An impressive array of community leaders from over this corner of the state met in Iola Friday to kick off Project 17. The organization has as its goal to turn southeast Kansas into a hive of economic and cultural progress — to transform it from the ugly step-child of Kansas to the state’s prosperity poster boy.
Quite a challenge.
At Friday’s meeting, it was agreed to ask the Legislature to appropriate $500,000 a year for the organization and to apply for a $1 million grant from the Kansas Leadership Foundation to be used to conduct leadership training sessions throughout SEK. Communities can’t prosper, it was pointed out, without local leaders who help them identify their needs and then guide and inspire efforts to meet them.
State senators Jeff King and Pat Apple are among area leaders who will devote their time, energy and considerable clout to the project. Gov. Sam Brownback was a presenter at the economic summit held in Iola that culminated in the creation of the project, so it is a good guess that the governor’s budget will include the asked-for funds. Lifting southeast Kansas up from its decades-old poorest-quarter status fits right in with the governor’s promise to focus his administration on job and wealth creation.
It is also worth noting that the 16 members of the founding group include a healthy mix of public officials, business leaders and professionals. Committees have been formed to come up with a list of projects to tackle. When those priorities have been established it will be instantly apparent that active involvement by the governmental units within the seventeen counties (hence, Project 17) will be essential to their achievement.
Without pro-active city and county governments, southeast Kansas will stay stuck in its rut. Leadership also will come from the region’s outstanding group of community colleges and from Pittsburg State University and from the business, industrial and professional communities.
THE 17 COUNTIES of southeast Kansas have great potential for growth. They always have produced strong political leaders. Their schools rank high. The community colleges are outstanding and Pittsburg State University stands out as a prep school for the Kansas University School of Medicine as well as for its technical courses which draw students from all over the world.
SEK also is — and has been since the early days of Kansas statehood — an industrial region, the home of a large number of successful industries, with Allen County as an example.
So the men and women who have banded together to move this quarter of Kansas a notch or two higher on the economic and social scale have all the raw materials they need to reach their goals. Iola and Iolans should enlist in this crusade along side Moran, Humboldt and the County of Allen.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
