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Senate bill would move Missouri’s steamboat and state museums–funded by casino boat fees

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Dishes found on the wreck of the Arabia

A bill awaiting a vote in a Missouri Senate Committee would fund construction and operation of a new museum in Jefferson City all about the steamboat era in Missouri.

Bill sponsor, Sen. Mike Bernskoetter of Jefferson City, says the funds should come from fees collected from casinos for each person who boards gambling riverboats because that is where today’s gaming industry initially gained steam in Missouri. In the year 2000, state law was changed to allow gambling boats to stay docked.

The bill would increase the fee from $2.00 to $3.00, which is shared among the communities where casinos are docked, the Missouri Veterans Commission and the state.

Goods excavated from the Arabia, which hit a log and sank in 1856. The museum touts the artifacts as the largest collection of of pre-Civil War artifacts in the world

The bill would fund moving the Arabia Steamboat Museum and its contents from Kansas City to Jefferson City.

The lease runs out on the Kansas City building in 2026 and the Pittsburgh, Pa., company that built the riverboat Arabia wants the remains of the boat for display.

“I think it would be terrible to let it go to another state,” Bernskoetter says, “It’s part of our history.”

“This would be a way to keep the museum here in Missouri without costing general revenue or taxing people some other way,” he says.

Bernskoetter says the Missouri State Museum, which is inside the capitol building, could be moved and rebuilt to accommodate the steamboat facility and more.

“We’re only one of two states that have the state museum in the Capitol,” he says. “I think the state museum to display artifacts from the state of Missouri would be better suited to be outside of the Capitol and leave the Capitol more for learning about the legislative process.”

The $40 million in revenue for the Steamboat Legacy Fund would also help recover sunken steamboats along the Missouri River, he says.

“There’s the steamboat Malta up near Malta Bend, there’s 400 of them all along the length of Missouri but there’s 200 of them in the Kansas City to St. Louis region,” he says. “There’s about six of them that they would like to dig up that are from different time frames, five or six different decades.”

Bernskoetter says if the bill passes, there are plans to put the museum on former prison property on the east side of Jefferson City.

The new museum would open on the 200th anniversary of Jefferson City becoming the state capital of Missouri.

Copyright © 2019 · Missourinet

Missouri flooding update: road outage list, governor warns of water dangers

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There are 104 roads closed because of flooding. Access the entire list here. Also check the MoDOT Traveler Information Map for road closures at traveler.modot.org/map.

MoDOT continues to work with Nebraska and Iowa to provide alternate routes while major roads are closed, including I-29 near Rock Port. Northbound I-29 traffic into Iowa is being detoured at I-35 in Kansas City, where travelers will continue north on I-35 into Iowa.

From Des Moines, travelers will drive west on I-80 and continue onto I-680 to connect back with I-29 near the Council Bluffs/Omaha metro area in Iowa.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol has additional marine operations troopers and swift-water rescue equipment in northwest Missouri. The patrol conducted three swift water rescues in Holt County over the weekend and troopers are going house-to-house in Watson, Missouri, after the levee breach on the Nishnabotna River.

Rhonda Wiley, Emergency Management Coordinator for Atchison County says some people are not taking seriously the dangers of moving water. “Part of the problem is from people who are not from this area, that are rerouting through our area. Even though they have had to pass barricades, and pass detour signs. They just keep coming out to where they’re trying to find a way around to get to Nebraska, to get to Omaha.”

Governor Mike Parson urges Missourians to use caution around floodwater as Missouri River levels near cresting at major flood stage in some Missouri communities. Rain will move into the western part of the state tonight through Wednesday morning but is expected to have minimal effect on current river levels.

He cautioned that despite Missouri River crests this week, flooding will remain a hazard well into the spring because of a combination of additional melting now from the north and saturated ground.

According to a press release, the Missouri Emergency Management Agency assisted the city of St. Joseph with recruiting volunteers for sandbagging efforts with the coordination of AmeriCorps St. Louis, Missouri Adventist Community Services, Missouri Baptist Disaster Relief, and the Missouri Department of Corrections.

Inmates from the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center have been helping with sandbagging in the northeastern town of Clarksville along the Mississippi River.

In Holt County, a water treatment facility is shut down operations because of flooding. The Salvation Army has provided bottled water to the area.

The governor’s office warns that standing water can carry infectious diseases and hide other hazards, including road damage, glass, and sewage. Storm drains can create an extremely dangerous situation for anyone caught in the current. Avoid walking through floodwater and keep children from playing in it.

Missouri medical marijuana program releases proposed rules for facilities

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The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) has released its second set of draft rules for the state’s first medical marijuana program.

The latest set of DHSS rules address dispensaries and other medical marijuana facilities.

The new draft covers “cultivation facilities, dispensary facilities, infused products manufacturing facilities and medical marijuana establishments in general.” Read draft rules.

The rules, for instance, set limits on how many facilities can be owned by one entity, separate testing facilities from dispensaries, regulate waste and byproduct disposal and set distances between facilities and schools, daycares and churches.

The DHSS Section for Medical Marijuana Regulation released rules for qualified patients and primary caregivers in February. The agency held public forums in Jefferson City, Poplar Bluff, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield in January and February to hear more about the needs of patients and caregivers.

Lyndall Fraker, Director of the DHSS Section for Medical Marijuana Regulation, says, “All feedback we received was considered, and is still being considered, as we continue drafting the rules.”

Public feedback can still be submitted on feedback on these drafts using the online suggestion form.

Jack Cardetti, a spokesman for Missouri medical cannabis trade association (MoCannTrade), praises DHSS for taking the time to hear from citizens and stakeholders before creating rules.

“It’s a steep hill. [The Missouri Constitution] lays some fairly aggressive timeline to get applications out to patients, applications out to those who want to be involved in cultivation and dispensary and they have done a nice job,” Cardetti told Missourinet.

The June 4 deadline to have the program plan in place was created in an amendment to the Missouri Constitution approved by voters this past November. But the process of creating such a program is new to the state.

Lisa Cox, DHSS spokesperson, calls the effort “monumental.”

Remaining rules include sales, transportation, physicians and healthcare providers, and taxation.

I-29 closed at Missouri/Iowa border due to flooding (MODOT detour instructions)

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The Missouri Department of Transportation has closed Interstate 29 at Rock Port (MM 110) at the Missouri/Iowa border due to flooding in Iowa.

Anyone wanting to use I-29 northbound should use I-35 and then I-80 into Iowa. For more information visit: https://www.modot.org/2019-northwest-missouri-flooding

Here are some important safety reminders:

  • Don’t drive through any flooded areas. A few extra minutes for a detour could lead to a life saved.
  • MoDOT reminds motorists it only takes six inches of water (or less!) to lose control of your vehicle and possibly be swept into rising floodwaters.
  • Any time there is water over the roadway, there may be unseen damage to the road surface below.
  • Stay alert and do not drive through water over a roadway or around construction barricades. MoDOT encourages all motorists to Turn Around! Don’t Drown!

More Information

Full closures of I-29 are in place at

US 136 at Rock Port, Mo. (Exit 110); and

Iowa 92 South of Council Bluffs, Iowa (Exit 48)

Those who would normally use I-29 as a through route should instead use

I-35 N from Kansas City to

I-80 West in Des Moines to

I-29 near the Council Bluffs/Omaha metro area

and vice-versa until further notice.

Travelers already on I-29 North

Drivers who are currently heading north on I-29 should use US 71 North north of St. Joseph to I-35 if possible.

Those north of the US 71 junction can continue to Rock Port and take US 136 East to US 71 North to I-35. DO NOT take US 275 North. Flooding in Hamburg, Iowa will block your progress.

 

New federal broadband funds can help rural Missouri — if utilities buy in (AUDIO)

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State Representative Louis Riggs, R-Hannibal, tells the story of a constituent who runs a major hog farm operation and has had to drive to a McDonald’s in another town to have the broadband to upload important veterinary records.

That constituent is Missouri’s Director of Agriculture, Chris Chinn.

Chinn lives in Shelby County in northeast Missouri, a spot that did not qualify for the most recent round of FCC outreach to underserved areas, the Connect America Fund, Phase II (CAFII)   Missouri telecommunications companies qualified for almost $255 million of CAFII money.

Rep. Louis Riggs in committee

Riggs represents eight of the most underserved counties in the state and applauds the most recent round of federal funding: $550 million in subsidies provided by the USDA Rural Utilities Service pilot program to help in underserved rural and Tribal areas with a population of 20,000 or less.

The FCC Broadband Progress Report shows that 1.25 million Missourians don’t have access to high-speed Internet (25mpbs/3mbps). The majority of those citizens live in rural communities. Between 50 and 60 percent of rural residents do not have broadband internet access, according to various sources.

Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks was in Kansas City last week to discuss these funds which were OK’d by Congress and President Trump on February 15 to avoid another government shutdown.

Riggs says Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, Rep. Jason Smith, Sen. Roy Blunt and all of the Missouri Congressional delegation have focused tirelessly on broadband. It’s now up to the utilities to buy in, including all of the rural electric cooperatives. Not all of the co-ops, governed by local boards, want to undertake this additional infrastructure.

“It is a substantial investment,” Riggs concedes.

“They are, to my mind, the major players across the state in terms of getting fiber to the homes, the gold standard,” Riggs says. “The folks who want to grow their tax base, get more money for our schools, rural roads and bridges, this is the ideal way. We don’t have to raise anybody’s taxes; we just increase the value of the property they own.”

He says his local research shows that property value can increase by $3,000 to $5,000 with high-speed fiber to the home.

Riggs also argues that this is the best way to keep or bring young farmers back to Missouri. “The FFA students who want to take over the family farm are not going to if they are kept in the dark.”

“The young folks who are coming online are using precision agriculture…it’s what’s being taught in the schools,” he says.

Along with the investment of utilities, Riggs insists it is up to Missouri legislators to “step up” and make it work, including approving the $5 million Gov. Mike Parson has requested to enable the work of the state Broadband Office.

Riggs has also introduced HB1162 to keep the awarded broadband funds in the state if a provider fails to perform.

In the first round of Connect America Funds auction, AT&T won $400 million, then declined to build out.

He says the state is in a much better position to find another provider.   Read Missourinet’s coverage of the Broadband Development Office.

“It’s to say, give us the benefit of the doubt here,” he says. “We’re light years ahead of where we were a year ago today.”

 

New team to track down thousands of untested rape kits across Missouri: “It’s a long time coming.”

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The state’s top law enforcement agency does not know how many untested rape kits remain in crime labs and hospital storage rooms across Missouri.

But they have six months to find out.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt (L) Wednesday announces the appointment of M. Keithley Williams, a former Jasper County judge and for the past 11 years, a treatment court administrator in St. Louis.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt tapped Judge M. Keithly Williams to be the state coordinator of the newly-established Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. The program is funded by a $2.8 million federal grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, applied for by the previous state Attorney General Josh Hawley.

Schmitt says his office will hire staff, who have six months to determine how many rape kits remain untested in order to get the remaining 75 percent of the grant.

Williams says this inventory will be very different than the previous “suggested” inventory of 5,400 samples.

“When that inventory, or that suggested inventory, was discovered, about 40 percent of the agencies actually responded to the survey and about 40 percent of the hospitals responded to the survey so we actually don’t know what we’re going to find when the inventory begins,” Williams said Wednesday.

“This inventory will be very different. It’s not just calling and asking ‘how many do you have?’ We’ll actually be helping law enforcement and the hospital staff do a physical count, record the information, have it prepared to put in a database so we will know precisely the location of each untested kit and we’ll know where to begin our task.”

Schmitt says part of the process is finding out from law enforcement why there’s a backlog. Late last year, CNN highlighted the Springfield Police Department for destroying older, untested rape kits.

“We really do want to work in a cooperative way. Testing takes money and that’s part of this grant process too,” he said. “It takes an incredible amount of courage for a victim to come forward and submit to this test–and they deserve to know answers.”

Once they build a database, those involved in a rape case should have access to the information they need: hospitals, police departments and victims who can look up the status of their individual case.

“This is really an ongoing process, we haven’t yet started the planning,” Williams said. “I suspect it’s going to take years, to be honest. It’s a long-time coming.”

 

 

 

 

Senior congressional lawmakers, Blunt and Cleaver fret over emergency declaration

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The U.S. House plans to vote as early as tomorrow on a resolution to President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration to fund construction of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, R-5th, has served in Congress 14 years.

Missouri’s 5th District Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, a senior Majority House Whip, says the measure will most likely be vetoed but the vote can help gauge the opinion of Congress.

“What we hope is that if we pass this at a level where the president would not have a capability to veto, then he’d say ‘the legislative branch of government is significantly opposed to this so I’m going to back away,” he told Missourinet.

Most of Missouri’s congressional Republicans are likely to vote against the Democrat-led bill, putting the blame on Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusal to fund a border wall.

But some Republicans have questioned the declaration—at least in comments to the press. Senior Senator Roy Blunt and a few GOP colleagues say this sets a troublesome precedent of side-stepping congressional power.

“It’s an issue that the country has debated and the Congress has debated for some time. There are a number of emergency declarations out there, none of them involve a situation where the president asks the Congress to appropriate money and they didn’t do it,” Blunt told Missourinet.

Senator Roy Blunt addresses the Missouri House on April 4, 2018 (file photo courtesy of Tim Bommel at House Communications)

“Just because I’m for what this president wants to do doesn’t mean that I’d want to establish a precedent that would allow the next president to decide that any number of issues are emergencies, he said.”

Cleaver, looking ahead, agrees, saying there has been an erosion of the legislative branch in the past 30 or 40 years.

“We’ve (Congress) surrendered some of it, and we’ve also had presidents take it away, all of them, Democrats and Republicans,” he said.  “When we have political overreach, if it’s our guy in power in the White House, we know it’s not right but we go along with it just simply because it’s our guy, not realizing that another president will eventually occupy the White House and we’ll continue the trek down this wrong road.”

If the president’s emergency declaration authority gets heard in federal courts, Cleaver thinks the high courts would side with the president based on recent cases.

“The president does have some broad powers that were given to the executive branch…over the past few years; we’re three decades behind,” Cleaver added.

Another issue is that the presidential order could stall three military construction projects in Missouri, according to a list published by House Democrats last week.

Missouri’s senior U.S. Senator Roy Blunt addressed the list Thursday, saying he hopes these are not “somewhere the president would look.”

Pelosi’s list says two projects, including a hospital, at Fort Leonard Wood would be threatened, along with the new National Geospatial-Intelligence facility (NGA West) planned for outside St. Louis.

“In both cases it may take that long to bid the project and have people ready to start future work anyhow, but these are both critically important, particularly NGA, both to what’s going to happen in development in north St. Louis and what’s going to happen in the actual security of the country,” Blunt told the press in St. Louis Thursday.

Cleaver said no funds for defense contractors to get started means no connected tax revenue for Missouri and, he warned, “It would further ignite the ugly part of government I have witnessed over the last 14 years that I call revenge politics.”

Cleaver and his staff are looking to the War Powers Act for a remedy:  “I don’t want to repeal it because it’s important, we need it to be in place like when we had 9-11. But we need to rework it to protect the legislative branch a little bit more.”

Missouri Rep. Shamed Dogan on Gov. Northam: There is no forgiveness without contrition

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Democrats and Republicans are calling for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to resign from office because his personal page in his 1984 medical school yearbook shows two people in blackface and a KKK hood and robe–and because of how he has handled the incident since.

Missouri state lawmaker, Republican Shamed Dogan of Ballwin says in his first two press conferences, Northam missed a chance to make amends.

“He did not talk about how he had changed in the thirty plus years since then and I just felt it was a missed opportunity for him to really talk about the legacy of racism and to talk about his own evolution personally,” Dogan told Missourinet.

Today, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring admitted to dressing in blackface when he was in college in 1980, “like rappers we listened to at the time.”

Herring said a press statement, “I have a glaring example from my past that I have thought about with deep regret in the many years since, and certainly each time I took a step forward in public service, realizing that my goals and this memory could someday collide and cause pain for people I care about.”

Gov. Northam apologized for being in the photo on his bio page, then in a subsequent press conference, he said he was not. In a press conference, he did say he dressed in blackface to portray Michael Jackson and win a dance contest.

Representative Dogan says there is no forgiveness without real contrition. “What does it say to a little black girl when she knows that someone like that can grow up to be the governor of the state and have power and influence over her life. It just sets us backwards. I’ve seen some people lodge accusations that this is about political correctness; no, it’s about moral correctness.”

Dogan says his call for Northam to resign is not partisan, citing the GOP outrage over comments from Iowa Republican Steve King.

And in Missouri, Dogan says the state Legislature has recently grappled with a similar issue when Democratic Representative Bob Burns appeared on a radio show that House Democrats say fosters “racist, on-air statements.”

“That’s painful to us sitting right here in Missouri. We’re not done having these conversations and it’s especially painful for us to have these conversations during Black History Month.”

 

Missourinet Midterm Election Report for 7:40 and 8:10p.m. (AUDIO)

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The polls closed more than an hour ago with people still standing in line in some parts of the state waiting to vote.  The Secretary of State’s Office has not opened its reporting web site as of this hour because ballots have not begun coming in from St. Louis County. Missourinet’s Brian Hauswirth and political historian Bob Priddy review turnout and races to watch. Reporter Jill Enders joins our broadcast from St. Louis and Claire McCaskill headquarters.

Listen to the 7:40 and 8:10 election reports.