Thank You, Working Kansas Alliance (WKA)

Last week I had the honor of standing in front of the men and women of the Working Kansas Alliance to talk about construction, about the growth our state is living through right now, and about where Kansas could go from here. I want to thank WKA and its members for the invitation, for the time, and for the conversation. It was one of the more energizing hours I’ve spent on this campaign.

Here is what I kept thinking as I looked out at that room. The growth everyone in Kansas is celebrating like the $4 billion Panasonic battery plant now running in De Soto, a single project that meant more than 16,000 construction jobs, the new stadium planned for the Kansas side of the metro, the aerospace work that keeps Wichita the Air Capital of the World, none of it is abstract. It doesn’t happen in a press release. It happens because skilled tradespeople show up before dawn, read the blueprints, pour the concrete, run the conduit, and put steel in the sky. The people in that room are the ones physically building the Kansas we keep promising. That deserves to be said plainly, and said often.

But we can’t only talk about the cranes on the skyline today. We have to look down the road, and the road ahead is remarkable. By industry estimates, there is somewhere on the order of $85 trillion in construction and infrastructure work coming over the next ten to twelve years: power, transportation, data centers, advanced manufacturing, and the buildings and systems a modern economy runs on. To handle just the electrical side of that, the trades will need roughly 325,000 new electricians. Now picture everyone standing beside that electrician on the jobsite — the masons, the carpenters, the pipefitters, the ironworkers, the operators, the laborers. Across both union halls and private-sector shops, the demand for skilled hands over the next decade is going to be staggering. The only real question is whether Kansas will be ready to fill those jobs with Kansans.

None of this builds itself, and none of it belongs to any one group. The projects that are reshaping our economy rest on a partnership — government that sets the table and keeps its word, private employers who invest and take the risk, and organized labor that makes sure the work is done safely, skillfully, and by people earning a wage they can raise a family on. When any one of those three legs is missing, the whole thing tips over. I believe Kansas does its best work when all three are pulling in the same direction, and that is exactly what I told the WKA members.

People sometimes ask what the State Treasurer has to do with construction and the trades. More than you would think. Meeting a workforce that size starts long before anyone picks up a tool, and the office manages money that can either sit idle or go to work for working people. I want to promote our Learning Quest 529 program so families know it can help pay for apprenticeships and skilled-trade training, not only a four-year degree because a journeyman’s card is every bit as honorable as a diploma, and a shortage this size will be solved in training halls and on jobsites, not in a boardroom. Through linked deposits with our Kansas community banks and credit unions, the Treasurer can help put affordable capital within reach of the small contractors and trades businesses that grow into tomorrow’s employers. And the office can be a steady, credible voice advocating for the workers who too often get talked about but rarely talked to.

I’ve spent two decades in risk management, making sure the numbers add up and that the people counting on them are protected. That is exactly the discipline I want to bring to Kansas’s treasury, and it is the same discipline the trades live by every single day on the job. We speak the same language.

Let me be clear about the goal. Today, Kansas lands somewhere in the middle of the national rankings for doing business, around 26th by some measures. With our location, our workforce, and our work ethic, middle of the pack is not where we belong. I want Kansas in the top ten, and the partnership I saw in that WKA room is exactly how we climb there.

To everyone at the Working Kansas Alliance: thank you again for having me. I left more convinced than ever that if the government, the private sector, and Kansas’s working men and women keep building together, our best days really are ahead of us. I look forward to earning your trust and to getting back to work alongside you.

Experience leadership that delivers.

Juan C. Luengo Candidate for Kansas State Treasurer Paid for by JC for Treasurer, Dr. Richard Nobles, Treasurer