High crop prices are trickling down to agriculture real estate, which have risen by the most in nearly a decade. Farmland values jumped 18% from a year ago during the third quarter of 2021 in the Seventh Federal Reserve District, a five-state region including all of Iowa and most of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, according to the Chicago Fed. The gains come as farmers were bolstered by high incomes and low interest rates, and after corn and soybean futures climbed to multiyear peaks in Chicago amid adverse weather for crops. Now, the high farmland prices are adding to concerns about [...]

Help for the homeless. Grants for movie theaters. Hydroelectricity. As Kansas prepares to allocate $1.6 billion in federal COVID-19 aid, business groups, non-profit organizations and civic advocates from across the state are pushing a sweeping range of proposals for spending it. They are all angling for a piece of the one-time funding that could prove transformational for a host of programs and initiatives. The money holds the potential to ultimately touch residents in all corners of the state through dollars for affordable housing, business start-ups, new and improved public buildings, better access to higher education and faster broadband internet. How this [...]

Developers have spent more than $11 billion bringing wind farms to more than 30 of the state’s 105 counties. Just drive across Kansas, and the changing landscape is inescapable: What once were wide open spaces, reserved for crops or cattle, are now home to wind farms, with turbines towering over the vista. In the past 10 years, more than 30 new wind farms — including several in eastern Kansas — have been built or proposed across the state. Source: Wichita Eagle

A man has admitted that he shut down a rural central Kansas water system but said he was too intoxicated to remember what happened, prosecutors said. Wyatt Travnichek, 22, of Ellsworth County, pleaded guilty Wednesday to tampering with a public water system and reckless damage to a public computer during unauthorized access. Prosecutors said Travnichek used a shared pass code to shut down the Post Rock Rural Water District in Ellsworth, which supplies water to about 1,500 customers in central Kansas. Source: Wichita Eagle

In recent years, even destination cities have had to offer significant incentives, discounts and free rent in order to lure convention and trade show business. ... Wichita isn’t competing with Atlanta and Las Vegas for convention and trade show business, but the same story of exhibit hall expansion and waning attendance has played out closer to home, too. The Overland Park Convention Center opened in 2002 with consultants estimating the new facility and city-owned hotel would generate 60,000 overnight stays a year. Overnight stays peaked at roughly 58,000 in 2006. By 2015, that figure had dipped to 30,346 stays. In 2018, [...]

The city’s latest campaign for a sales tax, championed by many of the same downtown boosters behind the Legacy plan, failed in 2014. The $450 million plan would have funded drought-protection and water infrastructure, transit, and street maintenance, but was rejected largely because of an $80 million “job creation” fund aimed at giving cash incentives to companies, which was seen by many as a giveaway to businesses. How other area businesses and nonprofits might see an uplift from east bank development isn’t clear, but one example floated by stakeholders has been a benevolence fund. ... City voters who were interviewed for [...]

Computer systems are being restored in Pottawatomie County are after hackers launched a ransomware attack on Sept. 17, county officials said Friday. The county resolved the attack by paying less than 10% of the hackers' original demands, County Administrator Chad Kinsley said in a statement. The eastern Kansas county did not disclose the amount it paid, WIBW-TV reported. “We are a small county with small resources,” Kinsley said. “With the extraordinary demands that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed on local governments like ours, we wanted to make sure that the hackers understood that there was no way we could even come [...]

As Congress considered a massive COVID-19 relief package earlier this year, hundreds of mayors from across the U.S. pleaded for “immediate action” on billions of dollars targeted to shore up their finances and revive their communities. Now that they've received it, local officials are taking their time before actually spending the windfall. As of this summer, a majority of large cities and states hadn't spent a penny from the American Rescue Plan championed by Democrats and President Joe Biden, according to an Associated Press review of the first financial reports due under the law. States had spent just 2.5% of their [...]

With limited resources, hospitals in rural areas of Kansas have struggled in recent weeks as COVID-19 cases have surged and hospitalizations are on the rise. In Great Bend, nurses say they’re struggling to keep up. One-third to half of the patients coming to the University of Kansas Health System’s Great Bend campus are there for COVID-related reasons, said Peter Mick, an emergency room nurse. “Working in the emergency room the past several weeks, we’ve seen a significant uptick in the number of patients that we see daily,” Mick told The Star in a video interview. Source: Wichita Eagle

City officials have begun showing off the planned design of a downtown park being rebuilt as the entryway to Wichita’s new osteopathic medical school, while continuing to honor the legacy of civil rights luminary Chester I. Lewis. The proposed redesign of Chester I. Lewis Reflection Square Park features a small stage, the floor of which will be a tinted concrete rendering of the “redline” map of Wichita. It shows the pattern of segregation in the city caused by overtly racist policies from the 1930s to the 1960s, which limited the places African Americans and immigrants could buy housing. Source: Wichita Eagle