By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

Demolition of the Ambassador Inn, formerly a Ramada property at 3603 Vine, is continuing.

Interior work started the last week of December, with heavy machinery beginning to bring the structure down the first week of January.

From the outside, it appears as if nothing much more has happened since then. But the project is continuing — it’s just not visible to outdoor onlookers.

According to Jesse Rohr, superintendent of the Hays Planning, Inspection and Enforcement Department, crews are currently “working inside to keep the dust and noise down.

“The building is a concrete shell,” Rohr explained last Thursday. “They’ll be using a concrete crusher in the process of taking it down and the city plans to purchase some of the crushed concrete to be used for better coverage in some alleyways.”

The hotel, which was once a leisure hotspot in its glory days as a Holiday Inn Holidome, has fallen into disrepair in recent years, with numerous code violations recorded.

With the hotel facility gone, the property is expected to be more marketable.

By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

“We could have tossed a dart and been just fine.”

Hays Vice-Mayor James Meier, his fellow city commissioners and even candidate James Leiker all agreed Thursday night there could be no wrong choice among the six candidates vying for the unexpired term of Eber Phelps.

“This has been gut-wrenching decision,” added Commissioner Lance Jones, who said he “met personally with everybody who put an application in. And, James is right. There is not a bad selection out of this group. Everyone was qualified for this position.”

During last night’s special session, the candidates, Bill Ring, Sandy Jacobs, Marty Patterson, James Leiker, Brad Pendergast, and Ron Mellick, first delivered short remarks about their desires to serve as a city commissioner.

A motion was then made by Meier to appoint Sandy Jacobs to the position, seconded by Jones, and then unanimously approved. Commissioner Henry Schwaller participated in the special session via phone. Although Schwaller said he “would like to see (former city commissioner) Ron Mellick reinstated, I’ve known Sandy for years and I know she’ll do a fine job.”

Jacobs is the executive director of Heartland Community Foundation in Hays and an active community volunteer. She is a retired bank executive with more than 40 years of financial experience and said that’s “a skill set I can bring to the table with the challenges I see and the budget issues in the near future.”

“The strongest thing I’ve done in my career and through my volunteerism and what is in my soul, is that I want to work to ensure sustainable economic growth for this community.

“My passion lives and breathes in the city of Hays and the citizens of Hays. I think that’s what it’s all about,” Jacobs concluded.

Jacobs will be sworn into office Thu., Jan. 26, during the next regular commission meeting. The unexpired term of Phelps, now the 111th Dist. state representative, expires in January 2018.

The commissioners encouraged all the candidates to run for in 2018. According to City Manager Toby Dougherty,  there will be three seats open on the city commission.

By GARRETT SAGER
Hays Post

Twice a year, Fort Hays State University Career Services hosts a big event to showcase its students by bolstering their interviewing skills and bringing in many employers for a Career-Internship Fair.

On Wednesday, Feb. 8, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., potential employers will pack themselves inside Gross Memorial Coliseum and make themselves available to speak with students.

“This event is all about getting employers and students together to showcase our students here at Fort Hays,” said Dan Rice, director of FHSU Career Services.

FHSU hosts one career day in both the fall and spring semesters. According to Rice, the fall career day went well, with around 650 students taking part.

“We had a lot of students participate, more than the average, and the employers were really pleased that there were so many students,” he said.

Rice said this is the best opportunity students will have to meet with a large number of employers in one location. Employers looking for interns, future full-time employees, and immediate employees will all be present at the career fair.

“It’s a real win-win situation for the students,” he said. “There will be lots of opportunities present.”

Typically, there are around 75 employers that participate in the career fair day. Currently, there are 35 employers who have registered, but, according to Rice, many of the employers sign up last-minute.

A list of registered employers can be found on the Career Services webpage.

The real goal of the career fair, Rice said, is to give students an informal professional setting to expose students of all majors and class levels to careers, internships and full-time employment.

“We want to show off our students. We want them to shine, so we make it open to not just seniors, but all class levels,” Rice said.

Freshman and sophomores are encouraged to research majors or jobs that might interest them, and the employers will be able to answer questions. For juniors, the opportunity to talk internships with employers will be available and, for seniors and graduate students, they can discuss post-graduation opportunities.

A resume is encouraged, Rice said, but not required.

“Employers realize that freshman and sophomores may not have a lot of career experience in a field to put in a resume, but employers will look at a resume if the student has one,” he said.

No individual meetings are scheduled as students may come and go at their convenience. Employers will have a table reserved with information displayed. Students are encouraged to select five to 15 companies to visit.

Rice would like to see a lot of students come down to the career day because that’s how they are able to bring in the high number of employers.

“The more students the better,” Rice said. “Employers are not going to come if they don’t feel its worth their time.”

Five hundred students is about average, he said, but he still hears from employers about getting more students to the event.

Rice added employers often come back because of how impressed they are with the students at FHSU and how they handle themselves.

“A lot of employers give me positive feedback about our students on how professional they looked or how they conducted themselves,” he said.

Rice encourages students to dress nice — at least business casual.

“There will be some students who will wear the suits, but business casual is acceptable,” he said. “You want to look nice because it gives the impression that you are interested.”

For more information on dressing for success, visit the career fair information webpage and download the pdf file.

By GARRETT SAGER
Hays Post

Construction began this week at Big Creek Crossing, 2918 Vine, on the new site of the HaysMed walk-in clinic and Starbucks.

It was announced in early November that phase two of Big Creek Crossing’s redevelopment would consist of the new building, which will be located in the northwest corner of the property where Montana Mike’s previously stood.

The project is expected to be completed by this summer.

Hays Medical Center

Six registered nurses at HaysMed were honored recently at a recognition ceremony and luncheon. They completed the yearlong RN Residency Program offered at HaysMed.

The program began a year ago in February, and the nurses spent the first three weeks in a classroom setting. The remainder of training focuses on clinical experience, one on one mentorship with their preceptor, high-fidelity simulations and on the job training. Additionally, nurses receive training from professionals in several departments, such as radiology, pharmacy, cardiac care, OB and others.

The RN Residency class included Jenifer Brewer, Julie Gross, Cheryl Herman, Taylor Ottley, Lindzie Rambat and Taylor Wade.

The RN Residency Program at HaysMed is one of only two in the state and has been offered since 2008. Shari Hertel, RN, heads the program and has oversight of all the training. HaysMed also works closely with critical access hospitals in the region through a rural residency program to provide training to nurses practicing in the rural setting.

“It is a great program.” Hertel said. “Having one year of focused, on-the-job, evidenced-based learning produces nurses who are more confident and competent in their skills, which translates into improved patient care.”

Currently, there are five nurses scheduled in the next program which begins in February. There are also two nurses in the Rural Residency program. The program is open to newly graduated RNs.

By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

“We were lucky, and we got moisture, which is nice.”

Hays City Manager Toby Dougherty was breathing a sigh of relief Tuesday morning following Sunday’s ice storm.

Although 7,539 Midwest Energy customers remained without power at 1 p.m. today, all Hays customers were online. There were 9 rural customers east of Hays still without electricity .

The major streets in Hays were treated with brine Friday by Public Works employees in anticipation of the weekend storm.

“Brine is just a salt/water mixture that creates a layer that helps prevent anything from freezing on the street,” Dougherty explained.

“Brine is an application that works very good if it doesn’t get too cold and we don’t get a lot of rain with it that washes the brine off. We put a lot of brine down, saturating the streets. As soon as it started icing, the crews were out putting down a granular salt/sand mixture down.

“We were lucky in that a lot of the moisture came down as rain (1.13″) overnight Sunday into Monday morning. That prevented temperatures from getting as cold as predicted (by the National Weather Service.) At 4:30 a.m. Sunday, it was raining pretty heavily and 34 degrees. If the rain had stopped earlier, we probably would have had just a solid sheet of thick ice on all the roads. Monday morning, the residential streets were a little slick but the arterials were all open.”

One-half inch of ice did coat sidewalks and trees.

Some big limbs came down, but Dougherty said the city is picking up only what is in the city right-of-way or on city property.

“We typically only pick up tree limbs in residential areas when it becomes a matter of concern to the health and welfare of the residents.

“When we had the windstorm (July 13) and there were lots of limbs blocking curbs and blocking streets, and others that were about to fall on passersby, and the sheer volume would take private haulers months to get rid of, that’s when the city gets involved.”

Dougherty knows there was some tree damage around town, but called it “very minimal and very localized, from what it could be.”

He encouraged residents to call the Parks Department at (785) 628-7375 for a list of qualified private tree removal specialists in Hays.

Tree limbs can also be taken to the Ellis County Landfill at no charge.

By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

The service area for Hays-based Midwest Energy covers territory from Reno County near Hutchinson, all the way northwest to the Kansas/Colorado border in Rawlins County. That’s 41 counties where MWE provides electricity and/or gas to its customers.

“And most of them have been in some kind of outage-type scenario because of the ice storm that blew through this weekend,” MWE Communications Manager Mike Morley said late Monday afternoon.

Morley and his Midwest Energy colleagues monitor the weather forecast carefully when severe weather is predicted and try to anticipate where the worst damage will be. They assign crews and hold some crews on reserve if there’s going to be a particularly bad outage.

“That’s what we did with this storm,” Morley said. “We held a couple crews back and also brought in some contract crews and had them standing by in Great Bend. So when the trouble started on Sunday afternoon, we sent the Midwest crews first. They worked into Sunday evening. And then today, Monday, it’s just gone crazy. As the ice has melted, it’s brought down lines all over the service area.

“All the Midwest crews are out. We’ve got a dozen contract crews helping us. It looks like we’re going to be working on this for several days before we’ve got the system back up to normal.”

Midwest Energy brought in contract crews from Ward Electric and PAR Electric to help repair this storm’s damage.

“They have more specialized equipment which can help put up the large transmission poles,” Morley said, “and they’re helping out in the southern part of our service area where we have several transmission lines down.”

An OMS-Outage Management System-indicates where certain circuits have opened and alerts Midwest Energy that “somewhere in this general area, there are 300 to 400 customers who are out.

“So the first thing we do is send out crews to patrol the lines, looking for obvious things like breakage on a cross-arm, maybe a tree that’s laying on some wires, or even a pole that’s broken off. Once we find that, we make the repairs as quickly as we safely can, then patrol the rest of the line and then we energize that line,” he explained.

There are 50,000 electric customers in the Midwest Energy system. As of late Monday afternoon, about 8,500 of those customers were without power.

Ice is the culprit.

An inch of ice on a power line on a 300 foot span between two poles adds about a thousand pounds of weight to that section. A pole with wires going both directions adds two thousand pounds of weight–a ton–per line on the cross arm.

“Fortunately, the cross arms are designed to stand up to a fair amount of ice,” Morley said. “Where it becomes problematic is when the wind blows. The lines begin ‘galloping,’ whipping up and down just like a jump rope. That’s what happens to the system. It basically shakes itself until it breaks.”

More problems will occur as the temperatures warm up.

“When the ice begins to melt, particularly on tiered poles where there are transmission lines on the upper part of the pole and distribution wires on the bottom, as the distribution wires melt off that weight, it’s gonna shoot up–just like a rubber band–and vibrate back and forth. As that weight comes off, the lines will snap up and hit some of the heavier lines above.

“That gives us what we call ‘blinks,’ where your lights cut in and out for just a second.”

All the utilities in Kansas sign into mutual aid, according to Morley.

Midwest Energy is dealing with scattered outages across its coverage map Monday, including a larger outage south of Russell.

According to Midwest’s outage viewer, more than 1,500 customers are affected in that outage, which is between Russell and Great Bend.

Overall, there are approximately 8,500 customers without power as of Monday afternoon after the weekend ice storm. Some of those customers could be without power for several days, Midwest said in a news release Monday afternoon.

In Ellis County, there were just a handful of localized outages.

Click HERE for the latest on Midwest power outages.

Click HERE for the extensive list of latest cancellations and delays.

FHSU University Relations

A gift valued at more than $1 million was announced today in a news conference at Fort Hays State University.

The majority of the gift, $666,000, will fund scholarships for women in four areas of study at the university. The remainder of the gift is in oil leases.

Dr. Cynthia Krueger, a retired professor of sociology, attended Fort Hays State early in her career in education, and her gift is an expression of her desire to lessen the financial burden on students. Financial need, based on an applicant’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid, is one of the criteria for receiving aid.

“If there is ever an example of somebody paying it forward, scholarship gifts are it,” said Dr. Andy Tompkins, interim president of Fort Hays State, “and this is one of those great gifts that help us help students for years and years to come.”

He continued, “I think it is a wonderful thing, not only a tribute to our students now and in the future, but also to Dr. Krueger for wanting to make sure she made a difference for our students for years to come.”

Jason Williby, president and CEO of the FHSU Foundation, explained that the gift will provide a minimum of $24,000 a year for scholarships, which will be divided into thirds: one for the Department of Allied Health, one for the Department of Music and Theatre, and another third to be divided between the departments of Sociology and Social Work.

Krueger, who died in 2014, grew up near Natoma. She received her doctorate in sociology from Washington University, St. Louis, and went on to become a professor at Brooklyn College in New York and San Fernando Valley State College in California before returning home to Kansas, where she retired from Washburn University.

“She brought her expertise into the study of areas as varied as radical politics on the one hand and nursing education on the other,” said Dr. Paul Faber, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at FHSU.

“Her life can serve as a guide for us and our students – her preparation through education, her use of her talents to serve others wherever that opportunity arose, her generosity,” said Faber.

Krueger’s gift will support young women in financial need who have declared a major in either sociology, social work, music and theatre, or allied health. The Dr. Cynthia S. Krueger Scholarship gives first preference to women graduating from high schools in Osborne, Russell, Rooks and Ellsworth counties as well as Highland Park High School in Topeka.

The scholarship is renewable for up to seven additional semesters as long as the requirements are met, which include maintaining at least a 2.5 GPA.

“It is only through the support of our generous alumni and friends that our students are able to pursue their academic goals and our programs are able to stay abreast of the latest advances in our disciplines,” said Dr. Jeff Briggs, dean of the College of Health and Behavioral Sciences.

“These scholarships will make it possible for deserving students to realize their potential and pursue the career of their dreams,” he said. “These scholarships enhance access to education for Kansans and provide a wonderful opportunity to improve the educational experience of Fort Hays State University students and to enhance the quality of life profile of Kansas communities.”

In addition to the requirement for financial need and others, the Krueger Scholarship has an additional requirement that represents a specialty of Dr. Krueger’s academic career. Within two semesters of receiving the scholarship, a recipient must take the Introduction to Addiction class, or an approved equivalent. Her aim was that young women learn to recognize the symptoms of addiction and be aware of the dangers.

Dr. Tompkins also pointed out the benefit of estate gifts such at Dr. Krueger’s. “By using her estate plan, Dr. Krueger was able to choose who, what, when and how her money was going to be used after her death,” he said. “I hope this occasion will help others see the benefit of estate planning and consider including Fort Hays State University in their estate plans.”

Williby said that Dr. Krueger’s gift is a great example of how someone can support the university’s Journey Campaign, which encourages donors to support the areas and activities of Fort Hays State that mean the most to them. Journey kicked off in the fall of 2016 with the goal of reaching $100 million over the next several years.

Gifts come in many forms, from cash and stock to real estate and collections. Dr. Krueger chose to give the university her oil interest, which will provide scholarships for students in perpetuity.

To learn more about the FHSU Foundation, call 785-628-5620, email the office at [email protected] or visit https://foundation.fhsu.edu.