Douglas County Administrator Craig Weinaug retired Friday. He held the position for 26 years. “I have loved this job,” he recently told the Journal-World. “I won’t say I’ve loved every minute of it, but I have loved this job for a very long time, and I love this community and county government.”
In national politics there is lots of talk about red America and blue America, but perhaps the more important split is big America and small America. New federal figures show just how much the economies of small-town America are getting hammered, and Kansas got hit harder than most, according to one measurement in the new data. For the first time ever, the federal government has produced data showing the gross ...
There is really no excuse this Christmas for me to not get something fabulously expensive like a yacht or a nongeneric jar of peanut butter. In past years, I’ve always excused such omissions because I know Lawrence residents have dollars sucked out of their wallets by some of the highest gasoline prices in the state. But this year, we are living in a bizarro world where elves evidently are tall and Santa ...
First I had to learn about the phrase “pet resort.” Now, it appears I need to learn about a “pet campus.” (Apparently it is not enough for my dog to have better vacations than me. He soon will have a better GPA, too.) Whatever the case, a pair of for-profit pet businesses are teaming up with a pair of nonprofit animal firms with hopes of building a pet campus along Wakarusa Drive. Preliminary plans ...
A couple of months ago, I told you how Downtown Lawrence Inc. was looking for ideas on what new types of businesses ought to locate downtown. At that point, the organization hadn’t yet gotten a formal system set up to take your ideas, but it has one now. The executive director of Downtown Lawrence Inc. tells me the ideas are starting to trickle in: an arcade, a grocery store, a bowling alley. Here is one ...
Plans have been filed with Lawrence City Hall to convert a downtown building into a drop-in center where the homeless can do everything from take a shower to get some temporary relief from the elements. City commissioners will have to approve the plans before they can move ahead, and it is unclear whether the proposal will bring up a new round of debates that surrounded the homeless and their presence in ...