The Kansas City Star: ’It’s not transparency’: Kansas still keeps secrets on business incentives under Kelly
Kansas claims economic development subsidies have contributed significantly to job growth and have been key to attracting companies, but state leaders aren’t providing evidence to back up those claims, reporters with the Kansas City Star found.
A list provided to the Star of businesses investing in Kansas “includes hundreds of projects big and small that add up to a total of 41,101 jobs created and 11,292 jobs retained and $14.6 billion in investments since 2019. 51 of those projects are marked confidential. Crucially, the document includes only those jobs companies at one time intended to create. There’s no way to tell how many of the jobs were actually created, state officials said.”
Good Jobs First Executive Director Greg LeRoy told the Star there was no excuse for state leaders to not know what they were giving private companies.
“How are you minding the store?” LeRoy said. “How do you even know anything about your programs: how much future revenue are you committing to forgo? How many grants are you going to pay out?”
Read the full story at The Kansas City Star.