photo by: Peter Hancock

Jennifer Nauertc, daughter of former Lawrence High School football coach Bill Freeman, thanks Gov. Sam Brownback for signing a bill authorizing the sale of distinctive Alzheimer's disease awareness license plate. Freeman died from complications of Alzheimer's in December.

TOPEKA — People in Kansas will now be able to buy more kinds of distinctive license plates, including one that would raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association.

Gov. Sam Brownback signed that legislation, House Bill 2473, into law in a ceremony Wednesday, along with two other pieces of legislation.

Jennifer Nauertc, daughter of former Lawrence High School football coach Bill Freeman, who died of Alzheimer’s in December at age 84, spearheaded the effort for an Alzheimer’s license plate.

She and House Speaker Pro Tem Peggy Mast, R-Emporia, who authored the bill, were on hand for the signing ceremony.

photo by: Peter Hancock

Jennifer Nauertc, daughter of former Lawrence High School football coach Bill Freeman, thanks Gov. Sam Brownback for signing a bill authorizing the sale of distinctive Alzheimer's disease awareness license plate. Freeman died from complications of Alzheimer's in December.

“All I can say is (Freeman was) my hero,” Nauertc said. “He had beat prostate cancer, had a quadruple heart bypass, but did not beat this disease, and to help raise awareness and money for this, I decided to ask Peggy to write this bill.”

Freeman coached at Lawrence High from 1974 through 1990 and led teams to five state football championships and two state track titles during that time.

photo by: Peter Hancock

Lawrence High football coach Bill Freeman before the 1988 season.

People can now order Alzheimer’s Awareness license plates by paying a royalty fee of $25, in addition to their normal vehicle taxes and registration fees.

The bill also expands eligibility to add certain decals onto military veteran license plates indicating that the owner has earned specific military honors.

Previously, decals have been available only to recipients of the Purple Heart. The bill expands the list to include the Silver Star and Bronze Star, as well as several other military distinctions.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, an estimated 51,000 Kansans are diagnosed with the disease, 90 percent of whom are over age 60. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease that results in memory loss and interferes with thinking and behavior.

The license plate bill was just one of three bills Brownback signed during a ceremony in his Statehouse office, but later in the day he announced the signing of 10 more, including one that permanently cuts off Planned Parenthood from receiving any of the state’s allocation of federal family planning funds, and directs the money instead toward full-service public health clinics.

The bill puts into statute a policy that lawmakers have inserted as a proviso into every budget bill since 2011. It has been cited as the primary cause for the closure of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Hays and an unaffiliated family planning clinic in Dodge City.

Also Wednesday, Brownback signed a bill that classifies audio and video recordings from police body and dashboard cameras as investigation documents that can be withheld from public release under the Kansas Open Records Act.

That same bill also declares that emails concerning public business that are sent or received from a public officials personal, private email account are public documents subject to the open records act. That provision was a response to controversy that erupted late last year when it was reported that Brownback’s budget director Shawn Sullivan had used his personal email account to discuss details of Brownback’s budget proposal with lobbyists before he had submitted it to the Legislature.

Other bills Brownback signed Wednesday:

• House Bill 2151, requiring law enforcement agencies to adopt stricter policies regarding citizen identification of suspects during criminal investigations.

“Misidentification is the leading contributing factor to wrongful convictions, so this is a huge step in preventing wrongful convictions by using evidence-based practices,” said Michele Feldman, a state policy advocate with the Innocence Project, which supported the bill.

The bill also allows the Department of Corrections to place a juvenile offender under home supervision rather than in a correctional facility under certain circumstances.

It also amends state law regarding grand juries that are summoned by petition, allowing the person who filed the petition and that person’s attorney to witness the instructions given to the grand jury, after it is summoned but before beginning deliberations.

• And Senate Bill 149, which makes several changes in income and sales taxes, including a temporary sales tax exemption for purchases made to repair or replace fences damaged or destroyed by wildfires that occurred in south-central Kansas this year.