Arkansas City hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday at Lovie Watson Park. The ribbon cutting was hosted by the Arkansas City Chamber of Commerce and marked the culmination of extensive efforts by Arkansas City’s Parks Department to renovate the park. The renovations were made possible through a grant that was secured in Nov. 2023 from the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas Health Pathways program. The grant funding helped install new equipment and establish a tobacco-free policy within the facility. The Pathways initiative, known as Pathways to a Healthy Kansas, is the largest community grant initiative funded by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas. It combines community-wide, evidence-based solutions and practices to help Kansas communities improve active living, healthy eating, and tobacco prevention. The initiative provides community coalitions the tools and resources to engage their communities and remove barriers to healthy living.
Source: KSN-TV

Wichita firefighters took the time to teach kids about being first responders, letting them spend a day in their boots. On Friday, the Wichita Fire Department hosted a summer camp, giving kids a personal perspective on the life of a firefighter. They learned how to pull a hose, spray water, and force their way into a building. “We want to get out in the community and do fun things, great things with the kids. We want to share what we do with them. We want to have fun with them and let them know if they ever need us that we are going to be there for them,” said WFD Captain Larry Inlow. The fire department wants to make the summer camp an annual event.
Source: KSN-TV

An emergency shelter is now open in Cowley County, and it has already housed its first temporary residents. The shelter has been in the works for years but now has the opportunity to change lives. In Cowley County, resources for housing are slim. The Cowley House of Hope shelter is meant to fill those gaps. The shelter’s been in the works since 2017 when thousands of dollars had to be raised to make it a reality. The shelter is built similarly to a duplex. It sleeps five people and has two rooms with several beds in each. Each room also has a small kitchen and bathroom. Winfield, the seat of Cowley County, doesn’t have enough resources to put into homeless infrastructure. So, the city and county turned to nonprofits to fill in the gaps. “A lot of shelters have staff, or they have more steady resources than what we do. We’re dependent mainly and mostly, entirely on donations, private donations,” said Bradley Gamber, the director of the Cowley House of Hope. Due to the lack of funding, the shelter is still small, but officials with Winfield said that at any given point in Cowley County, there are between 14 and 30 people struggling with housing. “There’s a lot of different reasons that people can enter homelessness, and Cowley House of Hope is there to help them at least in the short term meet that need,” said Winfield City Manager Taggart Wall. Wall said that’s especially important because solutions are hard to find with a lack of resources.
Source: KSN-TV

The city of Sedgwick will have a city-run EMS service for the first time since 2017. City leaders made the decision to give up their certificate to run EMS services because they were not getting enough volunteers. This meant the closest ambulance was coming 15 minutes down the road from Halstead. The city’s new EMS director believes having in-service in the city limits once again will get them under the five-minute response requirement by the state of Kansas. Sedgwick’s officials made the decision to start stockpiling funds yearly from 2017. Now, they have roughly $500,000 to launch the new department. Having Halstead run the operation for the past several years cost roughly $200,000 yearly. The new department’s first year in business will cost $400,000, including the ability to pay five full-time employees and 20-30 part-time employees. “We’re in a perfect financial place as a city paid this year, we had two bond notes paid off, and we had an increased evaluation, and so we were able to actually start this service without impacting the mill levy,” said City Administrator Kyle Nordick. Nordick said their community is deserving of the move.
Source: KSN-TV

A Kansas grant is helping put new apartments into old buildings across the state. “It’s crucial to have on Main Street. Main Streets have been notorious for dying out and we are very proud of our Main Street and what we continue to do for our Main Street,” said Clint Bundy, president of Sterling Main Street/Chamber of Commerce. Bundy explains Sterling is one of eight towns in Kansas getting fifty grand to help put apartments into upper floors of towns in the Kansas Main Street program. “It’s historic, it’s old. It needed a lot of attention and TLC,” said Bundy. Bundy’s talking about the historic Shay building. It was built in 1906 and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2010. It’s also getting new life on the upper floor with apartments on the way. “We have a developer who has been aggressive,” said Bundy. “So being able to allow housing on Main Street will draw more attention and more traffic to our town.” The Residential Opportunities on Main Street (ROOMS) grant from Kansas is a welcome addition to Sterling and the Main Street Program. They have continued to go after different grants for the town while doing local fundraising, like soup suppers for the Main Street Association. But the grant is a needed step to rehab pieces of the Main Street in Sterling, which happens to be Broadway Street.
Source: KSN-TV