Region faces long road to prosperity

The nearly 300 people at Thursday’s economic summit in Iola – including Gov. Sam Brownback – all agreed southeast Kansas is plagued with a long list of social and economic problems. What to do about it – isn’t so clear.
Brownback told the capacity-crowd at St. John’s parish hall the first step to solving any problem, let alone the 10 key issues impacting the regional economy, is to be brutally honest in efforts to prioritize strategies.
The governor, a Linn County native, said high unemployment, a poor health care index rating and the welfare-poverty cycle prevalent in Allen County and the other 16 counties encompassed in the summit are not new ones, nor are the solutions being used.  
“You’re going to see some unpleasant numbers here today and that’s the start of a discussion to say ‘where are we’ and to not sugarcoat it,” Brownback said before a regional economic analysis was presented Thursday morning. “If we’ve been doing the same things for the last 10, 20 years and still not changed the dial on these numbers, we’ve got to ask the question 
‘why are we doing it this way?'”
THE PROBLEMS
Attendees took on the challenge as they split into groups of 10 and met in 90-minute breakout sessions to determine the top three pressing issues facing the region and their potential solutions.
Participant Ken Lassmann, Chanute, said a lack of community pride in southeast Kansas creates an environment that turns off young people, made evident by a steady decline of the area’s young families.
“There really wasn’t that much pride in Chanute back in the ’70s,” he said. “It’s better now. But we’ve suffered brain drain,” where the area’s brightest flee to metropolitan areas. “The reality is that somehow (youth) have a negative concept of southeast Kansas.”
During the past 31 years, while Kansas has seen slight gains in population, southeast Kansas has seen more and more people move away.
But Pittsburg State University senior Zach Sachs said it’s not the entertainment and social aspects of cities like Iola and Chanute that have college graduates looking to move elsewhere, it’s the lack of job opportunities. The type of work people with four-year college degrees are looking for can’t be found in southeast Kansas, he said.
“A lot of my buddies are going for internships and jobs in states away from Kansas. I’m going back to Wichita to work,” Sachs said. “There’s no opportunity to work here.”
When businesses are hiring, oftentimes the employee pool doesn’t meet the muster, said Neil Westervelt, Iola business owner. When M&W Manufacturing hires new employees, the lack of workforce development in Allen County is obvious, he said.
“They have absolutely no training whatsoever if they don’t have a college education and we don’t hire many people with a college education,” he said, suggesting more vocational courses in local schools might help.
“Sure (Iola students) build houses, but how many people can make a living driving nails,” Westervelt said.
About 11,000 people in southeast Kansas are unemployed, helping to deepen the cycle of poverty and dependence on welfare.
As a youth baseball coach, Marlon Thornburg said he sees firsthand what a culture of poverty looks like.
“A lot of those kids will show up at the game and their shirts are wrinkled. You can tell they haven’t washed their shirt since I gave it to them new the first game,” he said. “They just don’t have those basic things at home that they need. In many cases, there are kids that just absolutely don’t know what to do or how to get out of that situation.”
Thornburg said he sees the back end of the cycle as an administrator at Coffeyville Community College.
“I see lots of people coming in to retrain and some of them have figured out that you can actually make more money being on unemployment than going back to work,” he said. “You can tell they have the mental capacity to be a good employee for somebody, but they lack the self esteem to go after the interview.
Instead, welfare recipients often go back on the dole because it’s within their comfort zone, and the cycle starts all over again, Thornburg said.
“It comes back to building confidence … and working with those little kids at a younger age … to help build that self esteem so those kids can get out of that cycle eventually,” he said. “Is it working? I don’t know.”
Of the 17 southeast Kansas counties under the summit’s umbrella, 16 have poverty rates above 10 percent and eight experience as much as 16 percent poverty
The solutions
With the idea that the summit was the first step in a multi-year, pragmatic process, participants were asked to conceptualize a vessel for developing strategies.
Charles Fluharty, renowned worldwide for his rural development efforts with the Rural Policy Research Institute, said the key to succeeding is reaching beyond the boundaries of a single town, city or county. Rather, community leaders from all of southeast Kansas must work together.
“Those alliances are key. It cannot be just your little town,” he said. “This is a 17-county geographic region with amazing potential to rethink your sense of self. Who’s the champion? Who will drive this?”
All 10 breakout groups agreed that because many of the communities in the region have different chambers, foundations, philanthropy and nonprofit organizations focused on specific issues, any newly formed organization should consist of representatives and professionals from existing groups.
“A part of this is not reinventing the wheel. We do have some great organizations out there that have some really good things going and I think identifying some of those organizations” will help, said Karen Gilpin, active in a host of Iola and Allen County volunteer groups. “Maybe pulling a person or two from each of those … because you need that leadership,” would work.
Whether the vessel is a new organization or a hybrid of existing ones, the task of reviving southeast Kansas is going to take a very long time even with sustained enthusiasm, said Don Pyle, Crawford County Clerk.
“It’s not like cleaning up the city square,” he said. “It’s going to take some time and a lot of people. It’s not going to be one volunteer group for the whole region; it’s going to be every city, school district, whatever.”
The next step
Needing time to process the wealth of data and suggestions provided at the summit and in the follow-up surveys emailed to attendees today, Sen. Jeff King said it would be a disservice to everyone with the event to get specific about what’s next for the economic improvement effort.
“We have some momentum and thoughts about how to move forward. Now we have to turn that momentum into action,” he said. “We will take the ideas here and try to use those ideas as a way to put an executive committee to spearhead the process more broadly, or it could be something else. We’d be selling this process short to announce now what we’re going to do from here.”
Wherever they go, they’ll be going together.
“If we do not work together as southeast Kansas, we will die together as southeast Kansas. We’ve proven that this is not a pipedream. We’ve proven we can do this,” he said referring the 2007 flooding. “We came together as a region, we saw a common problem, we saw suffering and we made a difference in the lives of everyone in southeast Kansas, regardless of where they were from.”
Brownback warned summit attendees that the road to prosperity is going to be difficult, but worth it.
“It’s going to be tough,” he said. “Most of us don’t like change. We like it just the way it is, that’s comfortable. The problem with comfort, a lot of times, is it can lead to a slow downward slide.”