As Kansas state lawmakers begin another legislative session, $2.5 million they allocated last year for health testing of communities impacted by groundwater contamination has yet to be touched.
That may change next week, as the city of Wichita and Sedgwick County are set to take key votes.
The county will vote Wednesday on whether to sign an agreement with the state that will release some of the dollars, while the city will vote Tuesday on whether to provide a portion of matching funds needed to make state money available.
“In order to leverage the full state allocation for this testing, it is recommended that the City contribute $125,000 towards the community match,” the city’s agenda reads. “This contribution would be matched by an equal amount from Sedgwick County.”
The Kansas Legislature made the state dollars available in June 2024 in response to the recent discovery of a toxic chemical spill in northeast Wichita, which includes several historically Black neighborhoods.
Why the money has taken months to be used depends on whom you ask.
Certain state legislators, including Rep. Ford Carr, blame the program’s slow rollout on the city and Sedgwick County. He said the city and county have been slow to provide $1 million in local matching funds that are required by state law.
“Things didn't happen with the same sense of urgency that they should have happened and that they would have happened had this been any other group,” Carr said.
Elected officials at the city and county say before they could commit dollars, they wanted to come up with a plan that was useful to the federally qualified health centers doing the testing. A lack of answers from the state slowed the process, they said.
“We want to create a system and an infrastructure that can serve these people the right way,” said county commissioner Ryan Baty. “And that has been the bulk of the conversation for the better part of the last six months. … How do we build a system that can actually do justice for the people that have been impacted?”
Baty plans to request funding from the county commission in the near future. And both he and City Council member Brandon Johnson say they are working with private philanthropic donors, including the Kansas Health Foundation, to find the rest of the local match.
With the money unavailable so far, one health center, Hunter Health, said it’s unable to provide mass testing for residents who lived above or near groundwater contamination.
“It's just going to make the community healthier, in general, if we can get this figured out and just try to move forward from something that … had another negative impact on that community,” said Tara Nolen, the director of population health at Hunter Health.
Another health clinic, GraceMed, said it is still offering free health screenings using funds it received from private donations.
Funds needed, communication struggles begin
In fall 2022, many residents living near 29th and Grove learned for the first time of a large chemical spill contaminating the groundwater beneath their homes. The chemical, trichloroethylene, is a carcinogen.
Residents grew more concerned when the state published a health study finding elevated liver cancer rates near the affected area. Many were frustrated when told they should get screened for cancer but weren’t given a method to pay for it, the Wichita Eagle reported in 2023.
Following the report, several state legislators – including Carr, K.C. Ohaebosim, Henry Helgerson, Susan Estes, Angela Martinez and Oletha Faust-Goudeau – began working to secure state funds for testing during the 2024 legislative session.
They succeeded in including $2.5 million in last year’s state budget “for the purposes of environmentally at-risk testing related to contamination sites in Sedgwick County.” The dollars could be spent on metabolic panels, blood tests, urinalyses and alpha fetoprotein tests, which can help detect certain cancers.
But it required a $1 million match of local, nonstate dollars.
Carr said Johnson and Baty told state legislators that they could provide matching funds.
“If they would have said, ‘Well, we can't come up with that,’ then we might have done something different,” Carr said.
But Johnson and Baty said they weren’t consulted on crafting the legislation.
“We were completely out of the loop,” Baty said. “... They literally sent us over an MOA [Memorandum of Agreement] and said, ‘Here it is, sign it and get the local match prepared.’
“And we looked at it, and we knew that this wasn't what was going to solve the problems.”
Johnson said he did tell Carr that the city and county would come up with a plan to seek funding – just not necessarily from local government sources. In fact, Johnson planned to work with the Kansas Health Foundation to come up with the money.
“The million dollar match, we never committed was going to come fully from the city of Wichita or Sedgwick County,” Johnson said. “It's been, ‘We'll come up with a plan and then get the funding for it.’”
Testing challenges
Before the state offered up millions of dollars to carry out testing last year, the health clinics had received donations from a variety of private organizations to help them do so.
One of the largest came from the Kansas Health Foundation, which gave $50,000 each to Hunter Health, GraceMed and HealthCore for educating residents on the contamination and available screening options. The foundation then approved $400,000 to cover “un-reimbursed testing” for community members who lived near the contaminated groundwater.
The $400,000 was available to the three health clinics for three months – between September and December 2023 – and could be used to offer blood tests, alpha-fetoprotein tests, urinalyses and even sonograms.
But just $32,850 of the $400,000 were utilized – totaling 73 patients.
“Clinics quickly ran into difficulty with accurately tracking tests and requesting reimbursement, as their system and workflow was not designed for this purpose,” according to a briefing from the Kansas Health Foundation. “And because the labor had to be carried out manually, valuable time and resources would be spent on administrative tasks, rather than care. This is particularly problematic for the clinics, as they are already under-resourced.”
Ultimately, Johnson said, it was clear that “individual testing, as we'd been talking about, wasn't going to work well for the clinics.”
The experience also left the Kansas Health Foundation wanting to try a “new play,” said Ed O’Malley, the Kansas Health Foundation’s president and CEO.
“As we've thought about how we could be most helpful going forward, knowing that a match was going to be needed to draw down those state dollars, we have been encouraging people to learn from the experience that happened just a few years ago,” O’Malley said.
Carr, though, said requests for the Kansas Health Foundation’s funds were low, in part, because there wasn’t enough time or money spent on a communications plan to inform the public about testing.
Julie Elder, the chief executive and medical officer of GraceMed, said her clinic didn’t need to request dollars from the Kansas Health Foundation at the time because it had other sources of funding, including the original $50,000 grant.
The city-county plan foments opposition
Throughout summer and fall of 2024, conversations continued between the health clinics, the Kansas Health Foundation and elected officials from the city, county and state.
A new idea for how to use the state’s dollars and any local matching funds began to gain traction: instead of spending it on individual tests, what if it was spent on equipment – MRI machines, CT scanners, ultrasound machines – for the local health clinics to use to test residents in-house?
Johnson said the idea initially originated from Teresa Lovelady, the chief executive officer of HealthCore, at a meeting in September.
“She just said, ‘We do this work anyway,’” Johnson said. “... If the clinics had the ability to do all of this on their own and not have to schedule out for MRIs or CT scans, if they can do everything there to test, they'd be better off.
“And the room got quiet at that point, and we all just kind of looked at each other and was like, ‘There you go. That's the solution, if we can strengthen that.’ ”
Equipment could also help clinics with another challenge: some residents may need to be tested over multiple years, potentially a lifetime. How do you accomplish that with one-time funding?
“The opportunity to utilize some of the funding to purchase equipment is out of the need to develop the community resources and processes to support long-term and ongoing testing for the 29th and Grove community and for any resident in Sedgwick County that lives in a community impacted by a historical contamination area,” Lovelady wrote in an email to KMUW.
Nolen, with Hunter Health, wrote in an email that while upgrading in-house laboratory equipment would enhance the clinic’s capabilities, “additional funding is also required to support the necessary staffing increases.”
Elder, with GraceMed, said her clinic wouldn’t purchase the equipment because it doesn’t employ the specialized staff needed – but understands other clinics may operate differently.
In the fall, the city and county began to put together a plan to purchase medical equipment and sought answers from the state on whether the dollars could be used this way. Some state lawmakers said they couldn’t: purchasing medical equipment didn’t match legislators’ intent when they passed the bill.
“In other words, we never told our colleagues that what we would do is go out and buy machines to put in the community health centers,” Carr said. “That's not the intent.”
The stalemate required various lawyers to interpret the state’s bill – a slow process. In October, community members and state lawmakers gathered to protest the slow rollout of the funds. By December, Carr pointed out, six months had gone by without the city or county providing matching dollars.
What comes next
To make the dollars available, the state and Sedgwick County both need to sign onto a memorandum of agreement. The county has not yet signed on as local officials have sought answers about how the dollars can be spent.
Recently, though, Johnson and Baty said they received an update from the Governor’s Office and Kansas Department of Health and Environment that allows their plan to move forward. The county now plans to vote on its memorandum of agreement with the state next Wednesday.
If the county signs on, $1.5 million from the state will be released for the county to disburse. The rest of the dollars will be released on a rolling basis, as the city and county provide local match funding.
But the county commission as a body needs to pass the agreement, and some commissioners are already expressing doubt.
“We don’t need to necessarily stand up brand new equipment in (health clinics) to handle this really isolated issue,” said county commissioner Jim Howell.
The memorandum of agreement requires the city and county to raise the entire $1 million local match by June 30. Johnson said he has confidence that the city and county can accomplish that.
Carr said that he had originally planned to return to the legislature this year to ask for more dollars for testing. But with zero dollars spent from last year’s allocation so far, he said that plan is dashed.
“I would look like a fool, right?” Carr said.
