BY KEITH LIPPOLDT
klippoldt@gbtribune.com
Last week’s Board of County Commissioners meeting was canceled for the members to travel to Wichita for the Kansas Association of Counties (KAC) Annual Conference. Three days of seminars and breakout sessions were attended and each commissioner came away with takeaways from the event.
Commission Chair Barb Esfeld started the conversation by telling of her experience before asking each Commissioner to share their key points from the sessions.
“There was a lot of good things I want to mention for myself,” Esfeld said. “Probably the biggest was, as you all know, we’ve been discussing eminent domain powers for private entities and different laws. My takeaway was that the platform was very important for us to stand against private companies having imminent domain powers – do what we can to join together and watch all laws. This is going to be a very fast year. The legislature is already working, and they’re going to take off running.
“They go over it, and it gives them and their attorney a chance to look out for all of us, and we can email them through the year, and we’ll talk back and forth. And so, it was pretty, pretty hefty. We all voted in favor of the platform after much discussion the night before.”
Commissioner Donna Zimmerman brought home several thoughts she picked up while at the conference.
“I attended ‘A Look at Community Corrections in Kansas,’and it provided an overview of what community corrections is and how it compares to court services and parole,” she said. “They talked about how by 1990 all Kansas counties had a community corrections program, and talked about some of the changes and struggles. The comprehensive plan data changed March 15, and the agency struggle is that there’s such long waits from Department of Corrections for training. They’re still having issues with Athena that they use to get their data.
“I also attended the ‘County’s Role in Kansas Public Health.’ There are 100 health departments in the state of Kansas. The largest is 145 employees, with the smallest having one employee; the average is 13. We’re kind of in the middle of that. One of the concerns they talked about is Kansas’ health ranking has fallen from eighth to 29th, so that’s a concern. The other thing was, they’re looking for 26 more communities to collect wastewater samples. I talked to Karen (Public Health Director Winkelman) about that. I think she’s interested. We’d look to try and partner with maybe the city of Great Bend. You could benefit from the reports as they’re tracking and identifying diseases, so that might be something that we could look at.”
Commissioner Shawn Hutchinson most appreciated the time the commissioners spent together as well as the session in Rural Prosperity.
“I think it’s really good for the commission to get together as a team-building exercise,” he said. “I thought it was great for us all to be able to decide what meetings were important to us, who should attend what meeting and we would split, divide and conquer and get as much out of it as we could. I think it’s highly valuable.
“The one that stuck out to me was the Office of Rural Prosperity. The Director for Kansas Rural Prosperity is Tricia Purden, and she went over some things that made a lot of sense. It makes sense where our grant money is coming from so you can see these things happening in our community, whether it’s child care or the Innovation Center or these different things that you wonder ‘where did these ideas come from?’ The state is putting money out there for counties to grab up or cities to grab up and use for these purposes. That’s why these things are happening. They’re kind of directing that. Other than that, I think my biggest takeaway is that it’s good team building exercise, and there is definitely something to learn and something to pass along to the state commissioner.”
Commissioner Tricia Schlessiger took away ideas from one of the programs and has plans in the works to build on it locally.
“One of the takeaways I had from that was they started a ‘Love Kansas’ program, and they’re trying to recruit what they call ‘boomerangs’ back to town,” she said. “They’re trying to get our young people to come back home or back to Kansas. They have a whole program based on that, customized for your community.
“So, Commissioner Hutchinson and I, when we attended that one, kind of got a spin-off of that. We’re speaking at the Ellinwood career day next week, and then we’re also going to put together some groups of college kids over winter break and try to come up with some things that maybe they’d like to see improved in our community and what it would take to bring them back.”
Commissioner Duane Reif, like most Kansans, is concerned about the water situation for now and future generations.
“I went to the Kansas Water Implementation Plan, and like Commissioner Schlessiger said, I don’t think they’re very focused on the rule, but we can’t make more water in Kansas,” he said. “We have to use what we have. One of the things that really did kind of stick out, I guess, was the reservoirs. The reservoirs have been there a long, long time, lots of years. And the sediment that has came in, we can’t hold near as much water in our reservoirs as we could when they were first built. And, you know, maybe if they can get some sort of plan to be able to store more water, that might help also.
“Basically, what I came away with is supporting an approach where each generation is responsible for securing enough water for the future generations. I think it was good continuing education and real good team-building and I think that’s a good part of the whole reason to do this.”
