What Can Kansas Actually Win?

Kansas Commerce targets food and agriculture, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, logistics, professional and technical services, animal health and bioscience, and transformative technologies. The choices are sensible. They’re also broad enough to include almost anything.

“Advanced manufacturing” includes both a Cessna wing spar and a lithium battery. “Transformative technologies” could cover just about anything that plugs in.

If nearly every attractive project fits somewhere on the list, the list isn’t doing much choosing. It mostly ensures that whatever we decide to do was part of the strategy all along.

And then when a football stadium didn’t fit the strategy, we found room for it anyway.

Kansas’s actual advantages are narrower. Wichita has spent a century learning how to design, certify, assemble and supply extraordinarily complicated aircraft. Kansas agriculture produces enormous quantities of commodities but could capture more of the value between the farm and consumer. Manhattan sits at one end of the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor, connecting agriculture, veterinary medicine, research, NBAF and pharmaceuticals.

Those advantages weren’t invented by an economic-development plan. Kansans built them over generations.

I tried to see what the economy itself was telling us by comparing Kansas industries on two measures: how concentrated they are here relative to the country as a whole, and whether Kansas has recently been gaining or losing ground nationally.

The differences beneath Commerce’s broad categories are striking. Aerospace and computer electronics shouldn’t get the same strategy simply because both fit under “advanced manufacturing,” any more than food processing and software should.

We need to start with an advantage, ask where it might lead, and then consider the project. Starting with the project and finding a category afterward is easier, but it isn’t much of a strategy.

Kansas wind is instructive.

We have one of the best wind resources in America, and wind now generates more than half our electricity. There’s an obvious answer to “Why Kansas?” The wind blows here.

Yet much of the construction work ends when the project does, and Kansas hasn’t built a wind-manufacturing industry remotely proportional to the resource. Nor has all that wind made Kansas unusually cheap for industrial power. In 2024, Kansas industrial customers paid an average 7.73 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 8.13 cents nationally.

We’ve turned Kansas wind into a lot of electricity. We haven’t turned it into much of an industry — or even a dramatic energy-cost advantage for some other industry.

Markets and private capital should make most investment decisions. Government is considerably worse at predicting the future, even if it is considerably better at spending somebody else’s money.

But Kansas competes because it has to. We build infrastructure, fund research, train workers, write tax policy and put public money behind individual projects. Other states recruit our companies and workers.

So what’s worth fighting for?

Wichita aviation is an obvious answer. Kansas didn’t create it by government decree; entrepreneurs, companies and generations of workers did. Today the advantage resides in thousands of engineers and machinists, specialized suppliers, universities, research institutions and knowledge accumulated over a century. Lose enough of that ecosystem and getting it back becomes extraordinarily difficult.

There is a difference between losing business to a better competitor and losing an industry because another state or country is willing to subsidize it away. At some point, “let the market decide” can mean letting somebody else’s government decide.

Sometimes defense requires offense. Recruiting the next aerospace supplier or technology to Wichita makes the whole cluster stronger — and Wichita more attractive to the company after that.

That’s the virtue of building on an existing advantage. The engineers, machinists, suppliers, research and training are already here.

Sometimes, of course, there’s a reason to start from scratch.

Which brings us to Panasonic.

In 2022, batteries were becoming strategically important to the United States, and states were scrambling for factories. Panasonic offered thousands of jobs, enormous private investment and a foothold in an important new American industry.

Panasonic was different. Kansas wasn’t deepening an existing advantage. It was spending heavily in the hope that getting into an important industry early could create one.

Panasonic evaluated more than 100 sites in a dozen states. Kansas had nothing resembling Wichita’s accumulated advantage in aviation, and winning required an estimated $829.2 million behind Panasonic’s $4 billion plant.

There are early signs of something developing around it. H&T Recharge, a component manufacturer, has co-located with Panasonic, bringing $110 million and 180 jobs.

That’s encouraging. But Kansas still trails several states with much larger battery-manufacturing bases. The job now is to see how much of an ecosystem can grow around Panasonic without treating one enormous bet as a reason to make another.

Last year, Kansas began offering qualifying data centers a 20-year sales tax exemption on eligible costs and installation services, provided a company invests at least $250 million within its first five years of operations and creates and maintains at least 20 new jobs within two years.

Kansas is entering a mature race against states that have spent decades building data-center advantages. Power, land and fiber matter, but Kansas isn’t the only place that has them. Before we waive the sales tax for twenty years, we ought to know what comes after the data center. Does it attract suppliers, specialized workers, research, customers or another industry that would not otherwise locate here?

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Then there are the Chiefs.

A stadium can bring visitors, development and tax revenue. It may turn out to be a good deal. But compare it with the other choices Kansas is making.

An aerospace investment strengthens an advantage we’ve spent a century building. Panasonic was an expensive attempt to create a new one. A stadium doesn’t make Kansas unusually good at anything.

Step back and a pattern emerges.

Wind. EV batteries. A football stadium.

They are very different projects, but each began with an opportunity that looked big, important or difficult to let somebody else have. Then we found a reason Kansas should pursue it.

That’s almost the reverse of strategy.

That won’t always produce the biggest ribbon cutting. It may be another aerospace supplier in Wichita, another animal-health company near Manhattan or another food processor turning Kansas commodities into higher-value products.

None is likely to get us on SportsCenter.

But the next company has another reason to come because the last one did.

Sometimes a calculated bet works. Panasonic may yet prove to have been a terrific one. The Chiefs may prove to be one too.

But a winning bet is not the same thing as a strategy.

Kansas has three million people. We cannot chase every opportunity that looks exciting or every project another state wants. Once we put public money behind one, we’ve chosen it over something else.

We cannot choose everything.

A strategy isn’t a list of reasons to say yes.

It’s what allows you to say no.

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Josh Dambacher is a fifth-generation Kansan who attended public schools in Kansas, is on the Board of Literacy Partners, and writes The Plains Ledger.

— J.D.