Month: August 2021

Organizations join forces to help provide food for needy

Five organizations are joining together to provide food distribution once a month at the parking lot of the Kansas City Kansas Community College Dr. Thomas Burke Technical Education Center at 6565 State Ave.

The free food distribution takes place at noon on the fourth Monday of each month at 65th and State in Kansas City, Kansas. The next one will be Aug. 23.

Joining together in the effort to sponsor the food distribution are Harvesters, Humana, Kansas City Kansas Community College, Providence Medical Center and Providence YMCA-Ball Family Center.

Matt Eaves, executive director of Providence YMCA-Ball Family Center, said this group effort started when Cassandra Long of Humana came onto the YMCA Community Mission Board. They were discussing and determining community needs, especially during the pandemic. Child care and food distribution rose to the top of the list of needs, he said.

The conversations about how to help the community started before the pandemic, he added. Once everything reopened, they continued the effort for food distribution.

They started with a food distribution in late June and continued in late July, he said. Harvesters is providing the food, while the participating organizations have been providing the volunteers, he said.

The word is starting to spread throughout the community about the food distribution, he said. The location is good, with a lot of room in the parking lot to distribute food.

He said they would like to get some other businesses in the community involved to come out and volunteer.

“We are proud to partner with these other community organizations in providing free nutritious food to individuals and families in our area,” said Karen Orr, chief executive officer of Providence Medical Center. “Addressing food insecurity and hunger in our community will have lifelong impacts to overall health and well-being.”

Cassandra Long, population health strategy lead for Humana, said she has worked with other food distribution programs previously in the Kansas City area.

She was asked to get involved in the effort here, she said. Providence Medical Center had a couple primary care locations in Kansas City, Kansas, and Bonner Springs, and they were screening patients on social determinants for health, asking them if they had enough food to eat. They found a lot of responses that people did not have enough to eat, she said.

Providence came to Humana to help with a food distribution program, because they know Humana does food distributions in other areas of the city, she said. They worked with the YMCA as one of the nonprofit sponsors and with Harvesters, a regional food bank, as the food source. KCKCC came to the table, as its parking lot was so big, and able to handle the traffic.

It was largely a community collaborative effort, Long added. They knew intuitively there was a problem, as Providence was hearing about it from patients and the YMCA was hearing from members.

With the two events they’ve had so far, they ran out of food both times, Long said. There were over 100 families served in June and 125 families in July, she added.

The line was still pretty long when they ran out of food in late July, so they plan to order more food for the Aug. 23 distribution, she added. Cars had lined up 45 minutes before the second event started, and they ran out of food before the end of the line, she said.

“That speaks to a need,” she added.

Long said everyone is welcome to come to the food distribution. They don’t have to show identification, and there is no proof of need. People will be asked how many are in their household, if they are over 18 or over 65, and what is their Zip Code, she added. They are not asked what their income level is.

Need is currently everywhere, she said, and they are seeing more people in need in Kansas City, Kansas, Bonner Springs and Edwardsville.

“It doesn’t matter where they live, anybody is welcome to come,” she said.

Monarchs explode for 16 runs against Explorers

The Kansas City Monarchs exploded for 16 runs on 22 hits on Thursday night in Sioux City, Iowa.

Defeating the Sioux City Explorers 16-3, the Monarchs, 53-25, stayed on top of South division, 10.5 games ahead of the closest competitor, the Lincoln Saltdogs.

Explorer’s pitcher Patrick Ledet, 6-4, led the Sioux City pitching staff with 84 strikeouts. He faced Monarchs’ starter Nick Travieso.

After a scoreless first inning, the Monarchs scored three runs in the top of the second. Darnell Sweeney doubled to left field and drove in Charcer Burks, Will Kengor and Alexis Olmeda.

The Monarchs added another run the next inning with a Kengor RBI double, making the score 4-0. He extended his hitting streak to 18 games.

Travieso gave up his first run in the bottom of the third. Sioux City got three hits and two runs in the inning to close the gap to 4-2.

Both starters had flawless fourth innings, but the fifth inning was differenet.

Kansas City scored four in the top of the inning after a leadoff double, walk, hit by pitch, single and another double. Burks and Grotjohn had RBIs and the Monarchs led, 8-2.

Sebastian Zawada singled to right, scoring Joseph Monge, and the score was 8-3.

Elroy Urbina took over for Travieso after the end of the fifth. Travieso, the winning pitcher, faced 25 batters, gave up nine hits and one walk. Ledet, the losing pitcher, also left in the fifth, after striking out 10 Kansas City batters. The Monarchs got 11 hits, two walks and eight runs off Ledet.

The Monarchs scored two more runs in the sixth, bringing the score to 10-3. Gerrero, Isabel, Kengor and Olmeda got hits in the sixth.

Urbina pitched three scoreless innings, allowing only one hit and one walk, and got three strikeouts.

The Monarchs weren’t done yet. They added six runs in the last two innings. Colin Willis’ two-run home run was the highlight to end the night, with the final score 16-3.

The Monarchs travel to Chicago Friday night to play the Chicago Dogs at 7:05 p.m.

The game can be heard on the Monarchs Broadcast Network with the pre-game beginning at 6:30 p.m. and the video stream airing on aabaseball.tv.

  • Story by Jaxson Webb

Why Kansas Democrats tell Republicans to ‘keep it transparent’ as they draw new political maps

by Abigail Censky and Daniel Wheaton, KCUR and Kansas News Service

Republicans will control the redistricting process in Kansas next year. Right now, they face an uphill battle to convince residents in the suburbs of Kansas City that they won’t gerrymander the maps to supercharge Republican power.

Overland Park, Kansas — Without a single new boundary line drawn for the congressional and legislative districts, Republicans running redistricting in Kansas find themselves under fire.

Democrats argue that 14 town halls scattered across the state came with too little advance notice — 10 days — while people who crammed into one of those meetings in Johnson County worried that the fix is in.

“It’s almost as if there was a plan to cheat,” said Stacey Knoell, an Olathe resident.

One of the most critical choices with the once-a-decade redrawing of political maps revolves around the state’s 3rd Congressional District in the Kansas City area. For the last quarter century, it’s toggled between Republican and Democrat. In 2018, Democrat Sharice Davids won the congressional seat.

Republicans want that seat back. By drawing the new congressional districts in a way that puts parts of Johnson or Wyandotte counties in other districts, for instance, they could make her re-election nearly impossible. And because they hold a firm grip on the Legislature, Republicans control redistricting.

On Thursday, Knoell and hundreds of other people crowded into an Overland Park community center to weigh in with state lawmakers after Democrats raised alarm bells that Republicans were attempting to freeze citizens out of the process.

The audience tilted heavily Democratic and pressed for a collective wish list. They demanded maps that grouped districts by communities, not something gerrymandered to consolidate power for one political party. They wanted Wyandotte and Johnson counties kept together in a way that kept Davids’ district essentially intact.

“Within the district’s boundaries lies the heart of the Kansas side of the KC metropolitan area,” said Ron Fugate. He wants the Kansas 3rd to remain in a single district and urged lawmakers to “keep it transparent.”

State Rep. Chris Croft, a Republican from Overland Park, chairs the Kansas House redistricting committee. He said that information is what lawmakers came to hear, said “but how realistic that is really depends upon the numbers.”

New numbers from the 2020 Census show a decline in rural populations across the state and an increase in the state’s population centers fueled by migration to the Kansas City metro area. Douglas, Leavenworth, Johnson and Wyandotte counties are all within the top five counties with the greatest population growth.

Kansas’ four congressional districts will need to have roughly 734,470 people each.

Since 2010, Johnson County and Wyandotte County have grown by more than 77,000 people, putting the counties central to the 3rd District roughly 44,000 people over the threshold. Wyandotte County votes heavily Democratic. Johnson County is more Republican, but it has a larger share of Democrats than most of Kansas. Both counties cannot remain entirely whole to meet redistricting requirements.

A change in how members of the military and college students are counted will also mean changes for state legislative districts. Populations in Douglas and Riley counties, home to two state universities and an Army base, increased because college students were counted in Lawrence and Manhattan rather than in their hometowns.

Kansas is one of 29 states across the country where the Legislature wields nearly total control over the redistricting process. Next year, when maps are redrawn to make the number of people in each district equal, Republicans will have an outsize influence on the process thanks to their fortified supermajority.

But they face an uphill battle to convince residents in the Kansas City area that they won’t gerrymander congressional or state legislative districts to supercharge Republican power in the state.

At the meetings in Kansas City, Kansas, and Overland Park any condemnation of former Senate President Susan Wagle’s pledge that “we can draw four Republican maps” sparked applause from the crowd. Sen. Rick Wilborn, A Republican from McPherson and chairman of the redistricting committee, said that Wagle is not driving the redistricting process.

“It’s unfortunate that statement was made,” he said. “But that’s all I have to say about it. I didn’t make the statement. No one on that committee made that statement.”

Wilborn and Croft previously drew the ire of Democrats by scheduling many of the meetings during the work day and all in a single week. Democrats say that limits participation to the mostly white retiree and middle-aged group that attended the Overland Park meeting. In 2011, the meetings were spread out over the course of four months.

Rep. Stephanie Clayton, another Overland Park Democrat, said her concerns about accessibility materialized in places like Garden City and Dodge City.

“You have a lot of working people, a lot of shift workers, who were not able to take advantage of that,” she said. “So that is not just an issue here in the Kansas City area, but also all over Kansas.”

House Speaker Ron Ryckman has said that additional virtual town halls may be held in the fall, but he has not yet provided any additional details.

Democrats like Clayton want more town hall meetings to be held after people have had time to review the census data that came out on Thursday — at least two meetings in the five most populous counties in the state.

“We need to have these meetings where people actually live,” Clayton said, “because cows don’t vote, people do. And we’ve got plenty of people here, especially in the Kansas City area.”

Abigail Censky is the political reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can follow her on Twitter @AbigailCensky or email her at abigailcensky (at) kcur (dot) org.
TheKansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
Kansas News Service stories and photos may be republished by news media at no cost with proper attribution and a link to ksnewsservice.org.
See more at https://www.kcur.org/news/2021-08-13/wary-kansas-democrats-tell-republicans-to-keep-it-transparent-as-they-draw-new-political-map