a seismic shift in kansas is one of the leading candidates for governor drops out of the race kci back in the spotlight but is it a story of secrecy or silliness are our seniors at risk area nursing homes say they could lose thousands of workers as the white house threatens to cut funding if they don't require all staff be vaccinated and then lucas slapped with another lawsuit over mask mandates this time it's from parents we just need to be able to have rights my body my choice those stories are the rest of the week's news straight ahead on week in review week in review is made possible through the generous support of aarp kansas city dave and jamie cummings bob and marlese gourley the courtney s turner charitable trust john h mize and bank of america n.a co-trustees and by viewers like you thank you welcome everyone i'm nick haines and thank you for joining us on our weekly journey through the most impactful confusing and befuddling stories in our metro helping make sense of it all this week from the anchor desk at 41 news dia wall is with us from the tribune news service nationally syndicated columnist mary sanchez from kmbc 9 news chief political reporter michael mahoney and from the pages of your kansas city star dave helling now i've mentioned before on this program that we have a kansas side viewer called frank who writes to let me know how many minutes we talk about missouri issues on this program and how many minutes we actually talk about kansas so frank doesn't feel shortchanged i'm going to start this week in kansas where a seismic shift is underway this week who could have predicted this one of the leading candidates trying to beat governor laura kelly as dropped out of the race former republican governor jeff colyer says he has prostate cancer and is endorsing now his main rival attorney general derek schmidt you know i've been pulling lots of stories from around the country of candidates who have run for higher office who found out they had cancer and yet they continued their campaigns north dakota senator heidi heitkamp is one of those michael mahoney she was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was running for governor in fact had chemotherapy three weeks before the election that she continued on is it just the cancer or is there more to this there's a little more to it than that um if uh you talk to the insiders in republican politics in the state of uh kansas uh you will know or you'll find out that uh the collier campaign was not happy with its fundraising and they were very worried that they didn't have the financial resources and they were really banging the donor drums really hard it was not the reason that uh he dropped out of the race but it was going to be a problem for the collier campaign going up against uh derrick schmidt in this race and so uh fundraising was an issue on this and uh uh now it pretty much clears the deck there may be other candidates to get in uh get into this this race but it clearly makes uh derek smith now the uh the prohibited front-runner for the republican nomination uh for governor next year we know this is now going to be a steep curve dave helling for laura kelly and it's also the fact that president trump is not going to be on the ballot as it was when she first ran for office shows there's a record to run on now but if you were advising her what would be the best path forward for her she now knows who to focus on if we assume that derek schmidt is going to be the republican nominee so she'll want to spend some time watching him and understanding him um but he is she covet is going to be a huge issue the response to cove but if covet seems to be in the rearview mirror next year that will help her she needs to work on the labor department nick that's been a big issue and will be a big issue for republicans and then finally she's going to have a donny brook with republicans in the legislature this year on taxes spending other issues confronting the state of kansas it's very clear republicans will try to set her up for failure to help derek schmidt in the fall so those three things are the things that i would concentrate on if i were laura kelly um i think derek smith has a very clear path now dear one the thing i want to throw in too we are in a bi-state metro missouri has been at the top of every list in terms of cases hospitalizations drama with covet 19. i know people have a lot of opinions about this but overwhelmingly kansas has largely navigated this pandemic wholly apart from some of the drama we've seen across the state line so i do think that's something that governor laura kelly is going to try to run on remember four years ago she won in large part because she was not kris kobach and kobach was a very polarizing figure derek schmidt is not polarizing in the way that kobach was so if he can make her the issue and her performance the issue then it's an uphill battle for the democrat if on the other hand she can say as my colleagues have pointed out hey the health of the state fiscally is in pretty good shape the schools are funded uh you know we've we've overcome some real problems then i think she might be the favorite and the fact that he doesn't have a major opponent now mary sanchez doesn't moderate his campaign he doesn't have to run to the far right he can come towards the center absolutely and you can just read the tea leaves and then play to it um and we'll see i do think covet is going to be the big issue though whether we're over more of the hum but where we are now or not that's just going to be massive remember that spat over police funding in kansas city this week the whole issue finally got a hearing in court a jackson county judge heard arguments from the kansas city board of police commissioners that argues the mayor defunded police when he withheld 42 million dollars from the department in may and in fact if they don't get that money back they will be forced to cut loose a thousand officers and staff members they say well the mayor says that's nonsense he just trying to hold the police department accountable now that's very different views two very different views on the issue what side did the judge come down michael didn't come down on either side yet he took the case under advisement and the both sides have another week from last wednesday to file additional appoints with the judge i don't think that we're going to see an uh uh an opinion from judge campbell uh at least for a week probably quite quite a bit longer than that it was really dramatic testimony though dear wall we heard for instance that if 42 million dollars isn't restored to the budget the metro and central police divisions would have to shut down entirely the east patrol division would face about a 40 percent cut uh in staffing so the mayor can say that's nonsense but that sounds incredibly dramatic and eye-catching to the public it does and it's one of those things where it's very hard to get to the nitty-gritty of how much each of these officers cost right my question would be a thousand people is 42 million which i would say is what a little bit more than 20 percent of the budget if my math is correct here where's all the other money going right and that's something that i think we as journalists have continued to push for give us the accounting because when this first bubbled up i remember the fraternal order of police coming out saying oh it's gonna be two or three hundred officers then that ballooned to four or five hundred officers now we're in court it's a thousand officers and three patrols are going to have to shut down and so i think this is partially a strategy but it definitely is something where we are going to have to do independent analysis of where this money is going and how this is really going to impact the department but what about the mayor's accounting 42 million dollars was going to go into a community services fund mary and we still haven't heard where any of that money would go he did list in terms of just generally what types of crime prevention things they wanted to move towards but the actual decisions were to be made between the board of police commissioners police input and with the city manager it was kind of a change up of how things are done now which is what they're pushing back on but it's just it's horrible that so much has occurred that has confused the public and that has drawn up racial implications i find that egregious on everyone's part now while this police funding dispute plays out in court several members of the city council say they can't just stand by and wait they've introduced an ordinance that would use more than two million dollars of the city's pandemic relief monday to fund more police officers on the streets and we can't wait the people of kansas city need more policemen on the street it affects us over here in the black community because response time was already one thing but now it's even worse that's city councilwoman heather hall and neighborhood leader pat clarke how has that proposal then been received dave helling uh it remains under a consideration it hasn't passed yet let me also say this the police board in court yesterday basically conceded that the council does have the right to cut 42 million dollars at budget time in march that uh the illegality here was that the cut came in may after the border cemented its own budget that means that next year will be just a battle royal because the whatever the court decides the city council has been told that you need not spend more than 20 percent of your general fund about 150 million dollars on police and anything above that is discretionary you can do it in a contract you cannot spend it at all the police board nor the courts can order you to spend more than 20 percent of your general revenue on the cops and that will set up a huge battle next february and march when members of the council who agreed to cut 42 million dollars will now have another crack at the app you know the police may have a lot on their plates right now but one thing they shouldn't stop doing is arresting people on marijuana possession charges that was the plea this week from the clay and platte county prosecutors who appeared before the board of police commissioners drug cases are important because intervening in drug cases can prevent later violence people getting killed and shot over just small amounts of marijuana so what is an officer to do the jackson county prosecutor says she doesn't want police bringing her any of those cases she's refusing to prosecute them so if you're in the jackson county section of kansas city an officer should let you go but if you happen to be in the clay and platte county sections of the city we should slap on the handcuffs dear wall oh boy first of all i have no opinion okay on that front what i can say is this um countless drug cases come across the desks of these these prosecutors no matter which county they're in that is overwhelmingly like the largest number of cases that get forward to the district attorney's office i did a story at the end of last year hundreds right it was something like 50 to 60 of the cases that were being forwarded to the jackson county prosecutor's office were drug cases and these were not dealers these were possession cases right so what the argument comes down to is what's the best use of time and resources and i would only offer these drug cases have been being prosecuted to this point and crime is still up just add this quickly and i wrote about this the absurdity of marijuana prosecutions and arrests in the kansas city region needs to be fixed as well you can go to jail for a joint north of the buck o'neill bridge you won't even end up in a courtroom for the same possession case south of the buck o'neill bridge that just doesn't make any sense remember marijuana remains illegal on the federal level so all of these cases are prosecutable what is a person to do what is the person to understand about the law and the fact is it's just confusing and that's a recipe for cynicism about how courts work and how police work that needs to be fixed we'll talk about confusion and cynicism four months ago gene peters baker apologized to a man who has spent the last 40 years in prison for a crime she says he didn't commit this week a judge was to finally decide the case of kevin strickland what happened michael nothing so far uh very laid just hours before this thursday hearing was supposed to happen the attorney general's office asked the missouri court of appeals western district here in kansas city we want to postpone on this because we are not ready to argue our point on this case because they believe that strickland should remain in jail and a lot of people believe that he was on the verge this weekend of being released after 43 years now it's up in the air but i do see that the missouri attorney general is not convinced that he's innocent though dear yeah he sent out um a briefing not that long ago listing all the different reasons why they believe that he's guilty in this case prosecutor's office goes back to two main points on this one there's zero physical evidence that connects him to the crime this is what they're arguing and the main person who identified strickland and said that he was the guy who did it recanted her testimony as well so in their eyes in the eyes of a lot of other folks this man has been in prison 43 years and they believe that this is a travesty of justice now i will also add um we at kshb reported that uh the attorney general said that they did not have enough time to prepare very very quickly in addition to the key witnesses uh retracting her testimony two of the folks who pled guilty in this case in the triple shooting also has stated that strickland was not involved mary you know for people who struggle to understand what systemic racism is they might want to look closer at this case and closer with the actions that the state of missouri has taken in all these cases that have been proposed to be a wrongful conviction because this dragging of feat and the complete inability to even look at the fact that the criminal justice system may have done something wrong in the past and therefore be willing to correct it that is a huge problem and that's what this sounds like they just don't want to even face that issue is this next story important to you or not shout at the screen to let me know it involves kci we haven't talked about that for a while four years after city officials were blasted for hatching a secret deal to pick the developer of the new terminal the kansas city star says city hall is at it again this time picking the firm that will run all of the new terminals restaurants bars and stores in a secret deal that without any public scrutiny the mayor says the whole story is silly he says the city has kept the bidding private to protect the integrity of the process so what's wrong with that dave helly well that's the city's procurement process which is to keep the bids secret until a special committee can review them make a recommendation it becomes public the council decides now despite all of the criticism a couple of years ago which i am intimately familiar with on the on the decision to pick edgemoor the exact same process was used when edgemoor was picked as the developer at the airport you had bids you had a special committee the problem with the original proposal was burns and mack was trying to go around the procurement process no bids no discussion just appoint us and we'll do it so this is just more of the same we've said before that it's not the best way to do business because these things are going to become public and therefore politicized anyway and i think that's what the concern is with this vendor's contract once it gets into the public the council is going to be involved one way or another i just want to rewind the tape for a moment while mayor lucas supports a private process now here's what he said four years ago when the controversy erupted over burns and mcdonnell as dave helling mentioned being awarded the contract to build the new terminal of kci and a secret deal crafted by then mayor sly james for some reason early in this process secrecy became the rule as opposed to actually just being the exception frankly i think that the more eyeballs on something the more people understand something the better sunshine sunlight is the best disinfectant is there a difference though between uh the process for building the entire airport though dear and just a contract just to run the shops and the restaurants uh no this is not just a contract to run the shops and the restaurants it is the most lucrative right deal within the airport right this whoever gets this contract is going to make a lot of money but don't you think mary most of us do we really actually care about this are we more interested in is this going to be on time is this going to be on budget i hope it isn't an ugly airport i hope it's cool and i don't have to travel too far for my car to get to my airline gate isn't that what we're more concerned about well it depends on the person i do think increasingly the general public does want more openness and transparency in all things and so it's good to be asking for this i like the fact that the um city manager's office of our has already said that once this is decided and apparently the choice has already been made once the contracts are all done they are going to open it up to the general view of where the proposals came from i do think to your point though people are really more interested in who's going to be the barbecue vendor up there and some of the most popular brands in kansas city have already said that they don't want anything to do with it because they lose control of their product when you do it in this large scale under you know the oversight of another vendor in other news this week kansas city mayor quinta lucas slapped with another lawsuit over mask mandates this time it's from parents a group calling itself the northland parent association filed the lawsuit this week in federal court we want to be able to choose whether to send our kids a mask or not we're not against them we're not saying that they have to totally go out the door we just need to be able to have rights be able like my body my choice the northland parent association also filed suit against the city of north kansas city and seven area school districts that serve the northland is the lawsuit doing anything dear wall to change mask policies in any of those places no um here's the deal i'm so tired i'm so tired i'm so tired of talking about mass mandates in schools here's the reality the districts that did not mandate masks are dealing with hundreds of kids in quarantine they are canceling fall sports they are running into issues having enough educators to even staff the buildings i don't think that it's political but apparently it's become political this is an issue of public health and we are seeing all of these different battles all of this litigation but at the end of the day all our health officials a lot of our public officials educators want is for these kids to put on these masks so they can stay in school and parents can retain their sanity to answer your question no do i think this is the last we're going to see of lawsuits about masks and other mitigation no but i'm tired are parents just voting with their feet though now mary i see that private schools are now seeing a huge increase in enrollment homeschooling has doubled according to the census bureau in the last six months well some of those changes did occur as you know classrooms went to zoom and people still had to work how do we manage this so people were trying were in a bind they were trying to figure out where can i place my child homeschooling certainly did increase for a little while you're going to see a small uptick i don't think it is this massive run for the private schools because frankly that is out of the financial pocketbook of most families so i don't know that you're going to see this to dia's point it will just continue you can sue anyone over anything and one of the things that was generally missed and frankly a lot of news coverage is that it's really just a small group of people relatively who are just going to be the adamant anti-vaxxers there is another huge component of people who are swayable and unfortunately i think as we continue with this pandemic as people see the problems as perhaps they unfortunately have someone in their family get ill or god forbid die you're going to see more of the change are many of our seniors now at risk not from covid but from no one to look after them area nursing homes fear and exodus of thousands of care staff now that the biden administration has told elder care facilities if you don't require all staff be vaccinated you will lose all federal medicare and medicaid funding it's an even bigger deal where we live because uh in missouri for instance they have the third lowest rate of staff vaccinations with less than half of elder care workers getting the job the numbers are slightly higher in kansas but there are some nursing facilities we found in the state where most of the staff are still unvaccinated take a look at some of these like in bonner springs at the rehab center there where just 28 of staff are vaccinated at the overland park center for rehabilitation 29 of staff and even an expensive big name nursing facilities like a tall grass creek in overland park and vaccinated care our staff are still in the majority interestingly the man pushing back against the mandate is the former democratic governor of kansas who now leads the nation's biggest nursing home association mark parkinson overnight we have a mandate and they're fired if they don't get the vaccine they're just not going to be enough workers to take care of the residents in our buildings we think that we could lose tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of employees so while the push is on michael to get people vaccinated is this one of the consequences of that if you do that you might not be able to get the staff to actually do the job yeah it's a very difficult dilemma all the way around one would think uh on one level that if you've got nursing home folks who are working with a high risk population to begin with that the vaccination rates would be high uh among that workforce but obviously as you just showed our folks it's it's not the case there's a big resistance about it and here's the other thing is this is a very difficult job okay it's not a pleasant job and it's a hard job and if they have a problem with vaccine mandate uh in these they're going to struggle to find a replacement workers is that also why the chamber of commerce this week put out a survey and found that only 15 of their members are considering even doing uh vaccination policies for all workers at this point in time yes because i think you're you're talking about a lot of service-based industries these jobs and healthcare and in nursing homes where you really do rely on a healthy mix right and churn of people to fill those roles another thing that we need to consider when kids were not in school when restaurants and businesses were shut down people lost employment overnight they also lost child care and so a lot of people particularly women have dropped out of the workforce and so now when you're asking people to go back into these environments you really do have to consider what do the wages look like are there benefits involved people are considering a whole pie in a way that they probably weren't before the pandemic the thing that we also should consider a lot of states across the country have passed protection laws so that you can't sue a nursing home so for example if i got to put my mom in a nursing home that has 25 vaccination rate god forbid she gets the virus and dies then what where does the liability or responsibility rather for that kind of stand so i think this is a very complicated issue that we're getting into just add quickly that the battle over mandatory vaccines will be the next big political dispute in our area and in our country two hospitals st luke's and ku hospital both said they're going to require vaccines for their employees which is why the chamber had its meeting to discuss what private businesses are going to do remember nick just quickly the fall is just going to be really bad for covet in this this this surge has come in the summer imagine what it's going to be when we get into the fall and winter months so that's the next battle coming now when you put a program like this together every week you can't get to every local story grabbing the headlines what was the big local story we missed funeral services this week for the missouri marine killed in that bomb attack at kabul airport jared schmitz from wentzville was just 20 years old and on his first overseas deployment tributes pouring in for one of kansas city's best known actors ed asner died this week he was 91. need to go to the emergency room prepare to wait one patient waiting more than 30 hours this week for a bed to open up at advent health shawnee mission bracing for hundreds of evictions in kansas city as the supreme court tosses out an emergency moratorium meant to stop renters from being removed from their homes the refugees are coming but man lucas says there'll be much fewer of them he says kansas city should expect between 50 and 100 displaced afghans and its labor day weekend and despite concerns over covid kansas city's biggest festivals are moving forward huge crowds expected at santa caligon days in independence irish fest at crown center and the renaissance festival in bonner springs dear walt did you pick one of those stories or something completely different something completely different this week our community lost a 23 year old police officer from overland park to covet 19. he spent more than a month on a ventilator our station reported that he was not vaccinated allow this to be my personal plea please get vaccinated so that we can protect the people in our community the people who sign up to protect us mary i chose ed asner um i did write about him for my column this week and re-read his autobiography and he is just so you can really tell that kansas city kansas was a huge part of who he was as a humanitarian michael mahoney it's a tie the increasing wait times in the emergency rooms is very ominous and the end of the eviction moratoriums and the dilemma that renters some especially low-income renters will now be facing dave helling the u.s supreme court's non-decision on a restrictive texas abortion law will reverberate around the country particularly in missouri and kansas look for both states to try and mirror that legislation in their next sessions unless the supreme court intervened and on that we will say our week has been reviewed our thanks to 41 news anchor dear wall channel 9's michael mahoney from the tribune news service mary sanchez and dave helling of your kansas city star and i'm nick haines have a safe labor day weekend from all of us at kansas city pbs be well keep calm and carry on