ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Many people from many different walks of life have put their names forward as candidates for Kansas’ U.S. Senate seat, including Patrick Schmidt.

As Schmidt tells it, Kansas has always been his home.

“I am a sixth-generation Kansan, I grew up in Kansas City, and after college, I was commissioned as a naval intelligence officer,” Schmidt said. “When I came off active duty, I came back to Kansas and wanted to continue serving and was still in the Reserves, but I ran for Congress in the second district in 2022. I didn't make it, but I was proud of how we got a lot more people out. We had a really good campaign, and that helped me get to the Kansas Senate last cycle in 2024. My wife and I had our first child this past November, and that really made me think of how the challenges I see facing Kansas and the rest of the country are a lot bigger than what we can deal with in the Kansas Senate. I feel like we don't have the best or most serious leadership at the federal level right now, and I want to try to propose something different so we can help regular U.S. citizens.”

ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Back in January, Equity Bank announced it would be rebuilding its south location, a project Equity Bank Regional President Steve Williams said had been in the works for a while.

“This project has been in the works for quite a while, and it came about after we looked at our branches around the full Equity Bank footprint and realized our branch on South Kansas Ave. near El Rancho Supermercado was in need of more than a little bit of repair,” Williams said in a January L&T story. “We felt we could serve our customers a lot better with a new branch. It was really the ongoing maintenance costs of the current location that really made our decision to put together a new building. When buildings get to a certain point, it's more efficient to just tear it down and start again and make the next one last for 30 years, and we ultimately decided that was the way to go with this.”

ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

The Kansas Secretary of State office is very important, and one of the people running in that race for this election cycle is Jennifer Day.

As Day tells it, politics has always been in the background during her career.

“I'm a small business owner. I've owned my real estate investment business since 2013 and got involved in that because my family was involved in commercial real estate all my life, so my career just evolved through that,” Day said. “Prior to that, I was an executive assistant for various corporations in different industries for multiple years. I got involved in politics because of paying attention to what was happening in Topeka back in 2014 with the Brownback experiment. That had started taking over all our news cycles, and I was hearing about how our schools weren't being funded well enough, and it was taking away from our highway fund in order to fund other parts of our government. I started going to legislative events where I could hear from and speak to my legislators. Things rather started rolling from there, and in 2018, I started going out and volunteering to knock on doors for candidates and help people understand what was going to be on their ballot, and I started donating to candidates that year as well. I also started working elections in 2018 and I've been doing that ever since. I got more and more involved with that and kept knocking on doors and got involved with the League of Women Voters, which I've been a part of since 2019. I started getting involved because of what was happening here in the state of Kansas, that was very important to me.”

Western Kansas News

Washington, D.C. – Memorial Day marks the beginning of the summer driving season, a time when teens gain more independence behind the wheel, families hit the road for vacations, and celebrations bring more drivers onto the nation’s roadways.

To encourage safer choices during this high-travel period, AAA is urging drivers to commit to “100 Days of Safe Driving” between Memorial Day and Labor Day. 

This message comes at a critical time: according to a AAA review of national crash data, more than 30 percent of fatal crashes involving teen drivers and nearly one-third of all impaired-driving fatalities occur between Memorial Day and Labor Day.