KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A resident of a home was able to escape serious injury Friday following a house fire in Kansas City, Missouri.

Crews were dispatched around 12:33 p.m. Friday to the 8000 block of Euclid Avenue in Kansas City.

The one-story residence had “heavy smoke and fire” showing when firefighters arrived, per a press release from KCFD.

The fire department brought one person from inside the house to safety, and the individual did not need medical treatment.

City Planning and Dangerous Buildings was requested.

An investigation into the cause of the fire is underway.

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A lawsuit filed Wednesday, May 13 seeks to knock a proposed constitutional amendment off Missouri’s 2026 ballot that would give lawmakers new power to expand sales taxes to eliminate the income tax, arguing legislators bundled too many subjects into one proposal and wrote misleading ballot language.

The lawsuit, filed in Cole County Circuit Court by attorney Chuck Hatfield on behalf of a Missouri resident, challenges a proposed ballot question that would ask voters to amend the Missouri Constitution to begin phasing out the state individual income tax.

The measure, approved by the legislature last month, is expected to appear on the November ballot unless Gov. Mike Kehoe moves it to another election. Kehoe has made eliminating the income tax one of his top priorities, arguing it would make Missouri more competitive with states that do not tax individual income.

But the lawsuit argues the proposal is constitutionally defective and should be blocked from any ballot. In the alternative, it asks the court to rewrite the summary statement voters would see.

The lawsuits central legal argument is that the proposal violates constitutional limits on ballot measures by including more than one subject and effectively amending multiple articles of the Missouri Constitution.

“This is precisely the logrolling harm the multi-article rule was designed to prevent,” the lawsuit argues, contending voters who support eliminating the income tax could be forced to also accept provisions they oppose, such as expanding the sales tax or changing how road funds and local taxes are handled.

The lawsuit also argues the proposal would improperly expand the constitutional role of the state auditor by requiring the office to calculate reduced tax rates triggered by the amendment. The petition contends that duty is not related to auditing the receipt or expenditure of public funds, which the Missouri Constitution says is the limit of the auditor’s authority.

Instead, the lawsuit argues, the amendment would give the auditor a new rate-setting or revenue-modeling role, including authority to calculate changes affecting tax rates set elsewhere in the constitution.

A spokesperson for Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who was among the named respondents in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment.

If passed, the proposal would direct lawmakers to set a revenue baseline and triggers for phased-in reductions in the top tax rate. It also allows five years for the legislature to write a new sales tax law, which must be directly tied to cuts in the top income tax rate in a manner supporters hope will not increase or decrease revenue.

Currently Missouri has an income tax with a top rate of 4.7% for taxable incomes greater than about $9,200 a year. The sales tax is 3% for general revenue, but earmarked state taxes and local options stack on top of that, creating a rate that is 7% to 8% in most locations and can be as much as 12% in some special districts.

The sales tax applies to physical goods and excludes services. The Missouri Constitution prohibits lawmakers from applying the sales tax to real estate transfers and any goods or services not currently taxed, but those provisions would not apply to any sales tax plan passed as a result of the constitutional amendment.

A bill requiring pornography websites to conduct age checks before granting access is headed to Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe.

Commercial websites and platforms must already verify that users are at least 18 if more than a third of their content is sexually explicit as part of a rule enforced by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway since December.

The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Sherri Gallick of Belton, would codify that rule in state law, requiring websites to use third-party age verification providers.

“One of the things that was really compelling to me is that a lot of people growing up in today’s age look at a phone or they look at a computer, and they think that is reality,” Gallick told The Independent. “It’s very demeaning to women and to children.”

Sites that don’t comply would be subject to civil penalties, including fines up to $10,000 per day in violation of the law and an additional $250,000 if at least one minor accessed sexually explicit content. Sites could be charged $10,000 per violation of a provision prohibiting age verification providers from retaining users’ identifiable information.

The House passed the bill 112-25 Wednesday, May 13, with 20 Democrats and 5 Republicans in opposition and 11 Democrats voting “present.” The Senate passed the bill 32-0 on Tuesday, May 12, sending it back to the House for approval of a minor amendment.

The bill got initial House approval last year but was dropped from the calendar before getting a formal vote due to a challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court to a similar Texas law.