The local election season is hitting a key moment with Monday’s filing deadline near, and some readers have questions about some of the politics behind the races. Two questions seem to be the most frequent: Why is there a dearth of local Republican candidates, and have some of the Democrats ...
Not even Lawrence’s longtime tradition of a community fireworks show is safe from COVID-19. A representative of the local Jaycees club confirmed Wednesday that the show along the Kansas River won’t happen this year. “We safely could shoot off the fireworks, but we don’t have a way to ...
It could have been worse. It is a phrase I utter every time I leave a homemade haircut with both ears, and it also may echo in the city’s finance department after Lawrence leaders received their first sales tax check that has been slashed by the pandemic. The city’s May sales tax ...
Perhaps you noticed that May hasn’t been great on many fronts. (Granted, I have figured out how to gain weight despite having my mouth mostly covered, which is surely an advancement in ingenuity.) When it comes to unemployment, the news isn’t great anywhere, but there are some particularly ...
There has been good news on the medical front, if not necessarily on the money front, at Lawrence's hospital. At a Wednesday meeting, members of the hospital’s nonprofit board of trustees heard about millions in dollar losses related to the COVID-19 disruptions and reduced the total ...
In-person dining in Lawrence didn’t make a lot of noise on Monday — the first day local regulations allowed eateries to reopen their dining rooms — unless you count the leaf blower. Along Massachusetts Street in downtown Lawrence, I counted only three restaurants that had their dining ...
Maybe Lawrence homebuyers in April already had a key aspect of our new lives figured out: If forced to live with a stay-at-home order, you will want to do so in a better home. (Pandemic philosophy: Your nothingness becomes smaller if you do it in a larger space.) Whether it was that realization ...
Unless you are really good at riding with no hands, having a cup of coffee while on a bicycle might be tough. (Obviously, one hand must be free to keep the admirers of the spandex outfit at a distance.) But that doesn’t mean coffee and cycling don’t go together. Lawrence’s largest bike ...
A combination of pizza, doughnuts and gasoline have been known to jump-start me on occasion. Now, the trio may do the same for a planned west Lawrence shopping center. Casey’s General Store has filed plans to build its third store in Lawrence, this one near the Bob Billings Parkway ...
Douglas County’s unemployment rate is now estimated to be at about 16%, which makes it more than 2.5 times higher than at any point in the modern era. KU economist and researcher Donna Ginther continues to use state data to make weekly estimates of unemployment rates for every county in the ...
Lawrence restaurants aren’t fully open yet, but already some of you have been asking whether their employees will be required to wear masks when they do start serving dine-in customers again. Formal guidelines haven’t yet been announced by local public health officials, but if a group of ...
At downtown Lawrence’s Rally House, the hoped-for outcome is right there in its name: a rally. But shoppers for the most part didn’t even stir, let alone rally, on the first day that many “nonessential retailers” were allowed to reopen following an easing of Douglas County’s ...
I know what the prominent style changes have been in my quarantine-era home: claw marks on the inside of the front door and the elimination of all full-length mirrors. (Wear pants, people.) Normally, though, I’m getting up to date on new housing styles at the Lawrence Spring Parade of Homes. ...
The downtown Lawrence boutique Striped Cow is getting much bigger. (Join the club. As the saying goes these days, I’ve social distanced from everything but the refrigerator door.) But owner David Jess is betting this is an expansion to get excited about, hopefully even showing how ...
Story updated 5:50 p.m. Thursday Douglas County’s estimated unemployment rate is now up to 14.8%, but the number of county residents making new unemployment filings has hit its lowest level since mid-March, when the pandemic began shuttering businesses across the state. The estimated ...
The items that Barb Gruber sells through her Lawrence-based promotional products business — key chains, T-shirts and other company giveaways — ordinarily won’t do much to improve a person’s health. But as Gruber and quite a few other people have noticed, these aren’t ordinary times. ...
We now have more detailed data on who is dying from COVID-19 in Kansas. As many suspected, the elderly are suffering the highest number of deaths, but that doesn’t mean you have to be old to get the virus. People between the ages of 35 and 44 have been the most likely to get the disease. As ...
We kind of are in a Road Runner cartoon moment. It is that point of the episode where Wile E. Coyote is running toward the cliff. We all know he is going to drop off the cliff, and, surely after all these episodes, he does, too. That’s where Lawrence and the state are when it comes to sales ...
News and notes from around town, with a heavy dose of COVID-19 numbers, and information on a furlough policy that has some Hallmark employees upset. — The unemployment numbers are still grim for Douglas County, but now we have more company. The latest estimate compiled by researchers at ...
Someday, we will shop again, and developers are still hopeful that it will be at a new shopping center just south of the South Lawrence Trafficway and U.S. Highway 59 interchange. Another set of plans have been filed for the long-debated shopping center, and this time they have a major twist ...