Upside Down-Land: Cerner's TIF Transplant

By | September 1, 2015 |
Illustration of upside down people with coins

Neal Patterson personifies 21st-century Kansas City entrepreneurialism. He is his generation’s Henry Bloch or Joyce Hall, the head of a company he started from nothing — Cerner Corporation — and made KC’s most prosperous business. Cerner, a health-information technology firm, makes more than $3 billion a year. The company’s market capitalization — the value of…

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Plentiful access to water fuels prosperity in rural Republic County community

By | August 13, 2015 |
An irrigated field in Kansas. Irrigation accounts for about 85 percent of the state’s water use, according to the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s Division of Water Resources.

In mid-fall, trucks full of corn and soybeans rumble through the north-central Kansas town of Courtland on their way to the grain elevator at the south end of Main Street. While neighboring counties struggle to survive, the western half of Republic County, including Courtland, population 273, isn’t doing too bad. Technology and insurance companies support the…

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US Treasurer Rios calls for greater economic equality and opportunity

By | July 13, 2015 |

The poverty rate for Latinos is decreasing, but the continuing growth of income inequality is making economic advancement for Latinos difficult. That’s according to panelists speaking Sunday at the National Conference of La Raza (NCLR) in Kansas City. In a panel discussion titled “The Great Economic Divide, Why Inequality Matters,” the town hall meeting featured U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios as keynote speaker.

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