Kansas legislators have cut down on the number of interim committee meetings during the legislative off-season, but they are going all out to attend the Midwestern Legislative Conference in Overland Park.

Just over 100 Kansas legislators signed up for the event that started Sunday and goes until Wednesday.

The state will pay each lawmaker’s $300 registration, and legislators will receive their legislative salaries — $88.66 per day — and expense allowance of $109 per day for each day at the conference, according to state officials.

State Sen. Jay Scott Emler, R-Lindsborg, is chairman of the nonpartisan MLC.

Conference organizers said the goal of the meeting is to provide a forum for interstate collaboration and information sharing among legislators from 11 Midwestern states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. The conference is a project of the Council of State Governments’ Midwestern office.

Pregnancy program cut

With little fanfare, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment ended a program aimed at helping women maintain their pregnancies.

KDHE officials said they had to cut the program’s budget in response to Gov. Mark Parkinson’s 2 percent budget cut in July.

Lawmakers who supported the Pregnancy Maintenance Initiative were not happy. “It’s disappointing and, I think, a disservice to the state of Kansas,” said Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita.

She said the program helped the state combat the problem of low-birthweight babies by providing prenatal care and education. And, she said, the program was matched dollar-for-dollar by the service providers.

The cut was made at the same time that KDHE alerted the media that it was cutting a program that assisted law enforcement in cleaning up meth labs. But at that time, KDHE didn’t mention the cut to the pregnancy program.