Mayor Fongu Cletus Tanwe is the Mayor of the English-speaking region of the country of Cameroon. He is Mayor of Bamenda III Council, NKWEN region. A meeting with City of Hays Mayor Mason Ruder and Mayor Fongu Cletus Tanwe was held Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m. at City Hall. It was agreed that they would sign a friendship resolution on Friday before Mayor Fongu departs. Mayor Fongu met Cindy Elliott and Mehran Shahidi through Sister Cities International (SCI) about 10 years ago, when he attended one of SCI’s annual meetings in Virginia Beach. He attended subsequent meetings in Aurora, CO and [...]

The Creighton University Rural Mainstreet Index (RMI), that was released on Thursday, climbed above the growth neutral threshold, 50.0, for a second consecutive month, according to the monthly survey of bank CEOs in rural areas of a 10-state region dependent on agriculture and/or energy. Economist Ernie Goss said that the ag sector has actually done fairly well lately. ... Farmers generally are doing pretty well cash wise, which is good news for them, but not necessarily for the bankers that the survey covers, but as conditions soften, Goss sees use of credit by farmers as more likely soon. "That's going to [...]

Though voters will have to wait nearly two more years to fill the two vacant seats on the newly expanded five-seat Douglas County Commission, at least one nearby county has completed the same process in recent years and could provide some clues about what’s to come here. Douglas County voters approved a ballot measure that expanded the commission from three seats to five in November, and since then county leaders have crafted a new map of commission districts and have decided when the two new commissioners should be elected. Based on the commission’s recommendation, Gov. Laura Kelly gave her approval last [...]

As Kansas schools struggle to hire teachers from a much more limited pool of candidates, one Kansas Board of Regents task force is working on ways to get more Kansas high school students into the state's teacher preparation programs. Earlier in the fall, the Kansas State Department of Education’s estimated more than 1,600 empty teaching positions around the state, a sharp uptick from the prior year. The state department has been working on several of its own initiatives to address teacher vacancies, particularly from a licensure standpoint. At the same time, the Kansas Board of Regents appointed an Educator Work Force [...]

Federal Reserve officials are preparing to slow interest-rate increases for the second straight meeting and debate how much higher to raise them after gaining more confidence inflation will ease further this year. They could begin deliberating at the Jan. 31-Feb. 1 gathering how much more softening in labor demand, spending and inflation they would need to see before pausing rate rises this spring. In recent public statements and interviews, Fed officials have said slowing the pace of rate increases to a more traditional quarter percentage point would give them more time to assess the impact of their increases so far as [...]