Lawrence city commissioners on Tuesday will vote on a resolution that would allow some small downtown establishments to derive up to 90% of their sales from liquor for the next few years. It stems from a request from John Brown’s Underground designed to skirt a long-standing city rule that requires many downtown establishments with liquor licenses to derive no more than 45% of their sales from liquor — the rest must come from food. The ordinance was originally passed to prevent downtown from becoming a problematic bar district. Source: The Lawrence Times

Kansas should scrap its de facto policy of draining the Ogallala Aquifer, a state board decided Wednesday. Instead, the board said, the Kansas government should take steps to stop the decline of the aquifer, which supplies water to one-sixth of the world’s grain supply, and save it for future generations. “It has taken decades for this to be said formally in writing by an official state body,” said Connie Owen, director of the Kansas Water Office. “… This is nothing less than historic.” Source: The Lawrence Times

A coalition of voting rights groups says Dodge City’s election system is designed to prevent the community’s Latino population from holding office on the city commission. In a complaint filed late Thursday in federal court, the coalition argues the “at-large” election system is unconstitutional and a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The lawsuit was filed by the UCLA Voting Rights Project, American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, the national ACLU, and New York City-based law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton. The city uses an at-large election system, in which all city residents can vote for each of [...]