Kansas County Bucks Brownback's Vision; ‘Lung-Scarring Siege’ in California
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com
Also in our State & Local weekend roundup: Stories from New Jersey, Florida and Wisconsin ...
Here’s what you may have missed this weekend in local news from around the nation ...
JOHNSON COUNTY, Kansas: Gov. Sam Brownback has said that limited government and low taxes has helped this suburban county outside Kansas City prosper. But as Brad Cooper of the Kansas City Star reports, Johnson County, “where taxpayers regularly open their wallets to pay for comfortable living,” doesn’t exactly fit Brownback’s vision. As the Star writes:
For the last decade-plus, Johnson County has led the state in private-sector job growth while embracing steady spending and tax increases to pay for road upkeep, new justice centers, schools and some of the sundry suburban extras.
Local officials argue it’s those very amenities — parks, bike paths, ballfields, festivals, pothole-free roads and especially the well-regarded schools — that have drawn families and attracted employers.
In the past 13 years, property taxes for the county and its largest cities increased on average 38 percent, the Star reports.
TRENTON, New Jersey: Bergen County Administrator Kate Donovan’s office has dropped its plans to mail out a county newsletter and has removed it from the Internet because it violates the state’s so-called “90-day rule,” Matt Friedman of the Star-Ledger reports. Donovan is up for re-election in November and although the newsletter never mentioned the upcoming election “it included Donovan’s name 27 times and her photo eight times, including one under the headline ‘Bergen County cares… about seniors,’ and one of Donovan holding a dog at the county’s ‘Bark in the Park’ festival.”
FRESNO, California: A terribly dry winter has “set the stage for a lung-scarring siege of soot that [has] squashed any hope of making a key federal air standard,” according to Mark Grossi of The Fresno Bee, who reports that the San Joaquin Valley’s stagnant air has become “a smothering blanket of soot and other microscopic debris.”
MIAMI, Florida: In November, voters in the Sunshine State will consider a constitutional amendment that would steer a third of taxes from real estate transactions to conserve land and protect water, Jenny Staletovich reports for The Miami Herald. Environmentalists are supporting Amendment 1, along with a range of interest groups, including “animals rights groups, local garden clubs, kayakers, bikers and even surfers.” But critics say that the proposal could stipulate land acquisitions that make the budget “too inflexible.”
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin: Police in Wisconsin’s largest city made a promise 10 years ago that they’d take effective measures to train officers to better deal with situations involving people with mental health issues. But since that pledge, “at least seven people with well-documented and severe mental illness have died after confrontations with Milwaukee police,” Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports. "It is obvious that the police in this community have not taken mental health illness seriously," said the brother of a man with paranoid schizophrenia shot 14 times by police and killed in a downtown park in April. The brother told the Journal-Sentinel that “he was ‘floored’ to learn the everyone-trained promise of a decade ago had been broken.”
(Photo by Albert H. Teich / Shutterstock.com)