Pulling the Taxpayer\u27s Sword from the Stone: The Appropriation Requirement of Missouri\u27s Hancock Amendment

On November 4, 1980, Missouri voters approved the Hancock Amendment (Hancock) to Missouri\u27s Constitution. Hancock addressed voter concerns as to whether state and local governments could keep their taxing and spending in check. The amendment contains two principle aspects. First, Hancock limits state and local governments in their ability to increase taxation, revenue, and spending without voter approval. Second, Hancock prohibits the state from imposing unfunded mandates upon its political subdivisions - closing a loophole that would otherwise allow the state to circumvent its duty not to raise taxes or spending above a certain level without a vote of the people. According to Hancock, new state mandates require that a state appropriation is made and disbursed to pay the county or other political subdivision for any increased costs. This appropriation requirement is the focus of this Law Summary. As one of, if not the most, fiscally conservative states in the nation, the history and future of Missouri\u27s Hancock Amendment - arguably the most restrictive tax and expenditure limitation in the nation - is critical to understand, not only for Missourians, but for many other Americans, as our state and national elected representatives consider how, if at all, to approach spiraling deficits in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Part II of this Summary will briefly trace the history of self-imposed fiscal restraints among the various states. Missouri\u27s unique tradition of fiscal conservatism and the birth of Hancock will be part of the historical discussion, which also includes a description of the Hancock\u27s key provisions and how the courts have interpreted Hancock\u27s provisions over time. Part III will focus on the 2004 case of Brooks v. State that appears to open the door for avoidance of the seemingly unambiguous Hancock appropriation requirement. This Part will also describe the pending case of Turner v. School District of Clayton, which may bring this question of interpretation before the Supreme Court of Missouri. Part IV provides two examples of recently proposed and enacted legislation that could violate the Hancock appropriation requirement in an effort to show the potential broad reach of the provision. It also suggests that the Supreme Court of Missouri has become increasingly deferential to the legislature in Hancock cases. Lastly, it applies the interpretive methods used by the court in Hancock cases to the appropriations requirement and concludes that regardless of method, the court is likely to uphold the provision\u27s broad reach. This section ends with a policy-based argument supporting such a holding

Agricultural Change in an Urban Age

AMERICAN LOCAL HISTORIES have traditionally focused upon the origins and early growth of communities while occasionally examining later periods of relative stability or renewed expansion. But many localities, particularly in rural areas, have undergone long periods of stagnation followed by decline and disintegration. These aspects of community existence have received much less attention and remain relatively unexplored. This is particularly true in the realm of agricultural history which in the United States has tended to steer away from the local history approach, especially when dealing with the dynamic changes of the twentieth century. The present volume represents a tentative effort to explore this void, examining the processes of socioeconomic change in an agricultural region of the Great Plains. Perhaps the first question that arises whenever a local history appears concerns how the author happened to choose a particular geographical area as his subject and whether it accurately represents a significant sector of the broader national society. In this instance the author spent his childhood and adolescence in the region surveyed and thus developed a personal familiarity with it. Hopefully I have avoided the twin pitfalls of romanticizing the world we have lost on the one hand and expounding on the horrors I have escaped on the other, while minimizing the degree of distortion arising from personal bias. At the same time I have occasionally unearthed evidence of developments which lack printed documentation. Thus the methodologically demanding will discover to their displeasure that certain elements of intuitive interpretation have found their way into these pages. As for the typicality or representativeness of the area, this depends upon the specific phenomenon under consideration. For a further discussion of this point the reader is referred to the Conclusions. In the process of researching and writing this work I have become indebted to numerous individuals in various positions and places. I wish particularly to thank Professor Earl Pomeroy of the University of Oregon and Professor John C. Hudson, now of the Geography Department at Northwestern University, for encouragement during the initial investigation of the topic. The staffs of the Extension Division of the University of Nebraska College of Agriculture and of the Nebraska State Historical Society proved very helpful. County officials in the courthouses at Ord and Greeley deserve praise for the patience with which they put up with their peculiar intruder over the course of several years. Professors Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., and Maris Vinovskis of the University of Michigan read early drafts of the manuscript and offered helpful criticisms and encouragement. Finally, an expression of gratitude is due Professor Allan G. Bogue of the University of Wisconsin, who provided counsel and reassurance on numerous occasions when the project appeared on the verge of dissolution

Detection of X-ray emission from the host clusters of 3CR quasars

We report the detection of extended X-ray emission around several powerful 3CR quasars with redshifts out to 0.73. The ROSAT HRI images of the quasars have been corrected for spacecraft wobble and compared with an empirical point-spread function. All the quasars examined show excess emission at radii of 15 arcsec and more; the evidence being strong for the more distant objects and weak only for the two nearest ones, which are known from other wavelengths not to lie in strongly clustered environments. The spatial profiles of the extended component is consistent with thermal emission from the intracluster medium of moderately rich host clusters to the quasars. The total luminosities of the clusters are in the range 4x10^44 - 3x10^45 erg/s, assuming a temperature of 4keV. The inner regions of the intracluster medium are, in all cases, dense enough to be part of a cooling flow.Comment: 21 pages including 4 figures and 4 tables. To be published in MNRA

A Parkes half-Jansky sample of GPS galaxies

This paper describes the selection of a new southern/equatorial sample of Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum (GPS) radio galaxies, and subsequent optical CCD imaging and spectroscopic observations using the ESO 3.6m telescope. The sample consists of 49 sources with -4020 degrees, and S(2.7GHz)>0.5 Jy, selected from the Parkes PKSCAT90 survey. About 80% of the sources are optically identified, and about half of the identifications have available redshifts. The R-band Hubble diagram and evolution of the host galaxies of GPS sources are reviewed.Comment: Latex, 12 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Faint Gigahertz peaked spectrum sources and the evolution of young radio sources

GPS sources are the objects of choice to study the initial evolution of extragalactic radio sources, since it is most likely that they are the young counterparts of large scale radio sources. Correlations found between their peak frequency, peak flux density and angular size provide strong evidence that synchrotron self absorption is the cause of the spectral turnovers, and indicate that young radio sources evolve in a self-similar way. The difference in redshift distribution between young and old radio sources must be due to a difference in slope of their luminosity functions, and we argue that this slope is strongly affected by the luminosity evolution of the individual sources. A luminosity evolution scenario is proposed in which GPS sources increase in luminosity and large scale radio sources decrease in luminosity with time. It is shown that such a scenario agrees with the local luminosity function of GPS galaxies.Comment: Late, 6 pages, 2 figs. To appear in the proceedings of EVN/JIVE Symposium No 4, New Astronomy Reviews (eds. Garrett et al.). For related papers, see http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~snelle

A new sample of faint Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum radio sources

The Westerbork Northern Sky Survey (WENSS) has been used to select a sample of Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum (GPS) radio sources at flux densities one to two orders of magnitude lower than bright GPS sources investigated in earlier studies. Sources with inverted spectra at frequencies above 325 MHz have been observed with the WSRT at 1.4 and 5 GHz and with the VLA at 8.6 and 15 GHz to select genuine GPS sources. This has resulted in a sample of 47 GPS sources with peak frequencies ranging from ~500 MHz to >15 GHz, and peak flux densities ranging from ~40 to ~900 mJy. Counts of GPS sources in our sample as a function of flux density have been compared with counts of large scale sources from WENSS scaled to 2 GHz, the typical peak frequency of our GPS sources. The counts can be made similar if the number of large scale sources at 2 GHz is divided by 250, and their flux densities increase by a factor of 10. On the scenario that all GPS sources evolve into large scale radio sources, these results show that the lifetime of a typical GPS source is ~250 times shorter than a typical large scale radio source, and that the source luminosity must decrease by a factor of ~10 in evolving from GPS to large scale radio source. However, we note that the redshift distributions of GPS and large scale radio sources are different and that this hampers a direct and straightforward interpretation of the source counts. Further modeling of radio source evolution combined with cosmological evolution of the radio luminosity function for large sources is required.Comment: LaTeX, 15 pages, 8 figs. To be published in A&AS. For more info see http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~snelle

Conception and preliminary evaluation of an optical fibre sensor for simultaneous measurement of pressure and temperature

peer-reviewedThis paper presents a novel concept of simultaneously measuring pressure and temperature using a silica optical fibre extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric (EFPI) pressure sensor incorporating a fibre Bragg grating (FBG), which is constructed entirely from fusedsilica. The novel device is used to simultaneously provide accurate pressure and temperature readings at the point of measurement. Furthermore, the FBG temperature measurement is used to eliminate the temperature cross-sensitivity of the EFPI pressure sensorPUBLISHEDpeer reviewe

Massive galaxies with very young AGN

Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum (GPS) radio galaxies are generally thought to be the young counterparts of classical extended radio sources and live in massive ellipticals. GPS sources are vital for studying the early evolution of radio-loud AGN, the trigger of their nuclear activity, and the importance of feedback in galaxy evolution. We study the Parkes half-Jansky sample of GPS radio galaxies of which now all host galaxies have been identified and 80% has their redshifts determined (0.122 < z < 1.539). Analysis of the absolute magnitudes of the GPS host galaxies show that at z > 1 they are on average a magnitude fainter than classical 3C radio galaxies. This suggests that the AGN in young radio galaxies have not yet much influenced the overall properties of the host galaxy. However their restframe UV luminosities indicate that there is a low level of excess as compared to passive evolution models.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Bulges", IAUS 245; M. Bureau, E. Athanassoula & B. Barbuy, ed