Retiring Guy's Digest: BIG PICTURE: Rural Kansas counties continue to lose population

Kansas has 105 counties, and most of them can be classified as 'rural'.

Corning Leader, Wichita Eagle, Associated Press, NPR

From the AP:

Five of the top 10 fastest-growing counties were in or close to the Kansas City metropolitan area. The state’s most populous county, Johnson County, has affluent Kansas City suburbs that have been growing for decades, and its population grew another 12.1% in the past 10 years.

Census figures show that Kansas saw a 3% increase in population over 10 years, to almost 2.94 million. Population shifts within the state mean a shift in political clout away from rural areas and toward Kansas City and a few other areas when the Legislature redraws political boundaries next year.

From NPR:

In 2014, when he was the governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback made the bold prediction that the state would soon reach a new population milestone — Kansas would surpass a population of 3 million by 2020.

Three years after the date he predicted, Kansas is still waiting for that three-millionth Kansan. U.S. Census figures show Kansas had a population of 2.93 million people in 2020. That’s an increase of just 85,000 residents in a decade — driven by growth in its larger cities and suburbs, not its small towns.

Rural parts of the state continue to see significant declines. People like Cloutier and some state officials are trying to staunch the seemingly endless bleeding. [emphasis added]

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