LIBERAL FIRST
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The City of Liberal has been able to complete many projects this year, and there are also multiple projects currently in the pipeline.
However, according to city staff, the work is still nowhere near done.
There has been a lot of progress on multiple projects throughout the community lately, but as City of Liberal staff tells it, there is much more to come.
“One of the big undertakings going on right now is our water line replacement project, which, even though there are still a few details we’re working on, is continuing to move forward,” Communications Director Keeley Moree said. “That will be rolling forward and replacing different water lines throughout the city and making sure our water infrastructure continues to stay updated, because we do want to be able to continue providing clean water to our residents. We’ve also continued working on our Comprehensive Plan, and we had a lot of activity in April and May with that in regard to public engagement. We did put out a community survey that had nearly 700 participants, and since then, our consultants have been working on putting together a professional plan for the future. We’ve been reviewing all the different feedback from not only the survey, but also from public events we attended, focus groups we put together comprised of people throughout the community, and we truly feel the best Comprehensive Plan will come from our citizens. We will be seeing more activity with the Comprehensive Plan come September, we’ll have another Steering Committee meeting to look at some of the ideas that were generated based on the feedback we got from our public engagement activities as well as city planners who work on tasks like this on a regular basis and can bring some ideas that match what is being talked about throughout the community. We look to have all of that wrapped up and available for the community to review by January, so we appreciate everyone who’s been part of that process, and our core team continues to work hard on everything related to that.”
There has been a lot of work going on throughout the Liberal community lately and earlier this week, Liberal citizens got to hear some updates on that work.
“In terms of what’s been done this quarter, one of the first big things was we did adopt a new slogan, and you might have noticed our logo is slightly different,” Communications Director Keeley Moree said. “For the longest time, Liberal’s slogan was ‘Crossroads of Commerce,’ but as we continued to reflect on what our community identity is and where we come from, we did identify our new slogan ‘From Generosity to Prosperity’ as the one that would work best. That had floated around the community for a while, and eventually, we got to the point where we felt we were in the right place to adopt a new slogan. While we won’t be doing an immediate, massive change in everything, you will see a gradual change in a shift from our old logo to a new logo. We did also recently launch LiberalGolf.com for the golf course, and that should allow everyone to be able to go on and sign in to book tee times, manage their membership, view different events, and many other tasks, and we do encourage everyone to take a look at that.”
The 2024 election has many offices on the ballot for voters to decide on, both nationally and locally, and local employees are looking to help spread the necessary information about this year’s election season.
“There are a lot of deadlines for all of the elections as far as the requirements of printing publications in the local newspaper and things like that – and I will say, any publication we're legally required to do, we also share on our Web site and on our Facebook page so that information can be shared to everyone,” Seward County Clerk Stacia Long said. “All of that work starts very early because there's a Notice of Voter Registration deadline we've had to print, as well as a Notice of Primary, which lists all the candidates who will be on the ballot and their parties, and all of that. For this election, we started very early, and we always do because we have overseas voters and have to be ready to go a certain period of time before the election, so we move things along very quickly as far as having the ballots programmed and ready to go. We mailed out overseas ballots June 22, and everything else just moves from there. We share a lot of information on our Web site and through our Facebook page, and we also do some Public Service Announcements to share as much as possible. Our focus right now is on the primary, so once that's all done, we'll get started on the general election stuff for November. There's definitely a lot of behind-the-scenes work the community doesn't see.”
The Five State Free Fair is scheduled to start Aug. 7, and while the event is a family-friendly time for everyone, one part of the fair is truly a family affair.
After a few years' absence, the demolition derby made a return for the 2023 fair, and the derby run by Gene Ward and his brother-in-law is coming back for this year’s fair.
“We heard, for whatever reason, there were no races anymore, and we decided to go to the fair board and ask them if they would be interested in a demolition derby,” he said.
