Dr. Greg Mosier, President, Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC)

Could you introduce us to the project?

This is the downtown center, the Kansas City Kansas Community Education, Health and Wellness Center. I’ll send you this. It’s one of a kind. There’s nothing like it in the nation, where a community college has collaborated with other private industry to create a holistic solution for an economically depressed area. So, this building is right in the middle of the urban core, which has been almost abandoned for 30 years.

It’s the largest investment that’s ever been made downtown in the urban core. So it includes us, Smoke Health Community America and Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. So we’re all on the same building. So they come to us and maybe they just need health care. So they would come and visit Swope Health. But it would get them into the college, and we can. They can see all that.

There’s a reason why we’re doing this. We serve Wyandotte County. This is a poverty map. On the east side of Highway 635, almost all live in poverty. Our current main campus is right here in the middle. And then, this is where we’re going to build, right in the heart of the urban core.

I’m a big data person, and I’m technical. You know my previous jobs were with NASA, Rockwell, and Lockheed. It’s just kind of an engineering mindset. When I first came to the college, I studied the county’s indiscreet portion. So there are actually 10 zip codes in the county. There are four zip codes on the west and six zip codes on the east. If we kind of break the county into half down the middle, these are the socioeconomic disparities that exist within the county.

So, for someone who is able to speak English well enough to gain work, there are only about 2,500 here, but it’s 20,000, so it’s 250 times worse in Eastern Wyandotte County. And under these working titles, you can see the same thing occurring. So these are by number. It’s out of the American Community Survey and the US Census. So it’s sourced. You can see every social economic indicator is 200 percent worse in this small county. It’s the smallest county in the State of Kansas.

However, we do have a lot of capital investment taking place in Wyandotte County each year. We’re really doing more than $500 million a year in economic capital investments, and Urban Outfitters has put its global headquarters here. Marvin Windows is moving down from the northern part of the United States. Panasonic Energy North America has chosen just south of us for a $4 billion battery manufacturing facility and they need 4,000 jobs. So we’re actually one of their main training partners for Panasonic. I do a lot of corporate partnerships where the corporations actually pay for the students. They sponsor them through their education, and then they come to work for them.

We can look at all these disparities. This is actually the location of our new site. All of this has been abandoned for 30 years. You can see this building burnt, but it burned like 20 years ago, and they’ve never done anything with it. So this is where the new location will be set. I have some newer visuals for you. I sent you this picture.

In the last four weeks, we’ve had four articles in the Kansas City Business Journal. So, I’m not sure if you have a subscription to that or not, but I can copy and paste the text for you.
We’re really moving downtown to end generational poverty. We have programs that will be in the technical labs. This is what the new building looks like, and then these are the technical labs. So it’ll be cut in half. One lab is automation engineering technology. We currently have students in this. It’s with the organization called FAME. It’s an acronym for the Federation of Advanced Manufacturing Education. So you have to be selected as a FAME member. It’s an apprenticeship model. So they’re at the college two days a week, and they’re with their corporate sponsor, their company, three days a week. They actually pay them to go to school. So our students in the program are making 60, 70, $80,000 a year while they’re going to school. One of them, who will graduate in May, is making over $100,000 a year while he’s a student.

So it’s an amazing opportunity when you think about this location, where there are thousands of abandoned homes. All of a sudden, you go to KCKCC, and you take this program, and you’re making $100,000 a year. It’s like changing for that person, for their family and for their generations to come. If I get an education in a high-demand area, I’ll never have to worry about money ever again. So, it’s really life-changing.

I believe a location like this can change everything. It will not only provide the location and help, but the properties around it will also go up in value, and everybody’s going to benefit.

Some of these articles discuss this, but this one just came out last Friday. It’s like the “Dawn of a new day: Two KCK projects promise to create greater density, deliver more services and create broader, brighter prospects in the cities downtown.”

They would see these projects signal a rebirth for this area because it’s been poverty for 30 years. So people aren’t really recognizing that there’s a different channel. So, there is hope to close the economic divide in Wyandotte County. But it’s really all about giving people jobs. Well, here, this is a while ago. It’s a $71 million project to end generational poverty. So it’s really life-changing. As I said, there’s nothing like it in the country.

The first floor of the building is KCKCC, where our student services offices are, and on the left is the Community America Credit Union. The college has all of floor 2 and floor 3, and Swope Health has all of floor 4. So it’s really that holistic solution.

It’s always needed in an area. You need finance, help, or unique education. Maybe a supermarket is the only thing missing. But it will definitely change the area.

There’s a co-op grocery store. It’s there, but there’s not enough business around it to really survive. So, the government is subsidizing it right now. For employees, we will have 66 people who will be working in the building, so that adds to them; they need lunch and dinner. They need the grocery store. It will serve about 20,000 people per year, and it’s creating 33 new jobs. So it’s bringing more economic investment into it.

This is our timeline. We’re doing a capital campaign to raise money to build the center. These are some of our main donors. So we have one that’s in front of the Congress right now for another 3 million, but so far today, we’ve raised $50 million for the project, and mostly in philanthropic and other types of state or Federal funds.

We have this 11 million. Now, we just submitted a $6 million grant request to a foundation, which we really believe will be funded in the December 7th or 8th timeframe. So we would know before this was published. We’re probably going to add $6 million dollars to this $5 or $6 million to this total the second week of December.

But we’re doing demolition now. We’ve started that. This is the video for the groundbreaking event. We expected 100 people, and 170 people showed up. Even our federal legislators from Congress traveled to attend this grand opening. It’s pretty amazing.

See the buildings behind the group. All the windows are broken out. This is the one with the tops all burnt, so it’s just falling apart. So we’re tearing all of this down to build this. We’re really excited about the vision for the project. The college is turning 100 years old this year. So that’s exciting. This project is actually going to be only two blocks from where the college started a hundred years ago. It’s on State Avenue. It’s only two blocks away. It’s been 100 years. Now, we’re returning home to where we started to serve that community that’s not getting service now, and that’s exciting.

We just built a 260-bed Centennial Hall student housing complex because there is housing and food insecurity in our county. Half of our county is very, very poor, and the other half is very affluent. A lot of people don’t have a safe place to stay, so we just built a new hall. Let’s see. Here you go. It doesn’t show the top of it, but it’s a beautiful building. I’m very much into the aesthetics. So this is the front face of it. But we have beds for 252 students and eight employees. So there are 260 beds in total.

Before this, we were in a really bad environment that was not always safe for the students from whom we rented space. So we stopped that rental and built our own. This has been the second year it’s been open. It was full to the brim, and there were about 80 people who wanted in after it was full. So that’s a lot of growth not related to the project that we know.

We’re starting new programs. This AET is a new program, Automation Engineering Technology. We’re starting a high-voltage program for linemen, which will start in the fall of 2024. We’re doing customized training for Panasonic. There’s another couple mentioned here. OGV makes electronics like semi-rigs. So they just moved into the area. So we’re providing their training. Marvin Windows is building up a large facility where they’re going to do their training. As I mentioned, Panasonic and Urban Outfitters. There’s a lot on the list that we’re going to build these training partnerships with.

There’s so much exciting stuff going on right now for the college that it’s really a new day for the college. I’ve been here five and a half years, and we’ve done quite a bit. We also bought property up in Leavenworth County because we serve Leavenworth as well. So, as soon as we finish building downtown, we’re going to build a new site in Leavenworth County. So it’s next on the list. So we did Centennial Hall for housing. Then we did the downtown urban core, and then this will be for Leavenworth County.

The raw ground is being taken up because all these big companies are moving in. So Leavenworth just sits to the west in this part of our service region. We’re building it now, and it’d probably be about six years from now. But when Wyandotte County runs out of space, they’re going to be moving on to Leavenworth County. Then, we’ll be able to meet those workforce needs with this new facility there as well.

There is a lot of growth in Kansas City in general because I70 goes east and west all the way across the country, and then I35 goes north and south. They meet in Wyandotte County, so you can get anywhere in the country if you’re a manufacturer in about two or three days with your product. So that’s why everyone’s kind of consolidating to the Midwest. And remember, the proposed title of this is “Success in the Midwest.” That’s what’s driving a lot of onshoring from foreign countries where we have a hard time getting goods now.

So, I work really closely with Lieutenant Governor David Tolman. I was on a trip out to Reno, Nevada, to attract Panasonic Energy to Kansas City. Then, I serve on the state business attraction team. When they’re coming into our area, I’ll go with the lieutenant governor, commerce and business owners, and like the president of the University of Kansas and K State, and talk about how we, as a community college, can help meet their workforce needs, which helps give our community, the people that we serve, opportunities for really well-paid jobs.

Understood. That’s quite incredible. And I was going to say that you should probably want to go to politics at some point because everybody will want to see somebody who actually gets things done.

Yeah, I’ve always been very driven and have about 10 years of building projects lined out
right now. So it’s a growth. This is a growth stage for the college, and it’s an exciting place to be in, so I love it here.

That presentation was fantastic. What would be your message to potential corporate partners who want to move to your area?

Community colleges are really the workhorse or the engines behind the workforce. Most of the jobs in manufacturing or other businesses are skilled labor. It’s not the engineers. There are usually about seven to 10 technicians for every engineer. So, we are the engine for workforce development.

At KCKCC, my goal is like this: If someone is interested in coming to this area, I begin working with them now, not waiting until they get here to identify their workforce needs. I’ll build custom programs for you. We’re doing that with OGV. It’s a one-of-a-kind electric semi. It’s called a yard truck because if you think of the big ports on the coast, they just have to move containers from location to location. They never leave the yard. It’s all-electric. When they go on break, they plug it in. They go to lunch, they plug it in so it’s always charged, and there’s no gas and no emissions. So we’re building a special curriculum just for them to train their workforce.

We’re working with Panasonic to double the capacity of our training that we can provide. Then, we’ll help with on-site training. So whatever their skill training and workforce needs are, we’re the choice because we’re going to custom build this and make sure that you know you’re successful Company X when you come to Kansas City.

And then, what would be your main message for potential financial partners and investors who want to collaborate with you to help you with this initiative?

With this downtown project, we’re really helping to end the social injustice in Wyandotte County and the redlining on I635. It’s kind of the same story: We’re producing workers who will help keep the economy running.

So, for a financial investor, we will create people who will work in your industry. If you’re a philanthropic investor, and we have several philanthropic investors, we’re helping to break the divide, the social socio socioeconomic inequality.

This new center will help provide education and training for people so they’ll make more money. There will be less demand for social welfare programs. There will be less demand for hospitals because they learn to eat healthier. There will be less demand on the prison systems and the law enforcement systems because if they’re earning good money, they’re not out there doing things that they should not be doing and getting arrested and thrown in jail, which costs $35,000 a year for every person who’s in jail in this area. We’re taking all those burdens away.

You’re definitely making an impact, not just when it comes to basic growth but as well as education. There’s nothing better than a good job to integrate yourself into society and be a productive member of it.

Yeah. Let me share this with you real quick. These are some of the major employers that we work with to help train their workforce. We did an economic impact study, and we just finished it. It’s still in draft form. In 2022, the college had 745 employees with a payroll of $41 million. There’s $115 million spent, and the return on investment is $764 million dollars for just one year for FY2022. So, for every dollar spent, the students gain $12, and they make $12 and 80 cents. The taxpayer gain is about 30 percent, whereas the stock market is only 10 percent. And there are some more details on that.

I share this with businesses because we’re fundraising. Our portion for the college is $53 million, and we invested $13 million. So far, we’ve raised $30 million just for the college portion. For the taxpayers, they’re only paying 33 cents on the dollar for this beautiful downtown facility. Their tax money in Wyandotte County has a property tax. That’s the way Kansas works. It’s about 50 percent of our revenue.

So, for the Wyandotte County residents, the story to tell them is like this. You’re only paying 18 cents on the dollar for this downtown building because everything else is being fundraised through the college. We have a lot of banks that have donated money because they know our graduates are going to make really good money. And they’re going to need someplace to put it. So that’s why they’re interested. So, the ROI from a financial perspective is very good. So it’s a complete package meeting both the economic and the social needs of the community and the health-related needs because now there’s a healthcare provider right down in the urban core, whereas it was a health care desert.

So it’s pretty amazing. I thought about this project for 15 years but never had a president who would take it on. But now, as president, I got permission from the board, and we’ve been hard at it for four and a half years, including through COVID-19, which set us back some. We lost two partners because of COVID-19. It’s an amazing project, and we’re excited. The whole community is excited, especially now with that wave of Kansas City business journal articles.

I congratulate you on that. Do you have any last messages? Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you would like to mention for this article?

As a community college, our main mission is to serve the community, and that’s exactly what this project is doing. It’s going to be life-changing not just for one person or one generation but for generations to follow. This project will increase the opportunities for people who live downtown for generations upon generations to come. What I get out of this personally is that thought. It’s kind of timeless how long it will continue to serve the downtown community and the surrounding areas.