Preventing food deserts: Group trying to help rural grocers
The Kansan
There is a trend of rural and small-town grocery stores in Kansas closing, and a group called the Rural Grocery Initiative has noticed.
“Over a 10-year period, from 2008 to 2018, we tracked 54 rural grocery store closures,” said David Procter, co-founder of the Rural Grocery Initiative.
One of those was Weaver Grocers in Hesston, which closed its doors in April 2018.
The city council of Hesston has had discussions in the past two years of what to do but to date, no one has stepped forward to fill the void. Grocery shoppers in Hesston now can head to Newton, Buhler, Inman, Moundridge or Goessel.
Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA The privatized system in Kansas for handling child support payments to 140,000 children suffers from Byzantine complexity perplexing to employees and the public, a laissez-faire approach to enforcement of support orders, and a computer network that should be a candidate for the scrap heap but isn’t because of high replacement costs.
The child support program overseen by the Kansas Department for Children and Families and operated by a collection of private contractors hired by the state was placed under the microscope of Midwest Evaluation and Research, an Emporia consulting firm. The independent evaluator was hired by DCF to review accountability and effectiveness of the privatized system in the context of Kansas’ performance on key metrics and with knowledge of persistent complaints about IT and communication shortcomings.