Kansas may be the most secretive state in the country, a Kansas City Star investigation shows. And it’s only gotten worse under Gov. Sam Brownback. By Neil Nakahodo and Leah Becerra
The statement was simple. Factual. A Kansas spokesperson was acknowledging that the state highway department didn’t have the money to rebuild a dangerous stretch of Interstate 70 that had been the scene of multiple wrecks and a grisly motorcycle fatality caught on video. “KDOT has lost a lot of money over the last few years,” the spokesperson said. “There’s just no funding at this point.”
Simple, yes. But in Gov. Sam Brownback’s cash-strapped administration, those were fighting words. Days later, the spokesperson was fired. “Your article was the nail in my coffin for being the face of KDOT,” the spokesperson said in an email to The Kansas City Star.
The terminated employee, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, had learned what it meant to cross the line — the one where the state of Kansas doesn’t discuss public business with Kansans.
Kansas runs one of the most secretive state governments in the nation, and its secrecy permeates nearly every aspect of service, The Star found in a months-long investigation. From the governor’s office to state agencies, from police departments to business relationships to health care, on the floors of the House and Senate, a veil has descended over the years and through administrations on both sides of the political aisle.
“My No. 1 question to anybody who opts in favor of nondisclosure is, ‘What are you trying to hide from us?’ ” said former Rep. John Rubin, a Johnson County Republican, calling Kansas “one of the most secretive, dark states in the country in many of these areas.”
What’s hidden are stories of regular Kansans who have suffered inside the silence. In the course of its investigation, The Star found that:
▪ Children known to the state’s Department for Children and Families suffer horrific abuse, while the agency cloaks its involvement with their cases, even shredding notes after meetings where children’s deaths are discussed, according to a former high-ranking DCF official. One grieving father told The Star he was pressured to sign a “gag order” days after his son was killed that would prevent him from discussing DCF’s role in the case. Even lawmakers trying to fix the troubled system say they cannot trust information coming from agency officials.
▪ In the past decade, more than 90 percent of the laws passed by the Kansas Legislature have come from anonymous authors. Kansans often had no way of knowing who was pushing which legislation and why, and the topics have included abortion, concealed weapons and school funding. Kansas is one of only a few states that allow the practice.
▪ When Kansas police shoot and kill someone, law enforcement agencies often escape scrutiny because they are allowed to provide scant details to the public. The release of body-cam video has become common practice around the country after several high-profile, police-involved shootings. But in Kansas, a new state law is one of the most restrictive in the nation, allowing agencies to shelve footage that could shed more light on controversial cases.
▪ Kansas became the first state to fully privatize Medicaid services in 2013, and now some caregivers for people with disabilities say they have been asked to sign off on blank treatment plans — without knowing what’s being provided. In some of those cases, caregivers later discovered their services had been dramatically cut.
The examples, when stitched together, form a quilt of secrecy that envelops much of state government. “Damn,” said Bob Stephan, a Republican and four-time Kansas attorney general. “That causes me concern. It’s very disheartening. … It’s gone crazy.”
Secrecy from the top down Many lawmakers who have attempted more openness in government say accountability has withered in the Brownback era. Sen. Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, has spent 41 years in the Legislature, making him the longest-serving lawmaker in Kansas history. He has served under eight governors — half of them Republicans, half Democrats.
“We’ve had a real problem with this current administration,” Hensley said. “This is the least transparent administration I have seen. To be able to even get basic information about issues like foster care and the corrections department, it’s next to impossible when you make an inquiry.”
Rubin pushed for transparency — often in vain — during his time in Topeka from 2011 to 2016. He was one of the first two legislators to sign a pledge created last year by a group called Open Kansas. The pledge asked lawmakers to increase government accountability and transparency. Only 23 of the state’s 165 legislators signed the pledge during the 2016 session.
After last November’s election, that number increased by 14 but still represented just 22 percent of the Legislature. It’s no wonder Kansas got a flunking grade in a 2015 study by the Center for Public Integrity that measured transparency and state accountability. Among its bad grades: F’s in public access to information, internal auditing and executive accountability.
Though the state’s obsession with secrecy goes back decades, Brownback’s seven years as governor have been marked by efforts to shield executive decisions from the public. In 2012, the Shawnee County district attorney’s office concluded that private meetings Brownback held with lawmakers at the governor’s mansion technically violated the state’s open meetings act.
Prosecutors determined the violations were a result of ignorance about the law and did not pursue penalties. Two years later, the state’s budget director used a private email address to share details of Brownback’s budget proposal with a pair of lobbyists who had close ties to the governor. The director shared the information several weeks before lawmakers saw it.
In late 2014, Brownback appointed two additional members to the Saline County Commission but refused to release the names of the applicants. Two news organizations sued and the court eventually sided with Brownback.
But five applicants came forward and identified themselves. The year before, Brownback had refused a request to identify applicants for a seat on the Kansas Court of Appeals, the state’s second-highest court. And last year, as Brownback’s office weighed budget cuts in the wake of massive tax reductions and huge revenue shortfalls, he refused to release financial documents that had been public under previous governors. Critics say the governor also leaves behind a legacy of state agencies that avoid disclosure as a matter of policy.
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After a fatal motorcycle crash on a dangerous stretch of Interstate 70 in Kansas City, Kan., a Kansas Department of Transportation spokesperson told The Star a lack of funding had prevented a rebuild project. Days later, the spokesperson was fired. By Monty Davis and Max Londberg
A current Kansas Department of Transportation employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, likened the central office in Topeka to the Pentagon. “They (spokespeople) are told what they can and cannot say,” the employee said. “Their public relations people are just there for show.” The spokesperson who was fired after talking about highway funding deficits was known within KDOT as a social media expert whose communication initiatives had built public respect for the agency, one former colleague said.
The employee “was really the best public affairs manager that KDOT had,” said Martin Miller, who retired in 2015 as the spokesman for the department’s south-central Kansas district. “I would see Facebook posts, tweets, emailed press releases at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning. (The terminated employee) did a great service for the residents of Kansas.”
The Star sent questions to Brownback’s office, including one asking whether anyone from KDOT had been disciplined for talking about funding issues. His office responded with a lengthy comment about transparency but did not answer the question about KDOT.
“Governor Brownback’s administration has always been sensitive to the fact that government is a public institution and that public institutions function best in the sunshine,” wrote Rachel Whitten, the governor’s interim spokeswoman, in an email Thursday. “He makes it a priority to remain open with the people he serves by answering thousands of media requests for comment, hundreds of open records requests, and signing numerous bills that increase transparency in state government.
“Public officials are required to balance transparency with many other considerations in the process of governing, including the law, and the privacy of private individuals who interact with the government, among a myriad of other important factors.” Many do not see it that way. The state, they say, seems hellbent on keeping information from the public.
“If you don’t have transparency in every aspect of the government, then you aren’t making it clear to people that the public’s business is being done in a forthright way,” said Doug Bonney, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.
“It’s something about Kansas; I don’t know what it is exactly. But Kansas is overly worried about information becoming public. “If it’s not the least transparent state in the Union, it’s close to it.”
An ingrained mindset of privacy. Rumors had been running through Tonganoxie for days: Tyson Foods was coming. But residents didn’t know any details of the planned poultry plant.
Not until the big announcement inside the Brunswick Ballroom in early September when state and county officials were on stage smiling and clapping. By then, much of Tonganoxie was pissed. This wasn’t just going to be a small plant. It would be a $320 million state-of-the art complex, slaughtering and packaging 1.25 million birds each week.
Residents worried about the smell, contamination to the area and how their town and schools would handle a projected 1,600 employees. City and county officials, along with Brownback, had been quietly working on a deal for months. A site was already picked. “Project Sunset,” it was called behind closed doors.
“This was a done deal. They said they were going to break ground in 90 days,” said Steve Skeet, whose parents own land across the road from where Tyson wanted to build. “They knew about this but didn’t tell anybody. Giving it a code name made it a dirty secret that they wanted to hide.” Residents heckled and jeered as the plans were revealed, and Skeet’s mom cried.
In the end, the town’s uproar was heard loud and clear. Two weeks later, the Leavenworth County Commission reversed its support of the project and Tyson said it would explore other locations. Project Sunset could have played out anywhere in Kansas, where privacy is as deeply rooted as the wheat fields covering the Sunflower State.
“In Kansas, I do think folks tend to be somewhat private people,” said Sen. Molly Baumgardner, a Louisburg Republican. “The majority of the state is rural and that small-town approach, that ‘Our business is our business and it’s not anyone’s business until we want to share it,’ tends to be the thought of the day.”
Both Democrats and Republicans have run opaque administrations, said Burdett Loomis, who worked for former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. “Once you’ve got that lack of transparency, unless there’s something that rocks the boat, the people who benefit from it are perfectly happy to let it be,” said Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. “Corporations, lobbyists, lawmakers, a lot of these people have no reason to change anything very much.”
The culture that stifles transparency has become ingrained, said Benet Magnuson, executive director of Kansas Appleseed, a nonprofit justice center serving vulnerable and excluded Kansans. “There’s something about once that culture sets in,” Magnuson said. “It’s really difficult to move out of.” Raised in Kansas, Magnuson went to Harvard and Harvard Law School before moving to Texas. There, he never encountered problems when requesting open records or information. Then he returned to Kansas. “Moving back here, time after time, the first question that would be asked is, ‘Who are you and why are you asking for this?’ ” Magnuson said. “In Kansas, I’m hesitant to say 100 percent, but it was close to 100 percent of the time that’s what you get—‘who are you and what are you going to do with this?’ ”
The Star asked more than a dozen counties how they were responding to a new law intended to open criminal affidavits. When it contacted Kurtis Jacobs in Finney County in southwest Kansas, the District Court administrator said he would not provide the information without first knowing the angle of the story. Or, he said, The Star could file an open records request. “Under the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA), I can take three days to respond and then as long as I need to to get the information,” Jacobs said. “We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.”
Three months after receiving two requests from The Star regarding the deaths of an infant and a 10-year-old boy, the Department for Children and Families said it could not fulfill them. Why? Because it didn’t have enough staffing resources “due to its current workload of KORA requests.”
Meeting behind closed doors.... Obtaining records and information isn’t the only obstacle regular citizens encounter. Kansas is one of four states that do not require public notice of all regular public meetings, according to a Star analysis of the 50 states’ open meetings laws.
The Kansas Open Meetings Act only requires notice be given to individuals who have requested it. And Kansas and Arkansas are the only two states that do not require minutes to be kept of a public meeting. Since 2016, the Kansas attorney general’s office has filed seven enforcement actions against municipalities that have violated the two open government laws. In each case, those who broke the law were asked to take additional training and agree to not break the law again. The state also grants tax breaks worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year to lure businesses.
Trouble is, you’ll never know who got those credits or how much. The state does what most states do not: It forbids the disclosure — even to lawmakers — of the recipients and how much they received. In Missouri and other states, that information is available online. It should be of little surprise then that Kansas has received D’s and F’s in several national studies about transparency over the years, including the 2015 Center for Public Integrity report where Kansas ranked with 10 states that scored F’s.
Some Kansans have fought to make the system more open. Alan Cowles, a Lawrence physician, couldn’t find any record of his local health board or city or county commissions discussing a $750,000 lawsuit he knew about.
That’s because, he discovered, when members went into closed session they didn’t list specific reasons why. That prompted him to survey the state’s 10 largest cities and counties and he found that all but one — the Manhattan City Commission — would close meetings without giving “meaningful information” about the subjects they were going to discuss. He found that they conducted at least 200 hours of government business behind closed doors.
“They were doing business in secrecy,” Cowles said. “What good is the open meetings act?” He worked with Sen. Marci Francisco, a Lawrence Democrat, and Baumgardner, the Louisburg Republican, to change the law and require boards to state the specific topics they plan to discuss in a closed meeting. The legislation went into effect July 1. “The public ought to have some chance in knowing what these governmental bodies were talking about,” Cowles said.
Judith Deedy, a mother of three in Johnson County, is worried about lack of transparency in education policy. She is one of many Shawnee Mission School District parents who started paying closer attention to what happens in the state Capitol after budget cuts and other policy changes began affecting schools.
Deedy, executive director of the advocacy group Game On for Kansas Schools, recalled that a 2015 law changing education funding was “one of the wake-up calls.” “That was a really clear example to so many people that we had a Legislature that was not listening to us,” she said, “and by us I mean any supporters of public education.”
The bill that made block grants the source for school funding was a “gut-and-go” measure — a common practice in Topeka where legislators take a bill that has already passed one chamber, gut it and insert an unrelated bill. The maneuver clears the path for less public debate and easier passage. “To us, it was absurd that something this important was getting rammed through so quickly,” Deedy said.
How did your legislator vote? Aside from using “gut-and-go” measures and anonymous bills, lawmakers also can keep their votes from being disclosed to the public in committee meetings where much of the legislative work is done. House rules don’t require committee votes to be logged unless a member requests his or her vote be recorded. The Senate only requires that the number of votes for and against an action be recorded.
When former Rep. Rubin told his committee in 2013 that the votes of each member would be recorded, “I had a revolt on my hands.” Both Republicans and Democrats went to the House speaker, he said, and complained, asking how Rubin was allowed to do that. When the speaker said committee chairs have the power to require public votes, they asked to be removed from his committee. Rubin backed down but still had every one of his own votes recorded; he recalled only three or four other committee members following his lead.
“I’ve talked to legislators in other states and so did Legislative Research, and they’ve never heard of such a thing,” Rubin said. He said Topeka should not be a place for covert actions. “The things we do in the Legislature affect people’s lives profoundly,” Rubin said. “People in Kansas have a right to know how their government operates and have the right to know about how decisions are arrived at that affect their lives. “People have no idea this stuff is going on.”
The Star’s Kelsey Ryan, Bryan Lowry, Hunter Woodall, Andy Marso and Steve Vockrodt contributed to this report.
The series was reported by Laura Bauer, Judy L. Thomas, Kelsey Ryan, Max Londberg, Bryan Lowry, Andy Marso, Steve Vockrodt and Hunter Woodall. Laura Bauer: 816-234-4944, @kclaurab Judy L. Thomas: 816-234-4334, @judylthomas Max Londberg: 816-234-4378, @MaxLondberg
Videos were done by Jill Toyoshiba and Neil Nakahodo. Growth editor Leah Becerra oversaw the online report.
Reporters spoke with about 100 people: current and former lawmakers of both parties, law enforcement and families of crime victims, state employees who had been demoted or fired for saying too much, caregivers for some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens, families of children whose deaths raised questions about the Department for Children and Families, and citizens frustrated by a lack of transparency in local and state government.
For several months, reporters poured over decades of legislation. They analyzed state open meetings and records laws and compared them to other states. And they filed dozens of open records requests with police agencies to gauge the transparency of departments across the state.
Share your story Have you experienced secrecy in Kansas that has affected you or other citizens? If you’ve had trouble getting records or documents in Kansas, felt cut out of Topeka’s legislative process or been stonewalled by state agencies, we want to hear from you.

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Secrecy inside child welfare system can kill: ‘God help the children of Kansas’ By Laura Bauer Updated November 13, 2017 4:19 PM
Caleb was 10 when his mother killed him in his sleep. Caleb's father Clint Blansett still can’t believe that a Kansas Department for Children and Families social worker showed up at his door before his son’s memorial service to make sure he didn’t.... By Jill Toyoshiba and Laura Bauer
Clint Blansett’s 10-year-old son had been dead just a few days when a social worker from the state knocked on the family’s door in south-central Kansas. She wasn’t there to offer condolences after Caleb’s death or ask about his sister, Blansett said. She wanted him to sign a form saying he wouldn’t talk about his son’s death or the Kansas Department for Children and Families.
No details about contact the agency had with the family before Caleb’s mom smashed his head with a rock while he slept and then stabbed him seven times. “It was a gag order,” Blansett said. “She was there for DCF; she wasn’t there for me, she wasn’t there for my daughter. She was there to ensure that I wouldn’t speak to the press. That was her only concern.”
What Caleb’s father faced that day in December 2014 is what other parents and Kansas legislators say they’ve battled for years: An agency charged with protecting kids instead focused on protecting itself. An agency where a former high-level DCF supervisor told The Star she was instructed not to document anything after a child’s death and to shred notes after meetings so attorneys and reporters couldn’t get them through open records requests. An agency where even lawmakers insist DCF officials are intentionally misleading them and providing information the Legislature can’t trust.
In the end, Kansas children continue to die without a public review of what contact state social workers had with the families — whether they did enough and whether policies and procedures were followed. “Secrecy is killing children,” said Dianne Keech, who knows DCF well after serving as a deputy director for two years.
Before that, she spent more than 16 years as a court services officer in Wyandotte County assessing child-in-need-of-care cases. Keech left the agency after she said she was told to shred notes after meetings about critical cases. She also said she wasn’t able to implement a system-wide review of abuse and neglect cases because administrators didn’t want mistakes put in writing.
“I couldn’t sleep because there are so many child deaths and if we don’t review them right, we’re not going to make any changes,” Keech said. “More children will get hurt. … Nobody wanted to change anything. The fight was so big and I felt so small.”
In a months-long investigation into the secrecy that permeates Kansas government and how it harms residents, The Star found a pervasive effort inside DCF to hide behind privacy laws and internal procedures to keep the public from knowing how it operates.
Those practices are particularly acute in cases where children are seriously injured or killed by parents and guardians who were known to the agency. For the past year, DCF has refused to answer questions on topics ranging from open records and the death of specific children to runaways in foster care. During the course of The Star’s reporting on widespread problems within the agency, DCF Secretary Phyllis Gilmore announced her retirement effective Dec. 1.
The Star sent a long list of questions to Gilmore last week. In response, the agency sent three paragraphs and did not address Blansett’s case. “First and foremost, the Kansas Department for Children and Families (DCF) is committed to transparency and has spent a considerable amount of time responding to your requests for information, which DCF is not legally obligated to do,” the agency said. Social workers in the field say they know how important image is to the department.
Sarah Coats worked several years as a social worker for one of Kansas’ top child welfare contractors. She said she was fired after she tried to create a union for workers and leaked information about high caseloads. Now running for the Kansas House as a Democrat, Coats told The Star that when a critical incident happens — including a child’s death or serious injury — a worker is required to fill out a “critical incident” form. It includes a box to check: Is this incident one that may draw public, legislative or media concern?
“Is that the worry when we have a child die or nearly die?” Coats said. “Is our first worry, ‘Will this catch media attention?’ “There’s a reason why they hide what they are doing and why they want to cover it up,” she said. “But if we never admit to the mistakes we make, we’ll never be better. We can’t sweep it under the rug when children are dying.”
The Wichita Eagle- ‘It’s cover your ass’ The cries for change have hit a fever pitch after five high-profile child deaths in five years and after three audits — requested and approved by the Legislature — exposed flaws in the foster care system and a desperate need for more accountability. Two months ago, this headline came from Wichita: Missing Kansas boy, 3, found encased in concrete. Evan Brewer, who loved Batman, lived with his mother, Miranda Miller, and her boyfriend.
Miller and Evan’s father, Carlo Brewer, had been locked in a custody battle. Concerned about his son’s welfare, Carlo Brewer had reached out to DCF. And though abuse and neglect hotline calls were made in the year before the boy’s death, he wasn’t removed from his mother’s home. “From what we understand, they (DCF) never saw him, and they said he was fine,” said Carl Brewer, Evan’s grandfather and a former mayor of Wichita who is running for Kansas governor.
“They still closed his case.” Miller refused to talk with DCF and police on numerous occasions. Her boyfriend is accused of threatening Carlo Brewer when he went to the home asking about Evan. DCF officials say they cannot comment on the case. Police have not released how Evan died and no one has been charged in his death.
Though Carl Brewer said he’s always been concerned about the safety of children, it’s an even bigger priority in his campaign now. DCF — as well as other agencies — must be more open, he said. “We haven’t held them accountable,” Brewer said. “They need to do their job and do it correctly. And if they do that, they don’t need to hide anything or create an environment where there’s not transparency.”
A legislative task force has met three times since August trying to determine how to fix the troubled system. Lawmakers insist they don’t think DCF is giving them accurate insight and information. “My frustration is it appears that things get hidden,” said Sen. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Republican. “I’m not convinced that they are totally forthcoming.” Sen. Laura Kelly, a Topeka Democrat, agrees. “There’s a real sense that what the agency is telling us is not right or not complete,” Kelly said. “It’s nearly impossible to get information we trust. …
Obviously, in order to fix something, you have to know what’s going on. You have to be able to get under the hood, see what is working and what’s not working.” When told of lawmakers’ concerns, DCF said in its response to The Star: “We strongly disagree with any assertion by anyone that DCF is stonewalling and misleading.”
Legislators say that during one recent task force meeting an attorney with DCF’s legal department “went in circles” and didn’t answer direct questions. Also, Kelly said, agency officials continue to tell lawmakers that Kansas’ child welfare system ranks among the country’s safest in the Child & Family Services Review, which measures how families fare in each state and whether the agency complies with federal requirements.
“In some ways it’s surreal,” Kelly said. “We are sitting there talking about a 7-year-old or a 5-year-old who died a torturous death in the system and the system’s response to that is, ‘Look at all these blue ribbons we’ve won.’ Not, ‘What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?’ ”
Social workers for DCF and its two foster care contractors have told lawmakers and The Star that high caseloads at times make it difficult to do the job. Laura Bullock, who has worked for two state contractors in the past, said at one point she had as many as 43 foster kids in her caseload. Another social worker said she had as many as 57 children at one time. Best practice, Bullock said, would be if a foster care worker had 15 to 19 children.
With that many, it’s possible to complete each monthly visit and do the case plans, court hearings and meetings with families. “Then when something happens, they (child welfare officials) look at the worker and say ‘Why weren’t you doing such and such?’ ” Bullock said. “It’s like, ‘Look, if you would stop giving us so much on our plates we maybe could have prevented this.’ ”
After the brutal death of Adrian Jones, a 7-year-old from Kansas City, Kan., whose body was fed to pigs in the fall of 2015, several lawmakers said that sources inside the system privately told them DCF had received several hotline calls about the boy. However, those legislators said they couldn’t, at the time, get that information directly from the child welfare agency. Neither could Adrian’s maternal grandmother, Judy Conway.
“Mentally and physically it has worn on me every single day,” Conway said. “And I’ve had to live through it every day to try to get answers.” It wasn’t until nearly 1 1/2 years after Adrian’s death made international headlines, after his father and stepmother were sentenced to life in prison, that DCF released any information. And even then, the agency released a disorganized file of 2,000 pages that one advocate said looked as if someone had thrown all the records up in the air and then haphazardly gathered them and said, “Here you go.”
“It’s like it was disorganized on purpose,” said Lori Ross, a longtime Missouri child welfare advocate who recently has gone to Topeka several times demanding change in the Kansas system. She said it took her several hours to organize the records so she could understand what happened with Adrian. Ross, who has reviewed child welfare cases for decades, said it appears the Kansas system failed to do adequate investigations of hotline calls in Adrian’s case and had interns doing interviews instead of licensed workers. She worries that if missteps like that aren’t addressed in a timely manner, more children could fall through “holes in the safety net.”
“There are risks out there and you can’t make progress when someone says, ‘I can’t talk to you about that, that’s confidential,’ ” Ross said. “And really, what it feels like to me is that the secrecy in Kansas doesn’t feel like it’s protecting children and families’ privacy. It feels like it’s cover your ass. “God help the children of Kansas.”
‘Not a disgruntled husband’ In the 10 years before Caleb’s death, 81 Kansas children had died from abuse and neglect. Clint Blansett still wonders: Had those cases been examined and lessons learned, could it have changed how workers treated his concerns? Would the investigations into hotline calls have been more extensive? “What did they do in those cases?” Blansett said. “For someone to sit there and say ‘no you can’t look at our records,’ there is something wrong. There is something so obviously wrong with that. What is there to hide?”
Seven months before his ex-wife killed Caleb, Blansett told a DCF caseworker he was worried. At the time, he was working out of state for periods at a time and feared that his son and daughter, Cadence, were being neglected and weren’t safe with their mother in Wellington, Kan.
“I wasn’t a disgruntled husband,” Blansett said. “I told her (the caseworker) about the drugs and the men and kids calling me at all times of the night.” A few days after Blansett spoke to the caseworker, he said he got a letter saying the complaint was unsubstantiated.
Clint and Lindsey Nicole Blansett — who goes by Nicole — had been divorced for more than a year by then. Both grew up in the same North Texas small town, and after Clint returned from the Army the two started dating and were married several years before Caleb was born. After about 13 years of marriage, Nicole filed for divorce.
When a judge gave her primary custody, Clint insisted his kids wouldn’t be safe. He knew his ex-wife, who he believes did love their two children, had a family history of bipolar disorder and wasn’t medicated. He worried about her mental health. But no one, he said, listened to him.
His concerns weren’t the only ones DCF knew about, Blansett said. He said a convenience store clerk had reported that Nicole had mistreated Caleb while in the store. A hospital worker also called, Blansett said, concerned about the boy’s treatment by his mother after he was seen for an abscessed tooth.
About a week before Caleb’s death, DCF received another call regarding the family. Blansett said Nicole called in a report saying he was molesting the children, an allegation he believes was meant to get back at him. DCF determined the call required more investigation and assigned an investigator. If an investigator had promptly gone to the home, and gone inside, Blansett said, that investigator would have known that his son and daughter weren’t safe.
There, on the walls and behind family pictures, Blansett said his ex-wife had written “bogus scripture” in permanent marker. Some photos had horns and mustaches drawn in marker. “Anybody that would have walked in the house, for just a moment’s time, would have seen danger, danger, for sure,” Blansett said. As Caleb lay dead in his bed, Nicole Blansett called 911 and told the dispatcher: “I just stabbed my son.” She later said, according to police, that “life would be full of suffering and it would be better for him to go to heaven tonight.” Soon after Caleb’s death, DCF officials released limited information about the agency’s involvement.
A Wichita television station reported that DCF first got involved with the family in 2012 and then received several hotline calls in 2014 in the months before Caleb died. Gilmore, the DCF secretary, released a statement at the time: “As with any child death, we are deeply saddened by this news. We are carefully reviewing this incident and our history with this family… Our hearts go out to anyone affected by this unthinkable tragedy.”
Yet, nearly three years after his son’s death, Blansett doesn’t know how extensively those complaints were investigated. And he doesn’t know if DCF did an internal review of Caleb’s case to identify any missteps or changes needed in policies or procedures or state law. “If they did, they didn’t tell me the results,” said Blansett, who has had custody of Cadence since the day after Caleb’s death.
Though Nicole Blansett has been in prison about a year, serving a life sentence, it’s still difficult to get records regarding Caleb. The Star requested information about his case — including hotline calls and any details about DCF involvement with the family — on Aug. 4 of this year. In the proceeding weeks and months, when asked for an update, an agency spokeswoman would say the office was working on the request.
Last week, a final email came denying the 3-month-old request on nearly a 3-year-old case. The email came on letterhead from Theresa Freed, an agency spokeswoman. “While KSA 38-2212 (state law) allows DCF to provide procedural details of the handling of a child-in-need-care investigation when it has become public knowledge, DCF has determined that it does not have the staffing resources at this time due to its current workload of KORA requests to address such requests.”

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Clint Blansett’s 10-year-old son had been dead just a few days when a social worker from the state knocked on the family’s door. The worker wanted him to sign a form saying he wouldn’t talk about his son’s death or the Kansas Department for Children By Jill Toyoshiba| Chris Ochsner and Laura Bauer
Sign this ‘gag order’ Blansett still can’t believe that in mid-December 2014, before his son’s memorial service, a DCF social worker showed up at his door to make sure he didn’t publicly discuss the case. “They had already failed me with Caleb, you would think her first thought would be is whether Cadence was safe, or that the house was clean, that there was food in the refrigerator,” Blansett said. “She never once asked about my little girl, who was upstairs at the time.”
While the social worker was at the home, a family member recorded what she said. “What I need is for you to sign this, saying that you’ll follow this,” the DCF worker is heard telling Blansett. Blansett asked the social worker what he should do because, he said, reporters had already been calling. “Do I just tell them — reporters — that I have a gag order? I can’t say anything?” Blansett asked. “I would say, ‘I cannot. I cannot speak, period,’ ” the social worker said. “I wouldn’t even say ‘gag order.’ ” “That’s what it is,” he told her. “I get that. … But if you say that, then they’re going to put that on TV.”
Clint Blansett: “That’s what it is.” She reminded him how important it was that he not talk about this case. “The last thing I think you want to do is jeopardize — one, your daughter’s placement, and two, your criminal case. Right?” the case worker asked. “I don’t think there’s any way I can jeopardize my criminal case. … I don’t want to lose my…” The case worker told Blansett several times there would be consequences if he violated the order. If he talked about the case, she told him, she would go to a judge.
In the end, Blansett said, he refused to sign the order. Karen King supervised the DCF Winfield office until September 2014, when she was let go after she reported to child welfare administrators above her that a case worker had said she had visited several children when King said she had not.
Though King was no longer at the office when Caleb died, she spoke to Blansett because he’s a friend of her son. She listened to the audio recording. “I was horrified when I heard they were threatening to take Clint’s other child,” King said. “And that was a threat. They don’t like it when they are under the microscope and they have to answer things.”
The following day — the day Blansett planned to see his son’s body — the social worker went back to see Caleb’s father. She handed him another order. Again, Blansett recorded the conversation. “So now it’s I can’t speak at all?” Blansett said.
“Basically, yes,” the social worker answered. “And what would the reason be for that, I don’t understand,” Blansett said. “I’m trying to make a difference in the world with the loss of my son and you’re telling me that I can’t. Or the court is, I guess.” “The court is doing that,” the social worker said.
“I’m following it.” Blansett explained again that he wanted to see changes made in Kansas’ child welfare system. “Let me tell you how I see it, OK,” she said. “When you talk to the media, yeah, you give them fuel to the fire. OK. They run with it, they change it. They make it to what they want. … If you are telling the media, what does that really do?”
“It opens the eyes of the public to let them know that there is a problem here,” Blansett said. “That this family has been let down and a life has been lost because of it.” At one point Blansett asked what would happen if he didn’t sign. The social worker said she’d have to alert the court. She encouraged him to sign. Not just for himself, but for his daughter. “I just think, sit back a little bit and just hold off on the media until this court order is lifted,” the social worker said. “I think you will be better off, OK, she’ll be better off.”
“I think you’ll be better off if I do,” he shot back. “I think your organization will be and that’s where your concern is. It’s not me, it’s not her. It’s your organization.” After a short break, Blansett said he wasn’t prepared to sign the form and referred the DCF social worker to his attorney. “I don’t feel that you are doing anything in my best interest,”
Blansett said. “Being a vet and serving this nation proudly, and then you’re telling me I can’t… You are taking one of my amendments away, one of my rights, that I fought for. “... I feel like I’m being bullied. I feel like I have no choice.”
‘Misrepresenting what happened’ ~~~ When Dianne Keech worked inside Kansas’ child welfare agency, people would visit her office and she’d want to explain more about what DCF did every day for kids. The former deputy director remembers asking members of her staff to tell the visitors what their unit did. “They couldn’t do it,” Keech said.
“They looked at me like I was from Mars. They are trained from the very beginning, ‘You don’t speak. You don’t disclose. You don’t share. You don’t tell.’ ” Keech said in 2014 she was told by a member of DCF’s legal team to shred notes taken in meetings where a child death or injury was discussed. After one meeting in the summer of 2015, Keech said she saw that strategy put into action by a DCF attorney after the two had met about a child who had just been killed.
“She walked over, put them in the shredder and just walked away,” Keech said. “It was like she had won.” Inside, Keech said, she struggled. “I wasn’t going to be that person who got up there and testified in court and said, ‘I don’t have my notes. I was told to shred them,’ ” she said.
After each critical incident, Keech became more focused on those reviews she wanted to implement. A four-phase review, she thought, would identify weaknesses in policy or procedure or even state law. Gilmore was in support of it, Keech said. Yet, she said, others in the agency, including administrators and attorneys, were resistant. They didn’t want that kind of examination of the system — one with a trail, Keech said.
“What they told me in Kansas, when I was trying to get this implemented was that you don’t document anything in writing,” Keech said. “I asked, ‘Why not?’ They said, ‘Because then that’s discoverable.’ ” She said she told one of the agency’s administrators that any good lawyer would know whether policies and procedures were followed in a specific case. “She says, ‘We don’t make it easy for them,’ ” Keech recalled.
In her two years at DCF, Keech and her team did a thorough review of one case. It was a medical neglect case regarding a child receiving family preservation services in the home. The child had asthma. While reviewing the specifics, Keech found that the caseworker had not requested medical records. Those records would have explained how severe the asthma was and what treatment was necessary.
After she left the agency, Keech heard that a new policy had been created. In every medical neglect case, workers now must request medical records from hospitals and doctors. Had she been able to implement a review system like that for all cases, not just medical neglect, lives could have been saved, she said. “We could have done something good,” Keech said. “We could have turned it around. … Nobody has as their top priority protecting kids. They are protecting the governor, the secretary (of DCF), the agency and their own careers.”
DCF did not answer specific questions about Keech’s allegations. When told what Keech said she experienced, including the directive to shred notes after critical case meetings, some lawmakers said DCF must be held accountable.
“That’s inexcusable to me — that’s fraud,” said Bollier, the Mission Hills Republican. “By not putting it all down like you’re supposed to, you’re misrepresenting what happened.” House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat and attorney who is running for governor, has worked inside the family court system.
As a legislator, he’s pushed for transparency and in recent years had called for Gilmore to resign. “The purpose of that agency, the only reason they exist, is to protect children,” Ward said. “This sounds like they couldn’t care less about that mission, and what they want is to avoid any scrutiny. “It reinforces my belief that they don’t care about these most vulnerable children, that they’re worried about covering themselves, stonewalling and misdirecting.”
Agency ‘in full defense mode’ ~~~ Earlier this year, Ward tried to make a small change he thought would ultimately help children. But, he said, DCF wouldn’t have it. The lawmaker proposed a bill that would have strengthened a 2004 disclosure law that allows information to be released after a child’s death or serious injury. His change would make the records open unless the department could show the release would hurt the child or siblings.
“The agency went into full defense mode,” Ward said. “They painted a picture that this would destroy the system, that it would violate federal law.” The bill didn’t go anywhere. On paper, the state disclosure law — created after the 2002 death of an adopted child in Overland Park — appears to be among the most transparent in the country. But because of a compromise lawmakers made to get it passed, the law hasn’t exactly been a beacon.
In hindsight, former Kansas Sen. David Adkins, who sponsored the disclosure legislation, said the law probably wasn’t “worth the ink on the page.” That’s because a provision in the law allows “affected individuals” — which includes prosecutors, police, attorneys and even parents of abused children — to petition the court to keep the child welfare records sealed. And judges typically approve.
Prosecutors have insisted that releasing child welfare information in a death involving abuse or neglect could hurt the criminal case against the suspects who injured or killed the child. Yet, in Missouri, that hasn’t been the experience.
When 2-year-old Dominic James was killed in a southwest Missouri foster home in August 2002, it was two prosecutors in Greene County who started talking about how the child welfare system might have failed him. Under the direction of former prosecutor Darrell Moore, the office not only agreed with the release of information but publicly demanded it. Child welfare records and internal emails eventually revealed several missteps by the Division of Family Services. And an independent investigation, complete overhaul of the system, along with the firing of top administrators, all began before the foster father who killed Dominic James was tried and convicted.
“If the system has failed in some way, we have to know that immediately,” said Cynthia Rushefsky, a retired Greene County assistant prosecutor who was heavily involved in James’ case. “There is a bigger picture and it is important. How many kids can get hurt in the meantime?”
That’s why, she said, she and the prosecutor thought all information had to be released. “It’s very important that they (child welfare agencies) be as open as possible. Their job is so critical,” Rushefsky said. “When you have an institution under scrutiny, they tend to close up tighter. If they are wanting to hide, that’s all the reason to shine the light brighter. “These children are everybody’s responsibility. In a very real way, they belong to all of us.”
Leaving Kansas with Caleb ~~~ Shortly after Caleb’s death, Blansett moved back to Nocona, Texas, where he and Nicole grew up. Now living in a small home a few blocks from the town’s high school, he and Cadence are reminded of the good times. Of life with Caleb. There, on the wall, is a picture of brother and sister, taken a few years before Caleb’s death, in their Sunday best.
On a bookshelf are separate photos of the kids, both enjoying time in Hawaii, where the family once lived. And, looming large, there’s a plaque someone made for Blansett, with a photo of him and his son and a poem titled “Missing You.” I think about you always; I think about you still; You have never been forgotten; And you never will…
Blansett and Cadence are learning to live on their own, something made easier in a town where most everyone knows their story. “People here wrapped us in hugs and kisses,” Blansett said. “They’ve been amazing.”
He remembers that day in a Kansas courtroom, just a few weeks after his son died in late 2014, when a judge finalized his custody of Cadence. She was already in Texas, so he was alone when he got the ruling. “When I left Kansas, and this is the God’s truth,” Blansett said, “as soon as they said, ‘You are good to go,’ I left that courtroom running. Literally running. I couldn’t hit the Oklahoma line fast enough.” In the nearly three years since his son died, he continues to see news of Kansas families enduring unimaginable grief.
He’s read about Adrian Jones and other children who died. He knows other families have struggled to get information as he has. “The way I look at this is we all are going to answer for our wrongdoings and if you know you are wrong about this, you know your organization did wrong, then why not just raise your right hand and say, ‘Our bad,’ ” Blansett said.
“That would go a lot further with me than not answering my phone calls, not sending the information I need just to get answers. “It should be a full disclosure company. Why be secret? I don’t understand. … Why be secret if you don’t have anything to hide? Unless you screwed up and you’re afraid to own it.”
In the end, he couldn’t leave his son behind in Kansas. Not in the state that Blansett said caused so much pain for his family and didn’t protect Caleb the way he believes it should have. Caleb’s ashes are in an urn on the bookcase, near all the photos. The family plans to go to Hawaii soon and scatter the fourth-grader’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean, where he learned to swim.
Until then, the father and daughter want to help protect other kids involved in the system. That’s why Blansett said he’s talking now. It’s what he and Cadence thought would be best. “There are still children in harm’s way up there,” Blansett said.
“She told me, ‘Dad, all I want you to do is help other kids.’ ” He wants his son’s death to mean something. It has to, he said. “Someone needs to stand up and be brave enough to say, ‘The system is broken, absolutely broken and we need to start from the ground up,’ ” Blansett said. “If my son’s death could help another child, then my son’s death wasn’t in vain. If he can bring some light to the shadiness. “In my opinion nothing stays buried, everything comes to light,” he said. “It’s a patience thing for me. It’s going to come out.”

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How Kansas lawmakers keep you from finding out what they’re doing — until it’s too late
By Judy L. Thomas and Bryan Lowry The Kansas City Star
Updated December 1, 2017 By Neil Nakahodo| Bryan Lowry| and Leah Becerra
What is Kansas trying to hide? It happened so fast that few inside Room 519-S of the Kansas Statehouse even realized what was going on. As members of the House Transportation Committee gathered to consider legislation, then-Rep. Artie Lucas made his move.
The Highland Republican stripped the language in a bill about vehicle registration fees and replaced it — not with another transportation measure, but with an anti-abortion proposal. Within seconds, committee members passed the measure on an unrecorded voice vote, sending it to the House floor without a hearing and prompting an outcry from incensed colleagues who were blindsided by the action.
“Those bastards!” then-Rep. Joan Wagnon said after learning what had happened. That brazen move, known as a “gut-and-go,” took place 27 years ago. Believed to be the first time the maneuver had been used, it changed the way lawmakers conduct business, paving the way for Kansas to become one of the most opaque state legislatures in the country.
Since then, the once-rare scheme has become standard practice in the Sunflower State — a way to resurrect bills left for dead and to circumvent public attention on often controversial measures. Kansas is among a handful of states that allow the procedure. But it’s not the only legislative tactic that stifles open and transparent government.
In Kansas, unlike most other states, nearly all the laws passed stem from bills whose authors are anonymous. All but six of the 104 bills that became law this year — a whopping 94 percent — were introduced by committees, with no sponsors identified. That means Kansans don’t know who pushed the measures and why.
Who stood to gain, who stood to lose. Many states prohibit the practice and require that every bill contain the name of the lawmaker sponsoring it. And while Kansas legislators on both sides of the aisle acknowledge anonymous bills have been part of the legislative process for decades, they say it’s now used way too often.
“It’s not like we learned in seventh-grade civics. It really isn’t,” said House Majority Leader Don Hineman, a Republican from Dighton. Many of his constituents, he said, are shocked to learn about the rampant use of anonymous bills. “I tried to explain that to the editor of the Dighton Herald,” he said, “and she was like, ‘What?’ ”
The result of all this secrecy? Proposals on such hot-button issues as gun rights and education sometimes become law with little or no debate. Indeed, half the abortion laws passed in Kansas in the past 10 years were the result of a “gut-and-go” procedure, The Star found. So was the 2015 law that overhauled the way the state distributes money to school districts — money that accounts for more than half the state’s general fund budget.
The Star talked to political experts, organizations that monitor government transparency and those who track legislative policies to gauge how Kansas compares to other states on issues of openness and accessibility. The responses indicate that Kansas’ legislative process is among the least transparent in the country, often cutting the public out of debates and making it difficult for constituents to track bills, let alone determine who sponsored them.
“There are gut-and-gos that are kind of sleight-of-hand when something is stuck in (the bill) that hasn’t really gone through the process and it’s an issue that we really aren’t up to speed on,” Hineman said. “And that’s kind of playing a little fast and loose with the technique.” Longtime legislators say the process wasn’t always this secretive.
“I try to explain to new people that this is not the way this place used to operate,” said Rep. Tom Sawyer, a Wichita Democrat who has served a quarter-century in the Kansas House. “They don’t quite understand that we used to actually spend hours debating bills and amending bills. “The problem is, there’s a culture that’s developed. With the turnover we have in the House, you now have a lot of people in the Legislature, that’s all they know.
They think that’s how you do things.” “Gut-and-go” has become so common that legislative committee chairs now keep a few bills handy each session to use as “vehicles” in the event they decide to use the maneuver to try to advance a proposal.
“My first session, a freshman colleague said, ‘Are we part of a government body, or are we used-car salesmen? Everybody keeps talking about vehicles,’ ” said Rep. Jarrod Ousley, a Merriam Democrat who has served three years in the Kansas House. “So there’s definitely some concern there. But that’s how it’s been since I’ve been there. I don’t know any different.”
Some laws are passed in the Kansas Legislature with little debate or public scrutiny because of legislative maneuvers that can muddy a bill’s contents or leave its authors unknown. ‘You’re kidding’ Wagnon, a Topeka Democrat who served in the Kansas House from 1983 to 1994, teaches a class on advocacy at the YWCA. “And when I try to explain to someone how you keep up with a bill, they go, ‘You’re kidding.’ “It’s not like the Schoolhouse Rock lesson,” she said, referring to the popular children’s program that used animation and a catchy tune to show how a bill going through Congress became a law.
“Throw your diagram away.” Here’s how it works: Let’s say a bill that has been introduced in the Kansas House is languishing in a committee. The bill’s supporters then get a committee member to take another bill that’s already passed the Senate, gut it, replace it with their bill and then send it to the full House for debate. Once it passes the House, the bill goes back to the Senate, but because it’s already passed that chamber — even though it’s now a completely different proposal — all the Senate can do is vote it up or down. There’s no debate or hearing on the new measure.
People who want to be involved in the political process can later discover that the bill they’ve been following has turned into something else. Something totally unrelated, said Mark Desetti, lobbyist for the Kansas National Education Association. “I follow it all day, every day,” Desetti said. “And I still find myself sometimes going, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ That’s problematic, and the citizens of Kansas lose.”
Supporters say the procedure helps move the process along and is a way to get proposals passed when partisan politics or a headstrong House or Senate leader prevents some measures from being considered. Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning said the practice is often used when both chambers have introduced similar pieces of legislation. The duplicate bill then becomes a useful shell for other pieces of legislation late in the session.
“You want that shell so you can get the hell out of town,” the Overland Park Republican said. Critics, however, call the process a sneaky way to squelch opposition and say it makes a mockery of the legislative process. It also makes it next to impossible for the general public to follow a bill through the Legislature — or to know what their representatives are doing.
Denise Sultz, president of the Kansas PTA, planned to testify against a bill in 2016 that would have repealed the state’s Common Core educational standards. But the hearing that she waited for in the House Education Committee never happened.
Instead, committee members gutted a less-restrictive measure that had been held over from the previous year and inserted tougher new language, then passed it on a voice vote without holding a hearing. When some on the committee complained, they were told that a hearing wasn’t necessary because the measure had been heard the year before.
“Some members of this committee perpetrated a shell game,” Sultz wrote to PTA members afterward. “These members took away your voice. If you were for the standards that Kansas is currently using, they chose not to listen to you. They not only chose not to listen to you, they chose not to allow you to speak.” The tactic “is an example of the worst of politics, and it has been used repeatedly by the extremists in the Kansas Legislature to have their way,” the Mainstream Coalition said in a blog post highly critical of the process.
“The gut-and-go allows laws to be passed through a deceitful process of expediency, denying our representatives the opportunity to consider, discuss, and determine how legislation will affect their constituents. It is a subjugation of the democratic process… and it is something every Kansan needs to know.”
Many Kansans, for example, would be surprised to discover that the bill that overhauled the state’s school finance formula in 2015 started out as an innocuous three-page proposal requiring information technology audits of state agencies. But after that bill passed the Senate, the House stripped the IT language and replaced it with the controversial school funding legislation, a Gov. Sam Brownback proposal to do away with the funding formula and instead give block grants to school districts.
The revised bill narrowly passed the House, and because it had already passed the Senate — though in a totally different form — all senators could do was vote whether to concur with the House on the bill. They wasted no time doing that. The 65-page bill had passed both legislative chambers a little more than a week after the proposal was first made public. Brownback signed it, and it went into effect a few weeks later.
The aftermath has been costly, not only to school districts that said the change forced them to make spending cuts but to taxpayers footing the bill for an ongoing court battle over how the state funds schools — a method the Kansas Supreme Court has since deemed unconstitutional. A half-dozen districts shortened their school year by several days.
The Olathe School District ended its elementary Spanish program, reduced custodial staff and eliminated its teacher mentoring program and middle school library aides. In Pratt County, a school superintendent resigned, saying the district likely could not make the next month’s payroll if he remained. That was after 18 employees had already been reassigned, had their hours cut or lost their jobs.
When it comes to finding vessels for a “gut-and-go,” bills on most any topic appear to be fair game. A proposal to deal with the retail sale of propane. Another dealing with retirement plans. And one addressing illegal profits from dog fighting, cockfighting and prostitution. All ended up as laws restricting abortion.
In May, a Senate committee snagged a bill designed to remove the city of Valley Center from an area cemetery district and converted it into a proposal making it illegal to carry a firearm into a state or municipal-owned medical care facility or community mental health center. That prompted the NRA, which was used to getting pro-gun legislation passed in Kansas, to cry foul.
“This move was undertaken to completely circumvent the House committee process as well as any official public input or chance to amend,” the NRA Institute for Legislative Action said in a May statement. “This bill is a solution in search of a problem, and it places an arbitrary boundary on your right to self-defense.” The bill passed, and Brownback allowed it to become law without his signature.
Political observers noted that, given the pro-gun climate in the Statehouse, the “gut-and-go” procedure was probably the only way that the legislation could have passed. Hineman said that the Legislature should set parameters for when the gut-and-go technique is acceptable and that lawmakers should be restricted from using it if it’s “a brand new issue out of thin air that nobody has seen before.”
Ousley said some issues should be totally off-limits. “Something as controversial as reproductive issues, that should go through committee hearings and the entire process,” he said. “I think doctors and medical providers should have a chance to weigh in on that.”
But even those who say the tactic is overused concede that they’ve benefited from it at times. Ousley said legislators used it this year to pass a law creating a task force to improve Kansas’ child welfare system. “I didn’t feel like our committee abused a rule but took advantage of a rule to make hay,” he said. “Had we not, there wouldn’t have been time in the session to get the bill through the entire process.”
He said none of the committee members was surprised at the action, and the measure wasn’t controversial. “It was discussed, and we explained the reason why,” he said. “We talked to our colleagues in the Senate as well. So it was really maybe not public transparency, because there was no press release put out, but within the building it wasn’t a surprise to most folks.” The procedure is used in a few other states, but not to the extent that it’s employed in Kansas, where it’s become so common that the term “gut-and-go” now appears in the glossary of the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s handbook.
In Oregon, the process is called “gut and stuff.” In Hawaii, “gut and replace.” Sometimes, the bills are called “Frankenstein” and “zombie” proposals because they’ve been brought back from the dead. But it’s become such a concern that some states have taken action to curtail it.
Last fall, California voters passed a ballot initiative that required all bills to be printed and accessible online for at least 72 hours before the Legislature could pass them — putting a stop to last-minute “gut and amend” measures, as they’re called in that state.

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Kansas House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Wichita Democrat who is running for governor, discusses his opposition to anonymous bills. Ward also says that the controversial "gut and go" tactic is sometimes necessary to get legislation passed. By Bryan Lowry| Judy Thomas| Shelly Yang and Leah Becerra
Whose bill is it? In 2016, a Senate committee emptied the contents of a House bill dealing with abandoned oil wells and replaced it with legislation that made it easier for cellphone companies to build towers in the public right-of-way. Local government officials from across the state were caught off guard by the proposal, which reduced the amount of control communities had over the towers’ placement.
“It was crafted by the telecommunications industry… and they have lobbied hard to take power away from municipalities,” said Mission Hills Mayor Rick Boeshaar. “The aesthetics of our city is pretty important, and we don’t want them to just start putting boxes in our front yards willy-nilly just to have faster data rates.”
Boeshaar said he thinks telecommunications lobbyists “pulled one over on the legislators.” The legislation was passed and sent to the governor’s desk without the House ever holding a hearing on the revised bill. Not only that, the name of the person or group sponsoring the measure was never made available. That’s because it was introduced as a committee bill. For the past decade, more than 90 percent of bills passed in Kansas each year have been committee bills, with no sponsors identified.
“I’m disappointed in the lack of transparency that’s allowed under that form of a legislative process,” said Wichita City Council member Pete Meitzner. “We don’t do it. I don’t think county governments do it. And for some reason, it’s allowed at the state level.”
Missouri, like many states, requires that every piece of legislation have a named sponsor, a lawmaker who takes ownership of the bill. Incoming Missouri House Speaker Elijah Haahr said that enables Missourians to probe the motivations behind bills. “It’s important to look at who sponsors bills and why they sponsor them,” said the Springfield Republican. “The what is not always as important as the why.” Hineman, the Kansas House Majority leader, said of the move: “I don’t think that’s a good way to craft legislation.”
Sawyer said when he arrived in Topeka in the 1980s, lots of bills bore the names of the sponsors. “That’s a thing that’s slowly changed over time,” he said. “Trying to explain to people that we used to actually work bills with names on them is hard, because now that’s just so rare.” He said anonymous bills should be prohibited. “Somebody has to request that bill being introduced, so there is some name attached to every bill,” Sawyer said. “That definitely should be public and everybody should know that.”
Supporters of anonymous bills contend that legislation sponsored by an entire committee carries more weight than measures proposed by a single lawmaker because it indicates wider approval. Lawmakers also argue that because their bills sometimes get amended or even replaced through the gut-and-go process, they may not want their names associated with the final product. And occasionally, lawmakers introduce proposals at the request of fellow legislators even though they may not support the measure themselves.
The anonymity gives the legislation a better chance of passing, said Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican. “If I want a bill passed, I always want it to be a committee bill,” Wagle said. “I don’t want a name attached to it because there are people here who see a name on the bill and they vote against it if they have a personal vendetta that they want to carry out.”
Wagle dismissed the notion that the practice hampers transparency by preventing voters from knowing whether their representative crafted a piece of legislation. “In the end, they know who votes for the bill and they know who votes against it,” she said. “That’s the most critical information that’s available to the public. I don’t think introduction of the bill is a big deal.”
Among the few proposals that Kansas legislators are willing to put their names on are those that don’t stir up controversy, such as resolutions congratulating a sports team, honoring a veteran or recognizing a student for scholastic achievements.
Or declaring the historic cage elevator in the State Capitol building the “official cage elevator” of Kansas. Last year, all 40 senators put their names on a resolution to do just that. Denning, the Senate Majority leader, said lawmakers can usually discover the source of a bill even if the public cannot. “But I guess that’s not full transparency to the public,” he said.
Rep. Melissa Rooker, a Republican from Fairway, said the source of legislation should be clear before lawmakers advance it. “If you don’t know who’s behind it and why it’s being pushed,” she said, “I don’t think it’s prudent to move ahead with action on the bill.”
In January, House Minority Leader Jim Ward led an effort by Democrats to end the practice of introducing anonymous bills, saying it would lead to more openness. “Anonymous bills are bad for the process and destructive to the whole concept of people trusting what we do,” Ward said.
“If you have anonymous bills, it’s hard to find out where ideas come from. Why are we doing it if no one’s willing to stand up and argue for it?” That attempt failed, but Ward did manage to change the House rules to allow lawmakers whose bills were drastically altered by a gut-and-go to remove their names.
Bills that are not attached to a real person are “a real violation of trust,” said Marge Ahrens, of the League of Women Voters of Kansas. “If you can’t find out from whence they came, you can’t find out why they came up with that particular piece of legislation,” Ahrens said. “The whole thing creates a loop, not just of distrust, but also ignorance. “And when you have ignorance, you can’t fix a real problem.”

Who benefits from tax breaks in Kansas? You’re not allowed to know By Steve Vockrodt and Bryan Lowry Updated November 14, 2017
Kansas gives up hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to a long list of tax credits each year. But finding out which companies and individuals benefit from those tax credits, and how much of their tax bill is whittled away through these programs, is nearly impossible. Kansas is a rare state that forbids disclosure of tax credit recipients, arguing that it’s confidential taxpayer information.
Greg Leroy, executive director of the corporate tax break watchdog Good Jobs First, said the lack of disclosure provides no way of analyzing whether corporate tax credits — often given for a promise of more jobs — actually work. “When the state doesn’t disclose anything about outcomes of deals, actual jobs created, actual wages paid, you don’t have an honest cost-benefit debate,” Leroy said.
“To us, that’s just irresponsible.” Tax credits function like coupons to allow recipients to lower their tax liability as a reward for making certain investments or behavior, whether it’s scholarship programs, adoptions or paying employees above-average wages. Taken together, tax credits amount to a significant line item in the Kansas budget.
In 2015, Kansas recorded $530 million in foregone revenue from tax credits, according to a Kansas Department of Revenue tax expenditure report. That represents about one-twelfth of Kansas’ $6.1 billion general fund budget. Kansas does not spend as much on public safety — $398.7 million in general fund spending in 2017 — as it waived through tax credits.
Tax credit programs themselves are generally administrative functions. State agencies take applications from people or companies and approve the credits if they qualify. Tax credit advocates say the programs encourage good public policy behavior, like higher wages or business investment. Personal tax credits account for a chunk of the $530 million. Corporate tax credits in 2015 amounted to more than $90 million alone.
The High Performance Incentive Program, which gives corporations a tax credit if they pay above-average wages, represented $64.6 million in foregone tax revenue. The program is sometimes bundled with other tax incentives when companies are lured to Kansas from other states, often from Missouri.
AMC Entertainment, for example, was eligible for those credits when it moved from downtown Kansas City to Leawood in 2013.
The public only knows that because a company spokesperson acknowledged it at the time. But other companies receiving the credits are kept confidential. Often when Kansas agencies forbid disclosure of state information to the public, they will let lawmakers review what ordinary Kansans can’t see. But with tax credits, even lawmakers are left in the dark.
“Because they’re getting government help, corporate welfare, whatever you want to call it … I think the public has a right to know who’s getting that help and whether they’re creating jobs or not,” said Rep. Tom Sawyer, a Wichita Democrat who is the ranking minority on the House Tax Committee. Sawyer said the policy, which has persisted under both parties, hampers the Legislature’s ability to judge whether tax credits are working.
“When we’re hard-pressed for revenue, we need to make sure all of these things are working,” Sawyer said. “Because the ones that aren’t working, we need to get rid of.” Kansas has suffered massive budget shortfalls in recent years, which has forced the state to delay transportation projects, reduce payments to doctors who work with Medicaid patients and repeatedly cut money for higher education.
Sawyer’s sentiment is shared by Kansas Republicans as well. “I think we do a poor job of tracking our programs and would love to get better data,” said Rep. Steven Johnson, the Assaria Republican who chairs the tax committee. Mark Desetti, the legislative director for the Kansas National Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union, called the lack of oversight frustrating because “we are giving up a lot of potential revenue for the state” without any analysis on whether individual tax credits are producing the desired job growth.
“If we don’t ever look, we’re just going on blind faith … no basis in reality. We ought to examine every tax credit,” he said. He said that tax credits should come with “claw back” provisions that allow the state to recapture the lost revenue if the credits do not produce growth. “Our position is that every time you give a tax credit there ought to be a strong rationale for it and an evaluation process. Oftentimes there’s very little evidence that tax credits do create jobs,” he said.
It’s a different story in Missouri. With a few taps on a keyboard and clicks of a mouse, it’s easy to discover that the health care technology giant Cerner Corp. received $9 million from Missouri for a job training tax credit in 2017. One can also learn that Republican state Sen. Ryan Silvey’s Northland district, which is home to Cerner, received more in overall tax credits than any other district in the state. Missouri publishes this data on a website it calls the Accountability Portal.
State and local dignitaries, including Gov. Sam Brownback (far left), joined Cerner officials in cutting the ribbon to officially open the first of two buildings at the new Cerner office complex in 2013 in Kansas City, Kan. Cerner gets tax credits in both Missouri and Kansas. Missouri has made those records public. In Kansas, however, the information is deemed secret.
But Kansans have no way of knowing whether Cerner, which has offices in Wyandotte County, is benefiting from similar programs in their state. Rachel Whitten, spokeswoman for Gov. Sam Brownback and the Kansas Department of Revenue, said in an email that Kansas law “will not allow us to divulge, or to make known in any way,” personal information from a taxpayer’s return. “Because the tax credit schedule is part of the tax return, we are not able to disclose any individual information,” Whitten said.
Taxpayer information, such as how much a corporation pays in income taxes or an individual’s tax return, is generally held confidential. For the record, Cerner confirmed it receives tax credits in Kansas, but it would not say how much. Most states have not interpreted taxpayer confidentiality as a justification for keeping tax credit information secret.
Leroy, the Good Jobs First executive director, said Kansas is one of a few remaining states that continues to rely on the taxpayer confidentiality argument to keep tax credit recipients secret. “I think it’s a hyperlegalistic reason,” he said. He said the level of secrecy with tax credit programs doesn’t make sense when applied to other ways that state governments spend money. “Would you hide a procurement contract and allow a contractor to build 50 miles of highway while getting paid for 100 miles?” Leroy asked.
The most information Kansans can obtain about tax credits is an annual report published by the Kansas Department of Revenue that lists the total amount of tax credits awarded in a given year. Whitten said that Revenue Secretary Sam Williams is “open to working with legislators to change the law to make the tax credit data publicly available and increase transparency.”
Lawmakers from both parties have expressed interest in changing tax credit disclosure policies over the years, but the idea has not transformed into a priority when the Legislature convenes each year.

When cops kill in Kansas, you probably won’t hear their names or see the video By Laura Bauer , Kelsey Ryan and Max Londberg The Kansas City Star Updated November 15, 2017
On a Tuesday night in July, Antonio Garcia Jr. was shot to death while sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle in front of his Leavenworth home. The shooter: a Leavenworth police officer.
Beyond that, the man’s family doesn’t know much. Four months later, they still haven’t been told the officer’s name or been allowed to see body camera footage they were told exists. “There are no answers in this,” said Gina Mays, who had raised Garcia like a son since he moved to the area from California when he was 14. “The answers we are getting, it’s like, ‘This is all we are going to let you know.’ ” In Kansas it can take years for grieving families to get answers.
Weak transparency laws and hazy practices often allow law enforcement to avoid public scrutiny, unlike many other states, a Star investigation has found. The state has one of the most restrictive laws on police body cameras in the country. Footage is classified as an investigative record and not subject to mandatory disclosure under the Kansas Open Records Act.
While family members may eventually see what was captured on camera, the public may never have that opportunity. The Star also found that some of the largest police departments in the state do not release the names of officers involved in shootings, despite a call across the country for more openness following high-profile incidents in Cleveland, Minneapolis and St. Louis.
In 2014, Kansas became the last state in the nation to open criminal affidavits, yet in some counties judges still seal those documents for long periods. And the state can keep records in unsolved cases closed to the public indefinitely.
One family has spent nearly 30 years trying to see records authorities have on the disappearance of their son in 1988. “I don’t trust a government that wants to let us know what we can and cannot know,” said attorney Cheryl Pilate, who recently helped win the release of a Kansas City, Kan., man who was wrongly convicted of a 1994 double murder.
Pilate works in both Kansas and Missouri, and said obtaining investigative records is far easier in Missouri. In the months since Garcia’s death, Tracy Ludeman, who is Mays’ sister, has organized several protests outside the Leavenworth Justice Center demanding answers. His family insists that Garcia’s vehicle was in reverse and he was trying to leave.
The only thing law enforcement officials have said publicly is that a police officer responded to a report of a stolen vehicle. At the location, an altercation occurred and the officer shot Garcia. Ludeman pleaded with the city commission in August to identify the officer and provide more information. She vows not to stop seeking answers.
“If it was a regular citizen who shot him, the person’s name would have been splashed across the papers immediately,” Ludeman said. “Right now, all we have is speculation and rumors. It’s horrible. “Why has there been nothing told to our family? ... The body camera doesn’t lie, let us see it.”
A try for transparency fails Even when Kansas lawmakers have pushed for openness in law enforcement, it’s been a hard sell. More than two years ago, Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City, Kan., Democrat, proposed a bill to implement body cameras across the state. “I’m a strong believer that body cameras work both ways — they protect law enforcement and the general public,” Haley said. “We wanted to have full transparency and accountability.”
It didn’t work out that way. Many legislators were hesitant. They worried that officers could be threatened or harmed if their faces and names became public after an incident. And they worried about the budget strain of departments having to pay for the cameras and data storage. That bill fizzled. The next year, the issue came up again. In the end, lawmakers compromised and passed another bill dealing strictly with the release of body camera footage. On July 1, 2016, the measure took effect.
Footage now is classified as criminal investigation records, exempt from mandatory disclosure under the Kansas Open Records Act. But authorities do have the discretion to release footage in certain situations. When a Topeka officer helped a young boy with autism who fell into a pond, video from the officer’s body camera was seen across the country. Officer Aaron Bulmer was hailed as a hero. Yet the same department declined to release body camera footage from an officer-involved shooting in September.
Topeka police, as well as Lawrence police, who are handling the investigation, cited state law in keeping the records closed. The city of Topeka later said it would allow the dead man’s children, ages 3 through 13, to view the video but not the man’s parents.
Lawmakers have let Kansas residents down, said Doug Bonney, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. Any citizen can see a police stop, capture it on video and share it, Bonney said. “I have a First Amendment right to do that and do whatever with it that I wish,” Bonney said. “At the same time, officers may be wearing body cam technology and that footage is exempt from disclosure. ... It was a compromise, but the wrong compromise.”
Garcia’s family says police officials told them that they’ll eventually get to see the footage. But that was months ago, said Darnell Warfield, Garcia’s brother. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation still has the case. “They told me they can’t tell me anything until the KBI is done with their investigation,” Warfield said.
The night his brother died, Warfield expected to see him. But Garcia first needed to stop off at his home to pick up some things. He and his wife had been arguing throughout the day, family members said.
When Garcia left the Leavenworth house, relatives said at the time that he encountered the police officer as he tried to get into his vehicle and drive away. Relatives said the officer tried to stop Garcia from leaving, and the two struggled over the door of the vehicle.
Garcia tried to drive away, relatives said, and the officer fired several shots, hitting Garcia in the head and chest. Warfield had gone to his brother’s home looking for him. He says when he pulled up near the location, he saw police lights.
At one point, Warfield said an officer approached him and put her hands in the air. “She said, ‘I didn’t do it,’ ” Warfield said. “I was like, ‘Didn’t do what?’ ” Now Warfield wants Leavenworth police to walk him through what happened to his brother.
Leavenworth Police Chief Pat Kitchens said the KBI is still investigating and he could not comment on the case. “I certainly understand the frustration of the family, but the most important thing to me, and I think to everyone involved, is that there is a thorough investigation and that everything is gathered appropriately,” Kitchens said. “The most important thing is to get it right.”
The waiting, though, only brings more suspicion and frustration, family members say. “My fear is they are waiting for us to be apathetic enough for us to sweep it under the carpet,” Ludeman said. “And that’s not going to happen.”
Officer Jane Doe Hours after a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Justine Damond in July, the officer’s name, how long he’d been on the job and some details from his personnel file were released. That same month, two Plant City, Fla., police officers shot and killed Jesus Cervantes. Their names were released days later.
Yet for more than a year, Santiago Quintero didn’t know the name of the Wichita officer who shot and killed his son, John Paul, on a snowy January evening in 2015. Wichita police wouldn’t tell him. “The only way to get it is to file a lawsuit,” said James Orr, a Texas-based attorney who represented the Quintero family in a civil suit against the department for excessive force.
The Star filed open records requests with a dozen law enforcement departments and agencies asking for information regarding all officer-involved shootings since 1980. Four of the five largest departments, which have the bulk of these incidents, used the Kansas Open Records Act as the reason for not disclosing the names of officers who have shot civilians.
Topeka was the exception, releasing the names. Wichita, Overland Park, Olathe and Kansas City, Kan., predominantly cited two discretionary exemptions to the state sunshine law: personnel records and records that would “endanger the life or physical safety of any person.” “It’s a safety issue for the officers and their families,” Overland Park Police Chief Frank Donchez said. “There’s a climate of anti-law enforcement sentiment in this country.”
Yet, other Kansas departments, such as Hays, Dodge City, Garden City, Manhattan and Salina, have released the information. Hays Police Chief Don Scheibler said each case is weighed on individual circumstances. “Law enforcement agencies have an obligation to be open and transparent with their communities, especially in cases of lethal force,” Scheibler said. “But they also have an obligation not to identify officers if it endangers the officer or their families.”
Some cities in other states — Denver, Oklahoma City — release the names after waiting at least a day. “The longer the law enforcement agency withholds this information, the greater the appearance that the agency is protecting its own personnel at the expense of transparency within the community,” according to a report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “At the same time, release of an officer’s name in this time of heightened police scrutiny and public dissent has also become a matter of greater concern for officer safety.”
For the family of John Paul Quintero, not knowing the name of the officer who killed him only worsened the pain. John Paul was celebrating the New Year and his 23rd birthday the day he died nearly three years ago.
He had moved to Wichita from San Antonio just four or five months before, his father said. Although his son had been involved in gangs and “other trouble” in California and Texas, Santiago Quintero said John Paul was trying to start over in Wichita.
On Jan. 3, 2015, police responded to a 911 call from Quintero’s relatives saying he was armed with a knife, was intoxicated and was threatening others. Santiago Quintero said the situation had cooled down by the time police arrived. Witnesses said John Paul was holding his hands in the air when he was tased, just before an officer fired a military-style rifle at him from behind, striking him twice in the midsection.
Santiago Quintero said the first thing the officer said was that she thought John Paul was reaching for his waistband after being tased. He said he believes his son was reaching toward his waist to pull up his baggy pants. Police did not recover a weapon on Quintero. The family did not find out the name of the officer until March 2016, when the city had to give it to them as part of the lawsuit.
The Sedgwick County District Attorney issued a 30-page report finding the shooting justified. Jamie Thompson, who was initially identified as “Officer Jane Doe” in the lawsuit, is still employed by the police department, according to the city human resources department. The family eventually settled its suit with the city of Wichita.
Quintero’s parents each received about $59,000 after attorneys fees and hospital bills, according to city records. “I don’t need the money,” said John Paul’s father, who doesn’t think families should have to file a lawsuit to find out who killed their loved ones. “It doesn’t bring my son back. It does nothing for me.”
When it came to the transparency of criminal affidavits, Kansas stood alone. In the dark. That’s what former Rep. John Rubin discovered when he tried to determine how many other states were like Kansas in keeping those documents closed to the public. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Rubin, a Shawnee Republican. “We were the only state in the country that absolutely sealed affidavits. ... When you’re the only state in the union that does something, or doesn’t do something, it makes you wonder what the other 49 states know that we don’t.”
Arrest affidavits describe why someone has been charged with a crime. The documents are readily available in many states. A retired federal administrative law judge, Rubin said he was prompted to do something after a Leawood couple couldn’t find out why authorities conducted a SWAT-style raid of their home in 2012.
Robert and Adlynn Harte were targets after they were suspected of cultivating marijuana. No drugs were found, and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office refused to release the search affidavit explaining the rationale for the raid. The Hartes sued to get the information and paid more than $20,000 in attorney fees.
Ron Keefover, president of the Kansas Sunshine Coalition, likened the incident to something out of a dictatorship. “How’s it any different than North Korea whisking tourists off the streets and saying they’re spies without any indication for why they’re charged?” he said. “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.”
Again, only a lawsuit led to answers. Tea leaves in the Hartes’ trash and a visit to a garden store had elicited authorities’ suspicion of a drug operation. “I was shocked at what happened with the Hartes,” Rubin said. “It’s a right of all Kansas citizens to know how government operates.”
In 2014, legislators passed a law, sponsored by Rubin, that opened the documents. Yet because of pushback from prosecutors and some judges, compromises were made. Instead of making the affidavits routinely open like they are in Missouri, prosecutors, defendants and their attorneys have up to five days to make a motion to seal the documents.
Kansas law allows judges to seal the documents if they determine disclosure would interfere with an investigation or prosecution. In Wyandotte County District Court, for example, there have been 46 requests for arrest affidavits since the new law took effect in summer 2014. Of those, more than three-fourths were denied, according to Chief Judge Wayne Lampson.
Most were denied because “the police department was still investigating the case,” Lampson said by email. Doug Anstaett, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said he is disappointed by the interpretation of the new affidavit law, questioning why, in some courts, some affidavits are released when others are not. “I think that raises suspicions for the public: Are you playing favorites? Is there a racial profiling (aspect)? Is it that rich people get protected and poor people don’t?” he asked.
The public has a right to scrutinize law enforcement, he added, “and the way you do that is you get out as much information as you can that doesn’t hurt an investigation but also tells the public why a person is in jail.”
Kansas prosecutors Todd Thompson of Leavenworth County and Marc Bennett of Sedgwick County say there are valid reasons for keeping the records private. Thompson said arrest affidavits, when made public, could taint a jury’s perception of a defendant. Hearing that affidavits in some jurisdictions remain sealed is disappointing, Rubin said. But not surprising. “Not given the blowback we heard back then,” when the proposal was first introduced, Rubin said. “Some judges never agreed with the transparency spirit behind the bill.”
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Harold and Alberta Leach last saw their son Randy in 1988. They are suing the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office for records that detail what authorities did to search for their son. By Jill Toyoshiba and Max Londberg
What happened to Randy? Even in less incendiary cases, law enforcement agencies are reluctant to share information. It’s been nearly 30 years since Harold and Alberta Leach last saw their son Randy, who disappeared one April night when he was just 17 and was never found.
The Linwood, Kan., couple have long questioned the investigation that followed. They’ve asked for the law enforcement records that detail what authorities did to search for their son. Seeing those records would bring them a degree of closure, they say.
But they can’t get them. Kansas is one of several states where criminal investigation records in ongoing cases can be closed to the public indefinitely. “If we had lived 25 miles away in Missouri, we would’ve already had our records,” Alberta Leach said. “That’s pretty bad. So why? That’s what we’re asking: Why?”
The Leaches filed a lawsuit in Leavenworth County, naming the county and the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office as defendants and demanding the release of records in the case. A Nov. 21 court date is set. Max Kautsch, the couple’s attorney, switches between incredulity and anger when speaking about why the Leaches still feel forsaken by law enforcement after three decades. “The purpose of open records is not just to find what’s in the records,” he said, “but to hold government accountable and determine whether they conducted the investigation in the manner in which they said they did.”
After Randy Leach’s disappearance in mid-April of 1988, the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office began the initial investigation. A few months later, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation began assisting with the case. Today, the KBI continues to investigate when new leads arise. KBI spokeswoman Melissa Underwood said new locations have been searched in the past year, “including a couple locations of specific concern to the Leach family.”
On one search, “the Leaches were invited and were present.” She said the KBI has “sincerely tried to accommodate the Leaches’ desire to know what happened to their missing son.” But the Leaches say it hasn’t been enough. That’s why, this past spring, they attended a Senate committee hearing in Topeka.
Sen. Tom Holland, a Baldwin City Democrat, proposed an amendment that would have compelled the release of some of the Randy Leach records to the parents. Though the amendment passed the Senate, it died in the House.
Kirk Thompson, the KBI director, staunchly opposed Holland’s amendment. His primary concern was that releasing such records had the potential to compromise a future prosecution in the Leach case, as well as hinder detectives’ ability to gain the trust of witnesses in other cases.
“Knowledge that information shared privately and in confidence with an investigator could later be disclosed to the media or general public would have a chilling effect on the cooperation of both victims and witnesses, therefore inhibiting successful resolution of criminal cases,” Thompson wrote. The Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police, the Kansas Sheriffs Association and the Kansas Peace Officers Association all joined the KBI in opposing the amendment.
In their lawsuit, the Leaches are seeking all records created prior to 1993. To win, they must prove the records are in the public interest, Leavenworth County Judge David King said at a recent court appearance.
“I can see in certain situations where we can’t have all this information out, but not necessarily for 30 years. That’s a bunch of garbage,” Harold Leach said. “Unless there’s something really bad out there to make them look bad, then that’s why they’re doing it. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
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Caregivers of disabled left in dark under Kansas’ private healthcare system
By Andy Marso Updated November 16, 2017
 Vicki Distefano, who cares for her disabled brother, was asked to sign a blank plan of care for him. Distefano later learned the state’s contractor wanted to cut her brother's support hours in half.
By Jill Toyoshiba and Andy Marso
Vicki Distefano relies on KanCare to provide the in-home care her brother needs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A 2006 motorcycle accident left Mike Distefano unable to walk, talk or take care of himself. So when Vicki gets a new plan of care from the state each year, she pays close attention.
Last year, a private contractor working for the state came to her Fairway house, asked some questions and then asked Vicki to sign off on a plan.
He handed her an iPad with a blank screen. “I said, ‘I’m not signing it,’ ” she said. “Until I see it, I’m not signing it. You send it to my house and then I’ll sign it, I’ll make copies and I’ll send it back to you.’ They didn’t like that but that’s how I had it done.”
Distefano went months without knowing whether Mike’s caregivers would get paid at all. She later learned the state’s contractor wanted to cut Mike’s support hours in half. She’s not alone. The Star found other caregivers who were asked to sign off on plans of care without knowing if they included cuts — one of several concerns about transparency that have arisen since the state became the first in the country to privatize its entire Medicaid program by establishing KanCare in 2013.
KanCare has made the Medicaid system in Kansas less collaborative and more secretive for people with disabilities, a group of independent case managers from Johnson County said in an August interview with The Star.
When the system was run by the state and a network of disability non-profits, the case managers said, the focus was on figuring out what services could help and how to find them. Now it’s about justifying the services they’re getting. Meredith Funkhouser, one of those case managers, said there’s no comparison. “(Before) you would sit down and you would bring the family in and you would talk about needs and real people,” Funkhouser said. “Now it’s like going to court. It’s intimidating.”
Gary Blumenthal, a former Kansas official who was appointed to the National Council on Disability under President Barack Obama, said privatization of state services always leads to less public accountability. “It’s another layer,” Blumenthal said. “It’s more difficult to get information.”
KanCare covers more than 400,000 people, most of them low-income children, elderly people or pregnant women who use it only for traditional medical care or nursing home beds. About 20,000 Kansans with disabilities, like 58-year-old Mike Distefano, also rely on KanCare for what are called home- and community-based services that allow them to live at home rather than in an institution.
Vicki Distefano, her husband and a series of paid caregivers feed Mike through a tube, wash him with towels and do their best to stretch his limbs so they don’t atrophy. It’s a lot of work and Mike can’t say “Thank you.” But he still smiles a lot, Distefano said, and she won’t consider putting him in a nursing facility. “He wouldn’t get this (care) in a nursing home,” Distefano said. “He would have been long dead.” Vicki Distefano and her husband Mark Perbeck spend hours preparing her brother Mike to be moved from his bed to his chair every day. Mike suffered a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident 11 years ago.
Going private No other state had fully privatized the administration of services like those — everything from bathing and dressing to tube feedings and catheter draining — before Kansas did it in 2013.
Disability advocates expressed concern from the start, saying the insurance companies had no experience with long-term support services, which, unlike medical costs, can’t be reduced through preventive care. But Gov. Sam Brownback said all KanCare services had to placed under three contractors to meet the goal of reducing estimated Medicaid costs by $1 billion over the first five years through better coordination of care.
The companies — Amerigroup, Sunflower State Health Plan (a subsidiary of Centene) and UnitedHealthcare — get about $3 billion annually in state and federal Medicaid funds and keep whatever they don’t spend on care.
The savings have materialized. But Blumenthal said fears about the state ceding too much control to private companies have been realized. “I think advocates were worried that there was minimal oversight at the state level (over the contractors) and that’s basically what the Brownback administration wanted,” Blumenthal said.
“Less government, which resulted in minimal oversight.” A federal evaluation of the program last year found that the state’s oversight was inadequate and that the health and welfare of Kansans with disabilities was at risk. Comments from Kansans and their caregivers “overwhelmingly reflect an inability to obtain clear and consistent information” about their Medicaid coverage, federal officials wrote.
The state submitted a plan to address the problems, and Kansas Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer says improvements are coming when new KanCare contracts go up for bid next year. “In the construction of KanCare 2.0 we listened closely to the voices of stakeholders and citizens in our effort to make KanCare even stronger,” said Colyer, the architect of KanCare under Brownback.
“KanCare 2.0 builds on the successes we’ve had in the past in order to continue serving our most vulnerable citizens, assisting them with services that benefit their physical health and improve their quality of life.” Colyer is promising better long-term care for people with disabilities in the next version of KanCare. But Vicki Distefano and others in the disability community still say they want out of the program entirely. “There is no transparency,” Distefano said.
Secret plans After Distefano refused to sign off on the plan of care without seeing it, she eventually got a plan temporarily extending Mike’s care for six months rather than the customary 12. Then she got a notice saying Mike’s KanCare company, UnitedHealthcare, planned to cut Mike from 189 hours of help per week to 71.25 hours. Distefano said that kind of cut would be crushing. She and her husband are 60 and 59 and are already stretched thin caring for Mike, who is heavy enough to qualify as a “two-person assist” — meaning two people are needed to move him.
Distefano hired an attorney, Kim Kass, who appealed the cuts, and after months of legal wrangling the hours were restored. But Kass said she wonders how many other KanCare families would know to do that. “I think most people look at that and go, ‘Oh, it’s the government, what am I going to do? That’s what they decided,’ ” Kass said.
Joe Friday, another Kass client who lives in Tecumseh, near Topeka, said he was asked multiple times over multiple years to sign blank plans of care for his disabled son. “I was never happy about doing that and on one of them I even signed it under protest,” Friday said. “It said ‘under protest’ under the signature line.”
Friday’s son is 42. Like Mike Distefano, he is brain damaged and requires 24-hour care. “He can’t be left alone,” Friday said. “Really, he needs to be monitored because he can easily choke to death.” Friday said his son’s managed care organization also tried to reduce his service hours, and he also had to hire Kass to get them restored.
Last year’s federal audit found systemic problems with KanCare companies asking people to sign blank plans of care or changing plans of care after they were signed — things that should not happen under federal rules.
A Johnson County group called Families for KanCare Reform recently tried to find out just how widespread the practice was. The group surveyed 235 families throughout the state that receive disability services. Fourteen percent said they’d been asked to sign a blank form, and 16 percent said they’d been asked to sign a form they knew was incomplete or inaccurate. Ten percent of respondents said their hours had been cut. Kass thinks there’s a connection.
“It’s just my opinion that the reason why they’re asking people to sign a plan of care they haven’t seen is to avoid the drama because either they’re going to refuse to sign a massive cut like that or they’re going to have to explain it to them on the spot and they don’t want to have to do that,” Kass said.
The state’s corrective plan after the audit was supposed to fix the problem, but Funkhouser and the other case managers said it’s still happening. Bea Judah, a Gardner resident whose 14-year-old daughter receives KanCare services because of severe autism, said an Amerigroup employee asked her to sign a blank iPad screen this year at the end of her daughter’s annual assessment.
Laura Singer, a case manager Judah had hired from Funkhouser’s company, stepped in. “Laura stopped him and said, ‘Well, how do we know you’re going to comply?’ ” Judah said. “ ‘This isn’t written up in any document, you’re just asking her to sign something.’ ” Judah said that based on Singer’s advice, she didn’t sign the plan until she got paper copies in the mail that showed how many hours her daughter would receive. But Judah said if Singer hadn’t been there, she probably would have signed the blank screen.
Angela de Rocha, a spokeswoman for multiple state agencies, said she thinks the KanCare companies are acting in good faith. But she said they should be more transparent. “People have to see what they’re signing before they sign and we’re going to talk to the (companies) involved about the situation so people aren’t confused and they know what they’re signing,” de Rocha said. “So everybody is on the same page before the (companies) ask them to sign. Otherwise they’re being asked to sign a blank check and no one would do that.”
A spokeswoman for Amerigroup referred questions to the state. A spokeswoman for UnitedHealthcare said the company performs monthly audits of employees who form plans of care to make sure they’re complying with state and federal rules. All changes to the plans require a conversation with the client or their guardians and new signatures, she said.
Sunflower State Health Plan spokeswoman Miranda Steele said her company trains its employees on compliance, and a survey conducted this year found a satisfaction rate of almost 95 percent among people receiving disability support services from Sunflower State. “We reiterate in each of our care coordinator training sessions that a member/guardian’s signature should only be requested once the plan of care has been fully reviewed and is final,” Steele said.
Kass said the KanCare companies are also protective of the assessment tool they use to determine how many hours to provide a patient. She’s filed multiple appeals but never gotten to the discovery phase where she would be able to use legal force to look at it.
“When I have challenged it, I push hard enough, they restore the hours and we never even get to the hearing,” Kass said. “I never get the opportunity to dig into it to find out what actually happened. They don’t want me to do that.” Steele said Sunflower State’s assessment tool is “not an external device,” but is only used to ensure the company is following state and federal rules about eligibility for disability services.
De Rocha said the state is working with the KanCare companies to get them to use a single, standard assessment method for the disability service plans and the next contracts will include language requiring it.
Politicians weigh in, KanCare is bound to be an issue in the 2018 state elections. Colyer will serve out the rest of Brownback’s term if he’s confirmed by the Senate for a job in the Trump administration. Colyer has announced he’s running next year, and he’s touting KanCare as a model for other states.
But former Rep. Mark Hutton, a conservative Republican from Wichita who is running against Colyer, said the state moved too fast in privatizing Medicaid services. He said the KanCare companies, called managed care organizations, or MCOs, were not ready to serve Kansans with intellectual disabilities, and the state didn’t do enough to hold them accountable. “When they handed this over to three MCOs, they should have remembered that they are the advocates for the patients, not the advocates for the MCOs,” Hutton said.
Hutton said about 90 percent of the constituent complaints he fielded while in the Kansas House from 2013 through 2016 were KanCare related. Another candidate for governor, House Minority Leader Jim Ward, a Democrat from Wichita, has introduced legislation to pull disability services out of KanCare and administer them the previous way. After the 2016 elections shifted the Legislature toward the center politically, lawmakers looked to exert more oversight of the program this year.
But Sen. Laura Kelly, a Democrat from Topeka who sits on a legislative KanCare oversight committee, said it’s still hard even for legislators to get comprehensive information. “I just sometimes feel like we don’t really have a good grasp on the depth or breadth of issues in the KanCare system,” Kelly said.

Andy Marso: 816-234-4055, @andymarso Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article184167411.html#storylink=cpy

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