Emporia City Manager Trey Cocking joined the KSNT 27 News Morning show to speak about the newest pay structure that was recently approved by commission. Cocking said that the change came about as a daunting realization hit the city. "Last August, especially in public safety with our police and fire department, we realized we had a real problem," Cocking said. "We have 41 police officers authorized and we were down to 33 police officers in the department." He said the situation with the fire department was not much different. "...53 firefighters authorized and I think we were hovering around 10 short there," Cocking said. Source: [...]

Superintendent Reginald Eggleston with USD-475 joined the 27 News morning show to speak about exciting developments at USD-475. He confirmed they are moving into Morris Hill Elementary School and they will be having a ribbon cutting to celebrate the milestone on September 22. "We are very excited about it," Dr. Eggleston said. "The move-in will be in two phases, we are actually going to start this year with about 250 students." Eggleston said they are going to work on continuing the second phase of construction. "Then next year, we will add and be up to capacity which could be 590 students." The intent, Dr. Eggleston said, [...]

If there's one thing for certain after Tuesday night's city council meeting, the governing body believes they need a set-in-stone plan to attack the homeless problem in our community rather than jumping from idea to idea on how to deal with it. It was brought up in Tuesday night's meeting, statistically on average, it takes anywhere from three to five years for the city to become aware of a "new" encampment in the city. When these encampments are in non-camping areas, the individuals who live within the camps are given a 72-hour eviction notice. As of July 7th, the property maintenance division has [...]