Opinion

The past few weeks have been eventful in county government as the Board of County Commissioners completed its work by adopting a $69 million FY 2026 budget. The budget process included budget hearings where commissioners heard from the head of each county department and each elected official regarding their proposed budgets.

The agriculture industry is a small world. It doesn’t always feel that way when you’re in the middle of wheat harvest or out checking calves on a quiet evening, but time and again, I am reminded of how tightly connected this industry really is.One of those reminders came this summer.

Most of our local schools have started. Social media has been flooded with pictures of children in new clothes reluctantly holding up signs that show vital information like what year it is, what grade the student is going into and some random fact about the students’ favorite subject in school.

For more than 160 years, mail-in voting has been a fixture of American democracy, especially in Kansas. During the Civil War, Union soldiers stationed far from home were granted the right to vote by mail, a practice that laid the foundation for absentee voting as we know it.