Jeff Longwell

Wichita Mayor Jeff Longwell and other city leaders are in Mexico this week to explore trade opportunities.

The mayor, along with City Councilman Jeff Blubaugh, Assistant City Manager Scot Rigby and a delegation of businesses from Mexico, are in the state of Queretaro until Thursday.

The purpose of the visit is to strengthen economic ties and find new trade opportunities between Wichita and Mexico.

The FBI is involved in a multi-year investigation in the Wichita area.

Wichita Mayor Jeff Longwell confirmed the investigation has been going on for at least two years.

"It could be longer, but that's certainly a conservative time frame," Longwell said.

Longwell said he could not comment on how or when he found out about the investigation because it is ongoing.

The FBI would not confirm or deny the investigation, but spokeswoman Bridget Patton said that agents were in Wichita last week.

Wichita will use some of the money from the recent sale of the downtown Hyatt Hotel to improve city streets.

Half of the revenue from the $20 million sale will go toward repairing some of Wichita’s worst asphalt and concrete streets. Voters rejected a 1 percent sales tax two years ago that would have only generated about $8 million for maintenance over the course of five years.

The fourth Regional Mayors Summit will be held in Derby on Wednesday. As KMUW’s Carla Eckels reports, mayors from a 10-county region are expected to share ideas about how to stimulate the economy in south-central Kansas.

Mayors from Wichita, Derby, Mount Hope and Goddard are coordinating the summit, which is expected to attract close to 30 mayors from across south-central Kansas.

Passenger numbers at Wichita's airport were down for July over last year, but they don't tell the whole story.

This July, close to 153,000 passengers flew through Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport. That was a dip from July of 2015, when the airport saw more than 158,000 passengers. It was the first monthly decline this year.

But Wichita Mayor Jeff Longwell said at his weekly briefing that last summer’s passenger count was unusually high.

The Kansas Humane Society has broken its record for the number of animals adopted in a single year.

With kittens and puppies in hand, employees of the Kansas Humane Society in Wichita were proud to announce at a press conference at City Hall that their organization had a record year in terms of how many pets they rescued and placed in homes.

Wichita’s mayor and police chief are offering sympathy and support to the Dallas law enforcement community following last night’s deadly police ambush at a peaceful rally over recent police-involved shootings of two African-American men.