelsey Smith's law," for their daughter (pictured).

The language of House Bill 1108 has been introduced three previous times in Missouri, and has been passed out of the House but never out of the Senate. It would require companies to locate, or “ping” a cell phone, when law enforcement requests that information in emergencies in which a missing person is in danger of serious physical injury or death. It also protects cell phone companies from being sued for providing that information under the guidelines of the bill.

Missey Smith has advocated for the bill each time. “It’s time that this gets changed.”

Missey and her husband, Greg Smith, are proponents of the bill commonly named for their daughter Kelsey, who was kidnapped from Overland Park, Kansas and found murdered in southern Jackson County in 2007.

Greg, now a legislator in Kansas, says if such language had been law then Kelsey might have been saved. “June 2, 2007 was the night she went missing and she was found four days later … Once that information was released by the cell phone company it only took forty-five minutes to recover her body.” A former police officer, he adds, “If you can get that kind of response in a missing person case, that’s just absolutely light years ahead of what we’re doing right now.”

Missey says the bill changes one component of current law. “They may turn this information over already. So, they’ve already got all of this in place. The Kelsey Smith Act, or this legislation, states they will. That’s the difference. It goes from ‘may’ to ‘shall.’”

No one testified against the bill in the hearing of the House Committee on Utilities.

Learn more about the effort to remember Kelsey, and pass the law named for her.

Missey says it is frustrating the bill has not become law yet, and its sponsor agrees.

This is the first year Representative Jeanie Lauer (R-Blue Springs) has carried the language. “We have history and tracking that shows that this legislation is great, it’s in other states and it is time for Missouri to step up to the plate.”

The bill is currently law in Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, New Hampshire and North Dakota. It is being considered this year in Hawaii and the Smiths say it could be taken up later this year in Massachusetts and Illinois. The Smiths says they know of two cases in the states where the law has passed in which cell phone location information has led to the safe recovery of a missing person.

Missy says she will be back in Missouri as needed to push for the bill to become law this year. “Whatever it takes to get it done.”

Filed Under: Crime & Courts, Featured, Human Interest, Law Enforcement, Legislature, News, Politics & Government Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Global food demand leading to vertical farming (AUDIO / VIDEO)

January 30, 2012 By

Imagine tall buildings in City Central full of crops — and perhaps livestock — instead of people. The Joint Committee on Urban Agriculture hears about where and how it’s happening.

Dickson Despommier — a professor at Columbia University in New York — is one of the world’s foremost experts on vertical farming. He tells the Joint Committee on Urban Agriculture the idea has mushroomed since his team of researchers started working on the idea. Despommier says vertical farming is happening in countries that have run out of arable land to feed its people — South Korea, Japan, Holland, England, Singapore. (Holland is building theirs underground with grow lights.) Japan got serious about vertical farming in a sterile environment after contamiation concerns from the Fukushima nuclear incident.

Stateside, in addition to Chicago, there are projects in Milwaukee and Seattle.

The world population is expected to grow by another 3 billion people — that’s 3 billion more mouths to feed, so this is an idea that is going to continue to grow, Despommier says. He says Missouri has the research institutions, the farming interest and the legislative drive to make vertical farming projects successful in this state.

His presentation on vertical farming shows how crops can be grown in industrial buildings amid dense population. “Just Google ‘vertical farming’,” he says. “It’s a really big deal.”

The committee also heard about initiatives in urban aquaculture and community gardening projects. A bill to push such initiatives in the state is expected to come forward soon.

Despommier says to one member of the committee who asked whether it can grow jobs, yes, so long as farmers are displaced by floods, drought and production moving overseas. He says Missouri, one of several states, can certainly identify how Mother Nature has wrecked so many crops.

By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use (sources: FAO and NASA). Historically, some 15% of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to avoid this impending disaster? — From www.verticalfarm.com

AUDIO: Jessica Machetta reports (1:10)

 

Filed Under: Agriculture, Economy, Featured, Flooding, Human Interest, Legislature, News, Politics & Government

Bills to clean up, reform adoption laws hit both chambers

January 26, 2012 By

The House is considering three bills that would help prevent adoption cases from being contested and held up in court.

Rep. Chris Kelly (D-Columbia) says his legislation comes from the Lentz case, in which a biological father took a case against a baby’s adoptive parents to the Missouri Supreme Court on the grounds that he never agreed to the adoption. Kelly says many cases such as these come forward when a biological parent or parents figure out they can financially gain from holding up the process.

“A woman’s parental rights were … her consent for adoption of the child was irrevocably filed, the court had ruled, she had consented, the adopted child had been living with the adoptive family for almost a year, then she attempted to name a punitive father, and he attempted to disrupt the adoption proceedings,” Kelly says. “Either once you have had your rights terminated, finally, or once you have not shown responsibility … it happens regularly that people try to hold the perspective adoption parents up for financial benefit by threatening to disrupt the adoption proceedings.”

Kelly’s bill says a father can establish his interest in the child, legally, by providing support to the child both before and after it is born.

Mary Beck is a law professor at the University of Missouri who specializes in adoption cases. When she was asked by a committee member about biological fathers of children who say they had no knowledge of the pregnancy prior to the adoption, she says current law already addresses that.

“That goes back to part of a stature that was passed years ago,” she told the House Committee on Children and Families. “It says that every man,who has sexual intercourse with a woman is on notice that she may become pregnant. So for him to say he didn’t know doesn’t work in Missouri, as well as about 20 other states. so he is liable to provide support for this child, prenatally, under this bill, because he is on notice.”

Beck says the legislation helps protect the rights and decisions of all parties involved, the birth mother, the biological father and the adoptive parents.

AUDIO: Jessica Machetta reports (1:14)

The bills being considered are HB 1258 — ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF PATERNITY, HB 1259 — CONSENT FOR ADOPTION, and HB 1260 — CONSENT FOR ADOPTION.

Senate measure would reform identifying information laws

Sen. John Lamping (R-Ladue) has filed three pieces of legislation that would reform the state’s law on letting adoptees seek their identifying information.

Lamping says he’s following up on legislation filed in the 2011 legislative session. Senate Bill 713, would add clarity to SB 351, which allows adoptees to obtain information on their biological parents if they can obtain consent from the parent or prove the parent was deceased or unknown. Lamping says this would help clarify situations in which there is no death certificate to prove a biological parent is deceased and no evidence, after a reasonable investigation is conducted, to prove the parent is still alive.

Similar measures have been proposed in years past, but have not been signed into law. Such legislation has received support from various advocacy groups, birth parents, adoptees and adoptive parents, some for life-or-death medical situations. One group has staunchly opposed releasing identifying information on the basis that a parent’s right to privacy would be compromised, and that is the Catholic Church.

Other adoption reform legislation is “aimed at getting more Missouri orphans in adoptive homes by increasing the efficiency of the process,” Lamping says. “My goal is to help parents experience the miracle of adoption and children to find forever homes.”

The adoption process can currently take up to two years or more. Senate Bill 711 would help expedite the process by prohibiting the court from using the race of a child, of the biological parents or of the potential adoptive parents as a consideration when placing a child with adoptive parents.

Another bill, Senate Bill 712, would modify the Special Needs Adoption Tax Credit by prohibiting a child’s ethnic background, or membership in a minority group, from being the sole factor used to consider the child as “special needs.” Lamping says under this bill, a child will still be considered a “special needs child” if he or she has a specific factor or condition, such as age, membership in a sibling group, medical condition or handicap because of which it would be reasonable to conclude the child cannot easily be placed with adoptive parents.

 

Filed Under: Crime & Courts, Featured, Human Interest, Legislature, News
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