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METRO EDITION LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY courier-journal.com W E D N E S D AY , A P R I L 21, 2 010 USPS 135567

JCPS may tap reserves for $27 million

More buses, books and school days proposed
By Antoinette Konz
akonz@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
Jefferson County Public Schools will
spend $1 million next school year to add
20 bus routes to ensure that no student’s
ride is longer than 75 minutes, according
to a budget proposal that school board
members will discuss Monday.
The district also will spend more than
$6 million from its reserves to provide
new textbooks and avoid eliminating two
school days, if those pro-
posed cuts are included
in the budget the legisla-
ture considers in the
coming special session.
“It is a priority of our days. Other costs would include transpor-
school board that we do
not cut out any instruc-
Sheldon tional time from the
Berman school calendar,” Corde-
lia Hardin, chief finan-
cial officer for the district, said during a
budget and finance committee meeting See JCPS, A4, col. 1
Tuesday.
“If the General Assembly decides to re-
duce the school year from 177 days to 175
days, we will pick up the cost to ensure
our students get 177 instructional days.”
Hardin said it would cost the district
about $2 million per day for teacher sala-
ries if the General Assembly cuts the two
tation and food service.
The district would spend $2.3 million
on textbooks for its elementary and mid-
dle school students next year — to offset a
cut made earlier this year by the Kentucky
BUDGET PROPOSALS
Jefferson County Public Schools expects to use
more than $27 million from the $90 million in
reserves to provide:
!$1 million next school year to add 20 bus
routes to ensure that no student’s ride is longer
than 75 minutes.
!$2.3 million on textbooks for its elementary
and middle school students next year — to
offset a possible state cut.
!$2 million per day for teacher salaries if the
General Assembly cuts two days.
!Money for increased operating expenses,
salary increases and for teacher retirement
funds, transportation and food service.

Ohio River healthier, McConnell

but recovery slowing tones down
It’s been 20 years
finance fire
since key pollution Compromise ‘progress’ noted
progress occurred by Senate’s minority leader
By James Bruggers By James R. Carroll
jbruggers@courier-journal.com jcarroll@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal The Courier-Journal

O
nce an open sewer for
industry and the bath-
rooms of millions, the
981-mile-long Ohio Riv-
er is, by all accounts,
cleaner and healthier than it was
40 years ago when Americans ob-
served the first Earth Day.
Cities along its banks and
within its 204,000-square-mile
basin now disinfect or remove
most of the dangerous bacteria
and other contaminants from
sewage before treatment plant ef-
fluent is released in the river.
A stench from improperly
treated sewage has mostly gone
away.
Industries no longer indis-
criminately dump toxic chemi-
cals into the water, and fish and
boaters have returned.
Yet much of that cleanup hap-
pened in the first 20 years after
the first Earth Day, when 20 mil-
lion people rallied in the United
States on behalf of Mother Na-
ture, prompting Congress to pass
the Clean Water Act in 1972.
In recent decades, progress
has slowed — and health authori-
ties still recommend that people
swimming in the river take a
shower afterward and don’t over-
do how much fish they eat from
the river.
“When we look at the last 20
years, we have not seen signifi-
cant changes in water quality im-
provements in this country,” said
Bowling Green attorney LaJuana
S. Wilcher. Wilcher ran the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agen-
cy’s water programs during the
administration of President
George H.W. Bush and more re-
cently was former Kentucky Gov.
Ernie Fletcher’s top environmen-
tal regulator.
Further progress, according to
See RIVER, A6, col. 1
WASHINGTON — A week after dismissing a fi-
nancial regulation reform bill as “fatally flawed,” Sen-
ate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has struck a
more conciliatory tone, saying Tuesday that Demo-
crats and Republicans are “making
progress and I’m optimistic” about a
compromise.
In recent days, the White House
and Democratic leaders have
stepped up their criticism of
McConnell for his objections to the
bill.
But the Kentucky Republican
said in an interview that his change McConnell
in tone reflects the fact that Repub-
licans are finally being included in the process and is
not because of the criticism.
“All the finger-pointing is just silly,” he said.
See REFORM, A5, col. 1
U of L doctors
threaten to quit
Humana network
By Patrick Howington
phowington@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
More than 460 University of Louisville physicians
— many of them specialists — may leave Humana
Inc.’s network July1rather than accept a pay cut from
the insurer.
That could require many patients to leave town
for care or pay higher out-of-network costs, since the
U of L doctors are the only ones in town to practice
certain medical specialties.
UofL Physicians, an umbrella group for the 460
doctors, announced the possibility of a break from
By Michael Hayman, The Courier-Journal Humana at a news conference Tuesday. Officials said
The Ohio River, a highway for barge traffic at Louisville, has come a long way since Humana notified it in February that the company
the 1960s — but experts say further progress depends on reducing pollutants from would not renew its contract July 1 unless doctors
storm water and chemicals from sources such as livestock operations. accepted a 10 percent cut in reimbursements.

See DOCTORS, A7, col. 1

NEWSPAPER
A GANNETT

BREAKING NEWS WEATHER | B2 INDEX 42 PAGES

Business B6 Lottery A2
O ON YOUR 36-HOUR FORECAST Classified E1 Metro B1
Stories, blogs and daily tips 4INF CELL PHONE Louisville area: Partly Comics D6 Movies D3
for a greener life. Plus Jim Text CJNEWS to sunny today. Partly Deaths B4 Sports C1
Bruggers’ “Watchdog Earth” cloudy tonight. Partly TODAY TOMORROW Editorial A8 TV D5
44636 (4INFO) for sunny tomorrow; Features D1
the local news alerts chance of shower. 72 49 73
MT DLY

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A6 | WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21, 2010 | THE COURIER-JOURNAL
RIVER | Pollution reduced, but chemicals and storm water runoff still concerns
Continued from A1
Wilcher and others, will de-
pend on paying more atten-
tion to pollutants coming in-
to the Ohio River through its
50,000 miles of tributaries,
including:
!Storm water washing
fertilizers, pesticides, oil,
bits of tire rubber and count-
less tons of eroded dirt into
the river.
!Thousands of chemi-
cals such as human and vet-
erinary prescriptions, over-
the-counter drugs, cosmet-
ics, and growth-enhancing
chemicals used in livestock
operations finding their way
into the water. Drugs, for in-
stance, aren’t entirely ab-
sorbed by the body and get
past water treatment efforts,
and some studies suggest
some substances may be
producing “intersex fish,”
with both male and female
traits.
Low point in ’60s
As hundreds of millions
of people around the world
observe Earth Day’s anniver-
sary on Thursday and relat-
ed events this month, many
local residents may recall
the pervasive pollution of
the 1960s that fueled a grow-
ing environmental move-
ment — including a push to
clean up the Ohio and its
tributaries.
One report in The Couri-
er-Journal in 1967 described
“black creosote that oozes
from a wood processing
plant to coat the sides of a
ditch; foul looking rubbery
suds that drive swimmers
and boaters out of the Ohio
River in disgust; black, stink-
ing sewage, improperly
treated, that roils the water
of the river into a soupy
brew; avalanches of garbage
that line the steep banks of
Beargrass Creek and tumble
down into the water.”
“The river back in the
’60s was pretty much at its
low point,” said John Ro-
mans, a retired Dow Corning
engineer who lives in Car-
Census: Women, men
now equal in degrees
By Hope Yen
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — degree has doubled to 10.1
Women are now just as like-
ly as men to have completed
college and to hold an ad-
vanced degree, part of an ac-
celerating trend of educa-
tional gains that have shield-
ed women from recent job
losses. Yet they continue to
trail men in pay.
Among adults 25 and old-
er, 29 percent of women in
the U.S. have at least a bache-
lor’s degree, compared with
30 percent of men, according
to 2009 census figures re-
leased Tuesday. Measured
by raw numbers, women al-
ready surpass men in under-
graduate degrees by roughly
1.2 million.
Women also have drawn
even with men in holding ad-
vanced degrees. Women
represented roughly half of
those in the U.S. with a mas-
ter’s degree or higher, due
largely to years of steady in-
creases in women opting to
pursue a medical or law de-
gree.
At current rates, women
could pass men in total ad-
vanced degrees this year,
even though they still trail
significantly in several cate-
gories such as business, sci-
ence and engineering.
“It won’t be long before
women dominate higher ed-
ucation and every degree
level up to Ph.D.,” said Mark
Perry, an economics profes-
sor at the University of
Michigan-Flint who is a vis-
iting scholar at the Ameri-
can Enterprise Institute, a
conservative think tank.
“They are getting the skills
that will protect them from
future downturns.”
While young women
have been exceeding men in
college enrollment since the
early 1980s, the educational
gains have now progressive-
ly spread upward to older
age groups. That could have
wide ramifications in the
workplace: more working
Time: 04-20-2010 23:23
rollton and tracks conserva-
tion issues for the Kentucky
Bass Federation, an alliance
of local fishing groups. “The
condition of the fish was
pretty poor. They smelled
and tasted like diesel.”
Cities and industries
along the river have spent
billions cleaning up — and
cities like Louisville, Cincin-
nati and Pittsburgh still are
spending billions more to fix
antiquated sewer systems
that overflow when it rains.
As a result, Romans said,
the river is “back into more
tolerable ranges” of water
quality.
“Will it support recrea-
tional fishing? Yes. It does a
wonderful job,” he said.
Biologists with the eight-
state Ohio River Valley Wa-
ter Sanitation Commission,
which sets water quality
standards for the Ohio River,
say a return of a viable fish-
ery is among the strongest
evidence of improvement.
Forty years ago, about all
that lived in the Ohio were
tough, pollution-tolerant
carp and catfish, said Peter
Tennant, deputy director of
the commission. But surveys
dating to the 1950s show
steady improvement in the
number and variety of fish,
as well as their overall
health, said Erich Emery, bi-
ological programs manager
for the commission. Fish
that have come back include
paddlefish, smallmouth bass
and logperch.
And a recent survey esti-
mated that although two-
thirds of the river doesn’t
meet official clean-water
standards for bacteria, more
3 million people each year
are using the river for swim-
ming, boating, fishing and
hunting.
One of them is George
McCarver, a Louisville resi-
dent who jumps waves on a
personal watercraft.
“I believe the biggest
myth is that it’s dirty, it’s nas-
ty, that it’s got feces in it —
that you wouldn’t even
dream of going in the river,”
OTHER CENSUS FINDINGS
! The share of women
who hold an advanced
percent from 5 percent in
1980. In 1960, the share was
1.7 percent.
! 87 percent of adults
have a high school diploma
or more. A higher proportion
of women (87 percent) than
men (86 percent) have at
least a high school educa-
tion, a reversal that first
appeared in 2000.
! Broken down by race, 53
percent of Asians have a
bachelor’s degree or higher.
That’s compared with 33
percent for non-Hispanic
whites, 19 percent for blacks
and 13 percent for Hispanics.
ON THE WEB
Census Bureau:
www.census.gov
Institute for Women’s Policy
Research: www.iwpr.org/
index.cfm
mothers, increased child-
care needs and a greater fo-
cus on pay disparities among
them.
Women with full-time
jobs now have weekly earn-
ings equal to 80.2 percent of
what men earn, up slightly
from 2008 but lower than a
high of 81 percent in 2005.
“I don’t know if we can be
heartened by the education-
al gains, because it is persis-
tent wage discrimination
that is driving women to get
a higher education,” said
Terry O’Neill, president of
the National Organization
for Women. “As more wom-
en enter the workplace, I
think they will realize the
unfairness of the situation
they’re experiencing and de-
mand change.”
Women outnumber men
in the U.S. — among adults
25 and older, 103 million are
women, 96 million are men.
And women now repre-
sent a majority in the na-
tion’s work force. They have
User: mstollhaus PubDate: 04-21-2010
FROM PAGE ONE & NATION |
The Ohio River Basin
Population: 27 million
Watershed size: 204,000 square
miles.
Land cover: Urban, 3 percent
Forests: 51 percent.
Agriculture: 35 percent
WISC.
WISC
WI SC.
SC
WISC
WI
W C.
SC.
SC . I MICH
S
CH.
CH
ILL.
IND.
IND.
MO.
MO
KY.
KY
ARK.
ARK. TENN.
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MISS.
ALA.
ALA.
Pollution
66 percent of the river doesn’t meet clean water standards for
swimming and wading because of bacteria. Typical bacteria levels at
Louisville are often 100 times less than they were in 1970.
2.5 percent of the river doesn’t meet clean water standards for
aquatic life.
Storm water runoff from cities and farms.
Nearly 1,300 combined sewer overflow locations, including: 443 in
Pittsburgh area; 215 in Cincinnati and 105 in Louisville.
31 million pounds of toxic discharges from 99 facilities in six states
in 2007.
Most prevalent toxic compounds in fish: PCBs, dioxin and mercury.
Fish consumption advisories found at
http://www.epa.gov/fishadvisories.
Sources: ORSANCO, U.S. Army Corps, Environment America.
he said. “It’s not got big turds
in it. There are no floating
syringes. Sometimes it gets
blue.”
But McCarver, who leads
a small group of personal
watercraft users known as
the Louisville River Rats, ac-
knowledges he takes a show-
er after a day on the river.
Health authorities also
recommend limits on eating
fish from the river because
of pollutants such as mercu-
ry, which is associated with
coal-fired power plant emis-
sions and can damage ner-
vous systems. Tennant said
the Ohio River commission
is still trying to determine
the source of toxic poly-
chlorinated biphenyls, or
PCBs, that are showing up in
consistently outpaced men
in employment rates in the
economic downturn that
some researchers are now
dubbing a “man-cession.”
The main reason is that
male-dominated construc-
tion and manufacturing sec-
tors, which require less
schooling, shed millions of
jobs after the housing bust.
Still, despite recent gains,
women’s advantage in the
work force is expected to be
temporary as job losses
spread to other sectors, such
as state and local govern-
ment, where women are
more highly represented.
Some men are also returning
to school for degrees in fe-
male-dominated industries
such as nursing and teach-
ing, which tend to fare better
during recessions.
Unemployment for men
stands at 10.7 percent com-
pared with 8.6 percent for
women. That 2.1 percentage
point gap is down from a rec-
ord of 2.7 in August but re-
mains higher than in the pre-
vious three recessions, when
women were almost as likely
as men to be out of work.
The findings are the lat-
est to highlight a shift of tra-
ditional roles of the sexes,
caused partly by massive job
losses in the recession.
Many women returning
to the work force say they
are now realizing how criti-
cal it is to get good training
and a higher education. Lin-
da Lorde, 62, of York, S.C., re-
tired as a U.S. postmaster
three years ago, but began
looking for a new job after
her husband was laid off as a
newspaper distribution
manager and their 401(k) ac-
counts shriveled.
Aiming for a fresh career
in hotel management, Lorde
is now taking college-level
business finance courses
and in the meantime is the
family’s sole wage-earner in
customer service for local
companies. “In this tough
economy, you have to know
how to compete,” she said.
Zone: MT Edition: 1 Page Name: A 6 Color: Black
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courier-journal.com MT-
ter T. Goodmann, assistant ment-laden runoff.
director of the Kentucky Di- Goodman said state offi-
Other: 11 percent 50,000 miles of vision of Water. “It really cials are concerned that not
rivers; 1,300 lakes. hasn’t resulted in a whole lot all farmers are keeping up
The Ohio River: of progress,” he said. with the requirements and
981 miles long. Provides drinking “Storm water runoff is have launched a study to un-
water for 5 million people and a caused by millions of people derstand any gaps.
habitat for 150 species of fish. doing millions of everyday Meade County farmer
activities,” Wilcher said. “It’s Adam Barr, who raises cattle
N.Y.
N.Y. basically coming from your and chickens and grows veg-
lawn, your street or the park- etables for farmers’ markets
PA.
PA ing lot.” and families in Louisville,
It’s also coming from said some farmers are like
OHIO
OHIO
farms, where runoff is large- some of their city counter-
MD..
MD ly unregulated by the EPA, parts and don’t realize how
W. VA.
VA. Wilcher said. The result is their activities contribute to
VA
VA. sediment, pesticides, fertil- pollution downstream. One
izers and manure get into solution, he said, is to sup-
waterways like the Ohio. port more smaller-scale
N.C.
N.C. Wilcher says Congress farms, like the one he works
needs to amend the Clean with family members.
S.C. Water Act to require identi- There are no massive
GA.
GA
fying problems and solu- piles of manure on his
tions in each local wa- 200-acre property, which is
tershed. mostly blanketed by grass
For its part, the EPA is used as forage for cattle. To
working within the current further help reduce erosion,
law. To tackle polluted storm fences keep the cattle out of
water in cities, EPA has a small stream.
pressed some in the Ohio He said he carefully man-
River basin, including Louis- ages manure to fertilize his
ville, to further limit the vegetable garden and pas-
amount of raw or partially ture land. This spring, for ex-
treated sewage that over- ample, he plans to put his
flows into the river when it egg-laying chickens in a
rains. The Metropolitan modified old school bus that
Sewer District, for example, will allow their manure to
has agreed to spend fall out the bottom. Each day,
The Courier-Journal $843 million fixing its leak- he’ll tow the bus to a new
ing and antiquated sewer part of the pasture.
system by 2024. There is broad agreement
fish 25 years after the EPA The EPA has also an- that the way to a cleaner,
phased them out. nounced it will strengthen healthier Ohio River is to fo-
“We are not where we its storm water runoff rules. cus on what’s happening up-
would like to be, but we are New development and stream in the tributaries.
several orders of magnitude redevelopment likely will What actions are people
better than we were back have to better manage run- willing to take in their own
then,” Tennant said, recall- off, said Jonathan Angier, an lives, what policies they’re
ing the Ohio River of 1970. EPA scientist working on the willing to support and how
project. New parking lots, much they are willing to pay
Storm water runoff for example, may need to use are crucial.
Tennant said the EPA, porous materials or have “It’s really up to the pub-
which was also created 40 areas that collect water and lic to become more aware, so
years ago this year, first fo- allow it to soak into the they can demand change,”
cused on the most obvious ground, he said. said Teena Halbig, a long-
sources, such as the pipes The Clean Water Act time advocate for water
from sewage treatment largely exempts farms, quality improvement in the
plants and industry. though Kentucky requires Floyds Fork watershed.
Only in the last 15 years farms of 10 acres or more to
has the EPA been regulating have water quality plans that Reporter James Bruggers can be
storm water runoff, said Pe- reduce polluted and sedi- reached at (502) 582-4645.
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