Municipal News & Jobs

Sitting at the edge of the gently undulating landscape of the Flint Hills in east-central Kansas, the town of Hillsboro boasts a small hospital that has survived a remarkable roller coaster ride even as other rural hospitals stagger and fail.

Nine months ago, everything seemed to be coming apart at the 15-bed facility, Hillsboro Community Hospital, which traces its roots back more than a century.

“In the period from November 2018 through about the 10^th of January of 2019, the hospital was essentially in abandoned condition,” says Brent King, who was appointed bankruptcy trustee after the hospital filed for Chapter 11 protection in March. “No bills were being paid, employees’ wages were often not being paid.”

(Read more: High Plains Public Radio)

A return to significantly higher yields will take longer than previously thought, according to a Reuters poll of fixed-income strategists who slashed their year-ahead major government bond yield forecasts to the lowest since polling began 17 years ago.
With no resolution in sight to the U.S.-China trade war, the current modest global economic expansion cycle has taken a hit, prompting major central banks to shift to policy easing this year from a tightening view at the turn of last year.
That has not only pushed benchmark sovereign bonds yields to new lows this year, but has also resulted in over $17 trillion – a record amount – of debt securities pushed into the negative yields territory.
And according to the Sept. 19-27 poll of over 100 strategists, that trend of subdued yields is here to stay.

Read more: Reuters.

The numbers paint a bleak picture of the future for Western Kansas.
By 2044, Scott County is projected to see a population decline of 12.6%.
Finney County’s population decline is projected at 19.4%.
And they’re the lucky ones.
The population loss in other area counties is forecast at: Wichita (44.9%), Lane (61.3%), Kearny (32.9%), Logan (32.1%) and Thomas (37.4%).
The only counties west of Hays expected to buck that trend are Gray (+5.6%) and Ford (+17.7%).
Those are the kind of numbers which might cause a little panic among economic development leaders in the region.

Read more: Scott County Record.

While the Douglas County government tends to give local property owners a few years to pay back taxes, it could take five years — or even more — before it sells those properties to recoup lost tax revenue.

Douglas County will soon offer a tax foreclosure sale on properties that have not paid their taxes. But the properties that will be up for sale include four parcels of land that have not paid county taxes since 2013, about six years ago.

Jeff Heiman, a local attorney who processes the tax foreclosure lawsuits for the county, said the process to sell those properties took longer than he expected.

Read more: LJWorld.com.

After purchasing a multiuse easement along the length of Midland Railway in April 2018, Baldwin City will soon apply for a Kansas Department of Transportation grant to help install a concrete trail on the section of the easement within the city limits.

Baldwin City Administrator Glenn Rodden said the city would apply in October for a KDOT transportation enhancement grant that would provide 80% of the construction cost of the trail. The trail would follow about 4,000 feet of track from the south side of U.S. Highway 56 to Lawrence Avenue on the east side of town.

Read more: LJWorld.com.

While many Kansas farmers believe mental health is a serious issue, almost half of them said in a recent Kansas Farm Bureau study that it’s hard to access mental health services designed for their lifestyle, said Mallory Meek, an agent for the K-State Research and Extension office in Douglas County.

However, in Douglas County, Meek’s office is partnering with the Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center to reverse that trend, she said in a memo to the Douglas County Commission.

During the commission’s meeting on Wednesday, Meek will present ways the partnership is attempting to address mental health issues among local farmers, which is a “community that often suffers in silence,” Meek said in the memo.

Read more: LJWorld.com.

The next phase of Lawrence’s Downtown Master Plan process will soon begin, and the city wants to know how residents think downtown should look and function in the years to come.

The new master plan will cover downtown land use and development for the next 15 to 20 years. Planning and Development Director Scott McCullough said the visioning phase of the plan’s development will look at multiple aspects of downtown and how they could improve.

“It’s really looking at the opportunities for development and public spaces and traffic and infrastructure, and laying out a shared vision for what downtown could become if those elements were enhanced or changed in some way,” McCullough said.

Read more: LJWorld.com.