NEWS

Gov. Kelly gives legislative update at Salina Rotary luncheon

Aaron Anders
Salina Journal
Governor Laura Kelly reminisces about the time she lived in Salina in the mid 1980s during the Salina Rotary luncheon at the Great Plains Manufacturing Convention Hall in the Tony’s Pizza Events Center on Monday afternoon.

Gov. Laura Kelly visited The Rotary Club of Salina as their guest speaker during their meeting inside of the Great Plains Manufacturing Convention Hall, formally Heritage Hall, at the Tony’s Pizza Events Center on Monday afternoon. Kelly shared memories of Salina when she lived in Salina during the 1980s as well as gave a legislative update of the 2021 session to a full room of more than 80 Rotarians.

Kelly said that while she lived in Salina, she enjoyed going to the first Smoky Hill River Festival, community theatre and the children's library. Laughter filled the room as Kelly proclaimed she still really misses Scheme pizza and thanked former Sen. Randall Hardy for bringing a Scheme pizza to the governor's office a year and a half ago.

"I consider (Scheme pizza) to be the best pizza west of New Jersey," jokingly said Kelly.

Governor Laura Kelly speaks to more than 80 Salina Rotary members as the guest speaker during the luncheon at the Great Plains Manufacturing Convention Hall in the Tony’s Pizza Events Center on Monday afternoon.

"It is nice to come back and see people gathering together again. People are getting their vaccines, allowing them to participate in lunches like we just saw with the Rotary," said Kelly after the luncheon.

Kelly thanked the Rotarians for keeping the community safe and healthy during the pandemic before mentioning the club kept the Salina Food Bank stocked. The group also provided “Vaccines Work: Ending Polio is Proof” yard signs to remind citizens to get the COVID-19 vaccination.

 "I have always admired the Rotary motto 'service above self' and their dedication to action and problem solving and creating change for people in our communities and all across the world" said Kelly.

Kelly mentioned having invested in education, healthcare, and economic development.

"We made measurable progress to strengthen Kansas' foundation. We fully funded our schools, just this morning I signed the bill to fully funded our schools for the past three years in a row," said Kelly.  

A few talking points from the legislative update were modernizing the Kansas Department of Labor’s digital infrastructure, the Ike Transportation program, and a cost-share program will help communities with infrastructure development.

While Kelly has been in office Kansas has had over $5 billion in economic development including the expansion of Great Plains Manufacturing and a multi-million dollar expansion of the Schwan's frozen pizza facility.

"We hit the 2.5 billion record for new capital investment in one year in 2020. We are in the trajectory to outdo that in 2021," said Kelly. "It is things like our ability to work with Schwan's and come up with a public-private partnership of sorts that allowed them to double the size of the facility here. The welcome they had here both the state and local level really discouraged them to even take this operation somewhere else."

Rotarian Angie Lassley, CEO of the Salina Family YMCA,  asked Kelly what the steps are regarded the unemployment benefits as currently, businesses are going through the struggles of recruiting employees.  Kansans who are unemployed have been getting an additional $300 per week in unemployment payments approved by Congress in January.

"What we need to remember is that it is not a new problem," explained Kelly. "We have had a shortage of workers in Kansas for a long time. It is not going to solve our problem because right now we have about probably 50,000 jobs, or close to it, on our Kansas Works force website, we only have 26,000 people right now on receiving unemployment benefits. So even if every single one of them was to be employed tomorrow it is not going to solve our workforce shortage." 

Kelly mentioned she will be in a meeting this week with the Kansas Chamber and other business leaders this week to come up with a solution.

"We really do have to look at our childcare infrastructure and we have to look at our workforce training programs,"; said Kelly. "We have to keep building on them (programs) there is still a lot of work we still need to do to take care of the workforce problem."