Category: Overland Park

Overland Park woman pleads guilty to sexual exploitation of minor

An Overland Park woman pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a 13-year-old victim, acting U.S. Attorney Tom Beall said.

Tricia Rodarmel, 39, Overland Park, Kan., pleaded guilty to one count of transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity. In her plea, Rodarmel admitted that in October 2013 she began a relationship with co-defendant Robert Dickson through social media. Dickson told her of his interest in having sex with minors. Rodarmel helped by putting Dickson in contact with a 13-year-old minor.

On March 16, 2014, Rodarmel took the 13-year-old from Missouri to a hotel in Kansas where Dickson was to meet them. Rodarmel knew that Dickson intended to engage in sex with the minor.

Sentencing is set for July 25. Both parties have agreed to recommend Rodarmel be sentenced to 17 years in federal prison, followed by 10 years of supervised release.

Co-defendant Dickson is set for sentencing July 11. Both parties in his case have agreed to recommend Dickson be sentenced to 25 years, followed by lifetime supervised release.

Beall commended the FBI and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hart for their work on the case.

Clients say turnover hinders regional DCF office for disabled employment

by Andy Marso, KHI News Service

When Shannon Lindsey moved from Missouri to Kansas two years ago, she decided she wanted to go to Johnson County Community College to get a nursing degree that would make her more employable.

Lindsey, now 49, has several disabilities, so she contacted Kansas’ vocational rehabilitation office for assistance. In Missouri she had the same vocational rehabilitation counselor for years — a state worker who understood her needs, what was available to help her and how to get it to her quickly.

In Kansas, her experience with the counselors has been far different.

“They come and go like you change underwear,” Lindsey said.

Lindsey is in her third semester at JCCC and on her sixth vocational rehabilitation counselor, a symptom of a regional office experiencing unusual turnover.

According to the Kansas Department for Children and Families, which oversees the vocational rehabilitation program, five of the seven counselors in the Johnson County office have been on the job six months or less. A sixth has just under a year of experience. The longest-tenured counselor has about two years of experience.

That makes Johnson County an outlier statewide, where the average tenure of the 67 counselors is almost 10 years.

DCF spokeswoman Theresa Freed said the Johnson County office has seen “several individuals with decades of experience” retire in recent years, but it’s now almost fully staffed.

She said the new counselors are well-qualified and supervised.

“(Vocational rehabilitation) counselors have master’s-level education,” Freed said via email. “Staff members in Johnson County also receive continued training on a monthly basis and work under program administrators and supervisors with extensive experience in the area of Vocational Rehabilitation.”

Forgoing federal funding

Still, the turnover has consequences for Kansans with disabilities in the state’s most populous county, and it comes in the wake of last year’s decision to turn down $15 million in federal funding for the vocational rehabilitation program.

Mike Donnelly, a DCF official who runs the program, said at the time that the federal money wasn’t needed because fewer Kansans were using vocational rehab services and it didn’t make sense for the state to put up the $3.5 million match to get the federal dollars.

But Lindsey said she was furious when she read about the returned money. Fewer Kansans with disabilities are accessing services because of the lack of continuity with their counselors, she said, not because they don’t need the services.

Lindsey tried to rattle off the names of her six counselors but couldn’t recall one because she said the woman was on the job for such a short time that they never actually talked.

By the time one counselor had become familiar with what Lindsey needed, she often was on to the next one and had to explain her case again. That meant delays in getting assistive devices, like eyeglasses and a digital pen to help take class notes.

The current semester was particularly rough, she said — so rough that she decided to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education.

“I finally got everything I needed … but the semester is almost over,” Lindsey said last week. “It was at least two months into the semester until I got everything.”

A key county for services

Counselor caseloads are slightly higher than average in Johnson County — about 89 open cases per counselor as compared to about 82 statewide.

It’s a key county for vocational rehabilitation, beyond just being the state’s most populous.

The Kansas School for the Deaf, a public school that serves students age 3 to 21 from across the state who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, is in Olathe.

Students and staff at the school frequently use vocational rehabilitation services to transition to jobs or academic opportunities in their communities.

Michele Golden, an administrative assistant at the school who is hearing impaired, said she had been trying to access services as she attends culinary school at the Art Institutes International in Lenexa.

Like Lindsey, she found the vocational rehabilitation process frustrating. She ultimately decided it was more hassle than it’s worth.

“I had awful experiences for the last four and a half years,” Golden said through an interpreter. “I finally closed my case.”

Golden said she worked with four counselors during that period before officially abandoning her request for services about two months ago.

“It just was not a smooth ride,” she said.

Golden said she ended up paying for assistive devices out of pocket, incurring more student loan debt.

Lindsey said she also had paid for some supplies after a vocational rehabilitation counselor told her she would be reimbursed. By the time she submitted the receipts, that counselor was gone and she never was repaid.

Though Lindsey has stuck with vocational rehabilitation, she said she could understand why others, like Golden, drop out.

“It’s been just a fight,” Lindsey said. “It’s been a big, old fight. I have spent hours and hours and hours on the phone that I should have been able to use to study.”

The nonprofit KHI News Service is an editorially independent initiative of the Kansas Health Institute and a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor reporting collaboration. All stories and photos may be republished at no cost with proper attribution and a link back to KHI.org when a story is reposted online.

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Legislator, budget expert speak out at forum

Don’t expect the state’s budget problems to go away soon.

At a forum tonight, an expert on the state’s budget was asked for his prediction on what might happen next. The state has dug itself into a hole after revenues declined when it cut income taxes, according to the speakers at a forum sponsored by the MainStream Coalition at the Matt Ross Community Center, Overland Park. With legislators on a break, forums like this are being presented to raise the public’s awareness on the state’s fiscal situation.

Duane Goossen, senior fellow of the Kansas Center for Economic Growth, answering the question about his prediction, said the state administration might choose the option to delay large cuts this year by waiting until the next fiscal year to pay into the pension fund. But that would just transfer the problem to the next fiscal year, when five payments instead of four would be due to the Kansas public employees retirement fund.

He said the areas most vulnerable in the budget would be public education, human service programs and public safety, because those are the main services provided by the general fund.

Goossen made one of the most interesting observations of the evening when he talked about the budget crisis’ effect on the future of the state. Kansas should be asking itself questions such as how to create world-class schools. Instead, because of the financial situation, all of the political effort is being spent on how to cut, he said, and there is no room for a future-oriented outlook.

The longer Kansas waits to fix its financial problems – caused by a lack of revenue from the income tax cuts – the more other states around it will keep advancing past Kansas, he believes.

About a year ago, Kansas faced an $800 million shortfall, according to Goossen. Kansas lawmakers made cuts and raised sales tax and cigarette tax, but it did not completely close the gap because revenues had fallen so much. Money was taken from other areas of state government, such as the transportation fund, to try to make up the shortfall.

They’re not finished, though. This year, the governor cut $17 million out of higher education between now and June 3. At least $31 million is still needed just for the state to slide by this fiscal year. He said the same situation is expected to play out in 2017.

Annie McKay, director of the Kansas Center for Economic Growth, said 330,000 businesses are exempt from paying income taxes under the Kansas experiment, and she said the plan to create jobs hasn’t worked. Less than 1 percent of small businesses saw enough revenue to create one job, she said. Instead, the tax burden has been shifted to the rest of the taxpayers, she said.

Instead of changing directions when it appeared that the plan wasn’t working, the administration doubled down and tripled down on it, she said.

Rep. Kathy Wolfe Moore, D-36th Dist., who spoke at the forum, said while businesses would change directions if this sort of thing happened to them, in this case, the administration isn’t changing directions. “The captain is willing to go down with the ship,” she said.

She said she believed the Kansas experiment has been extremely damaging to schools, also to mental health, to early childhood care, and to jobs they provide.

About the only solution would be to elect people in the upcoming election who would change these policies, she said. And according to the experts, it would probably take at least a year to make changes even if a more moderate Legislature was elected.

Mike Taylor, who was moderator of this program, said although the tax cut programs were promoted as a way to draw more businesses to locate in Kansas and to create more jobs here, perhaps they also were a way to starve the government and downsize it.

Rep. Wolfe Moore said it may be starving the government to the point where it is no longer efficient. She said in a legislative committee last year, legislators found out that so many employees had been cut in one state department that there were not enough people to open a stack of envelopes that had checks in them.

McKay talked about funds being swept from the transportation department, and also from tobacco settlement funds that were supposed to go to early childhood education. While one could always go back and repair roads in the future, the state won’t get the chance to go back and redo education for children, she said.

Rep. Wolfe Moore also opposes a property tax lid that puts a cap on local governments, requiring a vote to raise property taxes. She said communities elect local leaders to make these decisions.

She said the property tax lid is the wrong thing to do, but she fears it will pass this year and hurt local communities. The tax lid does not allow for changes such as population growth and community growth, she said. Legislators heard testimony from small communities that unforeseen things happen sometimes, and that they need the flexibility to make changes.

McKay said that asking what’s the tipping point for the Legislature or governor is asking the wrong question, because they will go down with the ship.

The right question, she said, is what’s the tipping point for Kansans.