Dan Verbeck

If you blanch at the state of the economy, put yourself in the shoes of budget-handlers of the Kansas City police department. At a recent Board of Commissioners meeting , members did not seem to be too disturbed. The deficit is $5.6 million. A good portion is from gasoline prices. Deputy Chief Cy Ritter tells KCUR reimbursement from the city is three dollars a gallon when more than $3.60 has been common. In Colonel Ritter's words:

"It's going to cost us about $885,000 additional dollars. And that's what we're going to ask the city for."

A high school diploma is like a roadmap away from jail.

Kansas' attorney general joined lawmen from some of Kansas City's largest suburban cities to issue a report card even as the school year is just beginning.

Sleeves rolled to the elbow, Attorney General Steven Six leaned into a podium at Kansas City police headquarters, saying:

"More than forty percent of area children drop out of high school. Nearly seventy percent of prison inmates don't have diplomas. The answer is early education."

A contract is sealed between 47 men and women and the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese. Bishop Robert Finn admits plaintiffs suffered sexual abuse when they were young boys or girls over a period that spanned five decades.

Outside Crown Center District law offices, where arbitrations are deciding how $10 million in church funds will be divided among the 47, lawyers say the atmosphere inside is so charged nearly everyone has been weeping.

A tentative settlement has been reached between 47 men and the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic diocese. Lawyers for plaintiffs say the diocese will pay $10 million. And money is not the key.

After months of negotiations the settlement began taking form late yesterday. Some of the charges date back four and five decades. Plaintiffs' attorney Patrick Noaker says the chief goal was reform.

During a hastily called meeting with reporters, the Catholic bishop of the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese says it happened, it shouldn't have and he's making amends.

Bishop Robert Finn acknowledges the $10 million settlement of lawsuits against a dozen present and former clergy accused of sexual abuse. Forty-seven people, most of whom were boys and girls at the time, filed suit in Jackson County Missouri Circuit Court claiming abuse beginning as far back as fifty years. The diocese was accused of negligence. Now all are settled.

Will Missouri State lawmakers listen to tax innovation? Kansas City supporters of a sales-tax-free district will learn next year, now that Jackson County legislators have joined Kansas City Council counterparts signing off on the growth stimulus effort.

American Airlines will keep some form of an overhaul base at KCI into the near future. The mayor and a top airline vice president say so after a 90-minute city hall meeting.

Financially wounded American Air will honor its million-dollar-a-year lease with the city, which owns the base. The contract calls for keeping 700 jobs there. However, neither side will address whether the jobs requirement is still intact in the 25-year contract term.

Claycomo, MO – A Democratic Senator from Michigan takes the Barack Obama message to autoworkers in the Kansas City Northland.

Senator Debbie Stabenow says many workers see the current administration as racing to the bottom:
loss of jobs, pensions, healthcare; And they want to race to the top, with free trade and investing in education.

She sees Senator John McCain in the "bottom race." At the Claycomo Ford Plant, Stabenow has this take on fuel efficient cars:

State law enforcers in Kansas are puzzled over a rise in incidence of methamphetamine labs, while it's completely different in suburban Johnson County.

First seven months of the year, as many meth cookers have been found as in all of 2007 across the state. Ninety Seven. Johnson County? Not a one. In all of last year there was just one. And that was a dumping of chemicals or equipment. Sheriff's Deputy Tom Erickson says this to KCUR,

Four casino corporations are trying to take as much gamble' as they can, out of a venture ultimately worth billions of dollars in Wyandotte County, Kansas.

In the building race for President of the United States, Senator Barack Obama's veterans affairs advisors in Missouri have been listening to former military personnel at meetings around the state, while his GOP opponent, Senator John McCain's counterparts call their candidate a 'tireless advocate for our troops.'

By Dan Verbeck

Kansas City, MO – Senator Barack Obama's veteran affairs advisors in Missouri have been listening to former military members at meetings around the state. Ten veterans and soldier's widow told their stories Monday at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City.

The soldiers wanted assurances that veterans' benefits will increase, starting with a GI bill of rights.

The widow of a Vietnam War medic, Kathleen Aylward, said that families must be more involved in veteran care.

A bi-state light rail approach seems unattainable in the short term, so Kansas City's mayor has brought in colleagues from other states to coach.

Mayoral caucuses of the kind sought by Mayor Mark Funkhouser are in place in Colorado and Greater Chicagoland to lobby for state and federal backing on transit, air quality, water issues and crime. The transit issue got a lot of attention.

Kansas metro-suburban leaders aren't taken with Funkhouser's transit plan, and it was tough enough getting a lot of support on the Missouri side.

The Missouri Democratic Party picked a symbolic location to draw support for the Fall campaign.

Observers watched and listened by the statue of Harry Truman on the old Independence Square.

After a weekend in which three people were killed by guns in Kansas City and another seven were shot, the police department becomes centerpiece for Mayor Mark Funkhouser's efforts to be part of the more than 320-member bipartisan group of mayors nationwide committed to getting illegal guns off the streets.