Gatherings organized by a local legislator are bringing a lot of positive attention to the state of Kansas.

Three conferences organized by state Rep. Tom Sloan during the last seven months have brought important attention to Lawrence, Kansas University and the state of Kansas.

Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was the keynote speaker in February at the Kansas Rural Stakeholder Summit that was called by Sloan. The summit brought together many people interested in the expansion of high-speed Internet service and gave Powell a chance to visit Lawrence and be briefed about research being conducted at KU’s Information and Telecommunication Technology Center.

Earlier this month, Pat Wood III, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, came to Lawrence at Sloan’s invitation to talk about wind energy policy. The Kansas Electric Transmission Summit II was designed to bring together decision-makers who could discuss ways to increase transmission lines to carry wind-produced electricity across the state.

Last weekend, thanks to another Sloan invitation, Lawrence played host to the director of the National Institutes of Health and the assistant director of the National Science Foundation. The meeting, dubbed the Regional Biosciences Collaborative Summit, drew more than 60 researchers, politicians and entrepreneurs to KU to discuss how to move the state’s bioscience efforts forward.

The challenge before the state is to turn the Kansas Economic Growth Act, approved earlier this year by the Kansas Legislature, into action. One of the keys is to turn university research, such as the development of new drugs, into commercial ventures that can feed the state economy. Grants will be an essential part of funding the research, and the National Institutes of Health is a $27 billion agency that provides such research grants.

No specific deals came out of the three summits organized by Sloan and held at the Dole Institute of Politics, but the summits brought together national and local experts in the fields of telecommunications, energy and bioscience research. State and local leaders went away with some new ideas and energy, and national leaders left with a better understanding of what Kansas is doing and what it hopes to do in the future.

If, in the future, a question or grant application from someone in Kansas comes across their desks, they already will know a little something about what’s going on in the state. Hopefully, they also will look at Kansas as a dynamic state that wants to be a national leader in such areas as wind power, high-speed Internet access, cancer research and biosciences technology.

It takes time and energy to organize these summits, but the eventual payoff could be enormous. Sloan deserves the thanks of Lawrence, KU and state officials for committing the effort to bring new visibility to efforts that will be important to the state’s economic future.