Topeka — What a difference a few months makes.
Earlier this year, then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius sought to eliminate the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corp., a state-funded agency started in 1987 to grow the technology economy.
Sebelius said KTEC had lost its effectiveness, and its operations could be brought under the Kansas Department of Commerce, a Cabinet-level agency headed by a gubernatorial appointee.
By the end of the legislative session, however, lawmakers kept KTEC alive, although they drastically reduced the agency’s budget.
In June, Tracy Taylor, KTEC’s longtime president and chief executive officer, resigned.
Now some of KTEC’s harshest critics said they are willing to give the agency another chance.
Last week, a House-Senate special committee looking at KTEC said the agency should continue as a stand-alone operation.
State Sen. Tom Holland, D-Baldwin City, who had been critical of KTEC, recently was appointed to the KTEC board.
He said he believed that the agency “has a role to play in the future.”
State Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, who also has been recently appointed to the KTEC board, said, “They have made some good changes.”
McGinn said KTEC would get lost if it were brought under the Commerce Department.
She said at her first meeting on the KTEC board there was a new sense of board members being engaged in the decision-making. She said she heard from veteran board members, “This is the most conversation we’ve had in 10 years. I don’t think it’s a rubber-stamp board anymore.”
An evaluation of KTEC by a consulting firm that was released in April said KTEC should continue operating but it needed to be more open and focused.
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KS (anonymous) says…
Rarely, if ever, would I agree with the former Queen Kathy, but I do on this one. This is an agency that can go by the wayside. Just where, oh where, is all of this money going?