Kansas bill offers incentives to attract more businesses to job-scarce rural areas of state

Seven years ago, Kansas lawmakers adopted new incentives for individuals to move to the state and make one of its 77 rural counties their new home. The Rural Opportunity Zones program offers a mix of income tax waivers (for up to five years) and student-loan repayments of $15,000. But as much as he supports the idea, Kansas Rep. Troy Waymaster says another part of the economic challenges for rural areas must somehow be met.  “The problem is when there is no job for them to take, [people] probably are not going to move [to the rural counties],” he notes. “This is the other half of the equation: how you get jobs to move back.”This year, he introduced the Ad Astra Rural Jobs Act (HB 2168), which would provide tax credits to investors who help businesses expand, locate or relocate in Kansas’ rural areas, many of which are struggling due to trends in their two dominant industries: agriculture and oil. In both sectors, commodity prices are low. “When [rural areas’] dominant economic engines are in an economic downturn, it really has a catastrophic effect for the entire city or region,” says Waymaster, whose home county of Russell has a population of less than 7,000. “You don’t have farmers having excess cash where they can go out and buy new equipment and new machinery,” he adds, “and on the oil side, you’re not seeing the drilling that was going on [earlier in the decade].”