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The Clearwater Fall Festival begins Friday, Oct. 4, and runs through Sunday. Find the schedule here. It began in 1985 and features a carnival, parade, fishing tournament, talent show, beer garden, mechanical bull and food. Mayor Burt Ussery says this brings the community together. “It’s a great opportunity for us to show off our city,” he said. “We’ll have a tremendous amount of turnout from within, but we also bring in a lot of people from outside. It’s just a chance for people to come down and see what Clearwater is and who we are.” Clearwater Fall Festival buttons cost $5. [...]

Three members of the Hutchinson Fire Department, who were deployed to Colorado to help with the Pearl Fire, are now home. They went as part of the National Geographic Area Coordination Center (GACC), which the department joined in 2019 and is made up of federal and state resources. Members of Hutch Fire have also helped in Oregon, Idaho, and several other deployments in California. “They got ready to go, drove up, they have a day of travel, they got there, got on the fire, they worked a couple [of] days doing some mop up,” said HFD Battalion Chief Justin Holzrichter. Holzrichter [...]

Wichita’s new Northwest Water Facility, in the works since 2018, is now complete. The half-billion-dollar facility will eventually replace Wichita’s 80-year-old water treatment plant in the Riverside area, but it won’t be fully up and running for some time. Although the facility looks ready to go, it won’t be fully operational until April, and the City of Wichita says it’s not planning on closing the old Riverside facility and fully relying on this plant until summer 2025. Source: KSN-TV

The Kansas housing market is seeing a shift. A new forecast from Wichita State University says prices will go up 6% across the state, but low inventory of houses continues to be an issue. KSN spoke with researchers and a local developer. House prices in Kansas are going up. Dr. Stan Longhofer with the Center for Real Estate at WSU says we’re still dealing with the effects of the housing crisis from 2008. “Those homes that we didn’t build in 2010, 11 and 12, those would be the move-up homes that would be out in the market right now that buyers [...]

A push to secure water for the City of Russell is on the ballot this November. The City is voting on a three-quarter cent sales tax. It is teaming up with the City of Hays to pipe water in from Edwards County, but doing that will take a lot of money. The sales tax would bring in an estimated $400,000 each year. “All taxes are unfavorable in any way you look at it, but the sales tax is more equitable to everyone because not only to the people spending money in Russell but outside. The citizens won’t have it solely as [...]