These days, it’s common to see women on the ballot for school boards, city council and mayoral races in Kansas. The state’s top official, Gov. Laura Kelly, is in the middle of her second term. But women running for office — heck, even women voting — is only a little more than 100 years old in most of the country. Except in Kansas. There, women were allowed to vote in school board elections in 1861. By 1887, women could vote in Kansas in a municipal election. And by 1912, women had full suffrage — a full eight years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. “Kansas was ahead of most other states but it took a long time to get to the ultimate goal. Kansans, some Kansans, were struggling for a better place from the beginning,” says historian Virgil Dean, retired editor of Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains. Dean traces suffrage efforts back to 1859, when there was an unsuccessful move to grant women and African Americans full suffrage at the Wyandotte constitutional convention. Not only was Kansas ahead of the curve in terms of granting the right to vote, it also beat the rest of the country to elect a woman to office. That honor falls to Susanna Madora Salter of Argonia, Kansas, who, on April 4, 1887, became the first woman ever elected mayor in America.
Source: KCUR News

The city of Pratt, Kansas, is home to around 6,500 people. But the small town is rife with new developments. Driving around town, vice mayor Doug Meyer and Jamie Huber – Pratt’s director of electric utilities – point them out: a new swimming pool, recently resurfaced tennis courts, a 16-unit housing project. One of their proudest projects, though, is a six megawatt solar farm that came online in 2019. It’s right on the edge of town. “A lot of people don’t see it – I’ve got people who still ask me where it’s at,” Huber said. Over the past decade, renewable power on the Kansas prairie typically meant one thing – wind turbines. But now, solar energy in Kansas is booming, with developers proposing utility-scale solar farms from Sedgwick County to Great Bend to Johnson County. The city of Pratt operates its own electric utility. That means it generates, buys and sells its own power instead of relying entirely on the grid. In 2016, Pratt officials decided it wanted a solar farm to replace an expiring contract with a coal plant. Solar was a reliable energy source during high-demand times of day. And its price stayed steady, unlike electricity from the grid.
Source: KCUR News