(Last of four articles)
Three years ago this month, students and educators in southwest Kansas talked about bringing a satellite campus from one of the state’s universities – Fort Hays was mentioned – to Dodge City. At stake, they said, is the long-term health of communities in the region, an “education desert” in the one quadrant of the state with no public university.
The region holds two-year community colleges at Liberal, Dodge City and Garden City, and yet they said people there are unlikely to earn college or university degrees. Employment and career opportunities are limited; they believe this may explain why the region is short on doctors, dentists and nurses.
Beef cattle and agribusiness have brought new residents and economic growth to the region; the young hope to leverage this into careers beyond manual and often dangerous labor. They seek opportunities in a region with more university-educated citizens.
Commuting to a university is expensive and overlong. Hays is 125 miles northeast of Dodge City; from Garden City, 145 miles; from Liberal, 210 miles. All on two-lane highways. This is especially challenging for the first in a family to go beyond high school.
Students seek four-year degrees in the southwest because it’s where they want to live. The campus at St. Mary of the Plains in Dodge City, a four-year liberal arts college that closed in 1992, was mentioned as a potential site.
*
The Legislature sent a message. It confronted rural population loss and congressional reapportionment by carving Lawrence from Douglas County and dumping it – and the University of Kansas – into the First Congressional District.
The proposed district, based on the 2020 census, holds a lot of the old one: rural and western, starting at the Colorado border. For Kansas travelers, the distant and spacious southwest is land of the two-lane highway, a 25,000-square-mile patch between two Interstates. From Liberal, the nearest Interstate highway is 150 miles either direction – north on US83 to Oakley and I-70, or south through the Oklahoma panhandle into Texas and I-40 at Amarillo.
As the population of farm country drops, the reapportioned First district has grown eastward every ten years. It now takes in Junction City and Manhattan and stops at the Shawnee County line ten miles from the state capital. The boundary of the planned new district avoids Topeka in an arc, then dips into Douglas to snatch Lawrence.
Lawrence is 385 miles northeast of Dodge City and that youthful dream for a satellite university. To offer Lawrence seemed shallow, a snide and untutored realignment.
The courts will have a say. The only people who want this plan are the legislators involved. In public hearings last summer, citizens from rural regions and metropolitan areas alike said they wanted no part of a realignment to force their marriage.
*
Last August, a 26-member House-Senate committee began a five-day charge through 14 Kansas cities to hear what people had to say about the state’s reapportionment process. New boundaries would be drawn for legislative districts based on data from the 2020 U.S. census.
Ten years ago the process involved the same 14 cities, west and east – and lasted four months. This year the hearings were begun even before the census had been released. In Manhattan, Tucker Graff, 33, said he could attend only because he was a “nontraditional student,” just completed an internship, and hadn’t yet started his new job. He said it was hard to see how fair maps could be drawn, or even discussed, before census data is released. “I don’t know why you’re having these meetings,” he said.
Later that day at Salina and Hays, citizens at echoed frustration over the process: With no census data, there was little to discuss; the meetings were cursory, a rush job. Rural residents said they had few common interests with the urban northeast. Metropolitan residents said they should not become an afterthought in farm country.
Rural and urban citizens said reapportionment should be the work of an independent and non-partisan commission; legislative boundaries should be marked by census numbers, not political persuasion.
The legislature’s cursory nod to citizen involvement evoked a great distance in miles and spirit between the far west and the metropolitan northeast. The committee of nine senators and 17 House members includes two from the far west: Sen. Rick Billinger of Goodland and Rep. Adam Smith, Weskan, and two from the southwest, Reps. Bradley Ralph of Dodge City and Kyle Hoffman, Coldwater.
The west’s spare membership reflects the way things are, the loss of population and voice. Shifting boundaries will expand the distance between what once was and what is. Southwest students and educators who yearn to narrow the gap and widen their possibilities are left to dream on.
