A little more than six months into the capital city’s Choose Topeka incentive program, Greater Topeka Partnership staff overseeing the initiative consider it a success. According to Barbara Stapleton, the GTP’s vice president of business retention and talent initiatives, 20 applicants — some of whom brought family with them — have moved to Topeka so far this year with help from Choose Topeka. She said people have moved to the capital city from Indiana, Texas, Nevada, Missouri, Tennessee, Nebraska, Iowa, Georgia, Minnesota, Colorado and elsewhere in Kansas.”It’s really exciting,” Stapleton said. “I hear people talking about how they really like what they see about what Topeka has to offer.”
(Read more: Local News | Topeka Capital-Journal)

As the United States’ meat supply chain wavered during COVID-19, cattle prices came down and feed lots swelled to capacity. Ranchers looked to small- and medium-sized processors to harvest their animals, but across the country, these businesses were in short supply. Many who had a two- to three-month wait before the pandemic, now have more than an eight-month wait. In some locations nationwide, including in western Kansas and Alabama, the wait to process an animal is more than one year. Some state agencies and legislators in Washington are trying to figure out how to help the supply chain. “No state has enough slaughter and processing plants for what the current market demands are,” said Christopher Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors. “It’s an ongoing situation we need to rectify.”
(Read more: Local News | Topeka Capital-Journal)

An analysis released this month by a nonprofit environmental group with global reach identified Kansas as a promising place in the United States to develop wind energy without destroying natural habitats unique to the Great Plains. According to the new “Site Wind Right” interactive map published by The Nature Conservancy, Kansas is one of 17 states in the central U.S. — all part of an area known as the “wind belt” — where renewable wind energy sites could be developed to generate a combined total of more than 1,000 gigawatts of wind power. And all that power could come from wind farms developed on land that would have low impact on nearby wildlife. “That’s a lot of potential energy — comparable to total U.S. electric generation from all sources today,” said Mike Fuhr, director of The Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma, another wind belt state.
(Read more: Local News | Topeka Capital-Journal)

Local elected officials plan this coming week to consider banning the use of “no knock” search warrants in Topeka and extending a Shawnee County state of disaster emergency. … The city’s mayor and council plan to consider Councilman Spencer Duncan’s proposal to ban the use of no knock warrants while also putting in place requirements regarding the use of body cameras during the execution of search warrants and the retention of data recorded by those cameras. The Topeka Police Department has not used no knock warrants “for a long, long time,” Police Chief Bill Cochran said in a recent Topeka Capital-Journal podcast.
(Read more: Local News | Topeka Capital-Journal)

The Shawnee County COVID-19 Response Team announced a revision late Friday afternoon to a restriction that took effect at 12:01 a.m. Thursday requiring bars and restaurants that serve food to stop offering dine-in service between 2 and 3 p.m. to enable them to carry out deep cleaning. Such establishments may still offer dine-in service if “deep cleaning and sanitation can be performed safely without interrupting” that, COVID-19 Response Team incident commander Dusty Nichols said in a news release.
(Read more: Local News | Topeka Capital-Journal)