NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson City Manager Enrico Villegas, Reno County Administrator Randy Partington and South Hutchinson City Administrator Jeff Schenk are working together where they can to move the entire area forward. One place where they are sharing resources is in housing.
"Enrico had met with me and had ideas about how the city and county can work together on housing," Partington said. "There was some development that the city was looking at, Hutchinson was looking at working on. The question was, how can the county be a partner? Because Enrico knows and Jeff knows that, you know, Reno County wants to be a partner with both cities and all cities in Reno County. Before the meeting, we talked about how can the economic development funds that Reno County has and has not been spending all of it in the budgeted year. How can we use some of that for housing? Housing is definitely an economic development item."
This is where the idea of a county-wide grant program came from, and though the final touches are not done on that yet, it provides an opportunity for all county communities to share in bringing people here.
"It's taken some revisions," Villegas said. "It's not polished yet. But it stands to benefit all municipalities in Reno County, not just Hutchinson. So Haven, South Hutch, etc. If they want to participate in this, they can. It really stands to benefit everyone in Reno County."
South Hutchinson is still building out the infrastructure to be more involved in programs like this in the future.
"We are still working on building incentive programs and learning all of the different programs," Schenk said. "South Hutch has kind of been a little bit chaotic in the past and hasn't always played really well with everybody across the river. And so kind of we're just rebuilding that kind of community feel and becoming well, all playing nice in the sandbox."
The three managers meet or email fairly often to discuss ongoing projects so that they can go to their governing bodies informed about how each other is approaching development.