Herald-ChronicleThe Osage County

Herald-ChronicleThe Official Newspaper

of Osage County

Serving Osage County

since 1863

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Thursday, March 12, 2020Vol. 158, No. 11

12 Pages + InsertsIN

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The Osage County Herald-Chronicle | 527 Market St., Osage City, KS 66523 | P.O. Box 266 | (785) 528-3511 | https://www.och-c.com | ochcnews@gmail.com

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Quenemo City Council

Council hears of town initiatives in the worksAlex Zerbe | Contributor

QUENEMO – Mayor Gary Moore reminded the public of the necessi-ty for residents to fill out complaint and request forms at city hall if they have an issue, before asking to be put on the city agenda, when the Quenemo City Council met in regu-lar session March 3. Present for the meeting were Dennis Devin, Bruce Rose, Ashley Moore and Tammy Mc-Coy. Council Member Fred Sweet-wood was absent. Also present were Todd Luckman, city attorney, and Theresa Turner, city clerk.

Mayor Moore asked to review sev-eral items under a consent agenda format, including an expense report for employees, time sheets, vacation and sick days, the clerk’s report and ordinance report. He asked for a motion to approval the consent agenda. Council members Rose and Devin expressed the desire to remove from the motion the employee expense reports, time sheets, vacation and sick pay reports. The motion to approve the deletion was carried 4-0.

Mayor Moore asked for a motion

to approve the employee expense report, time sheets, vacation and sick pay, which ended in a 2-2 tie (Rose and Devin cast dissenting votes). Moore was called upon to break the tie, which he did with a “yes” vote. The documents were ap-proved 3-2.

Alex Zerbe, PRIDE director, told the council there will be a meet-ing March 19 to discuss new PRIDE organization town initiatives. The organization has sponsored a new program called Citizen Corps, which has several branches of orga-nization. It is a federally structured program from Homeland Security and FEMA. Residents and non-resi-dents will be invited to attend town meetings to discuss issues and objectives for Quenemo. Zerbe said the new structure will be broken down into four segments.

The first segment is community planning, including economic con-cerns, social and health. The second segment is safety, preparedness and emergency planning, includ-ing a comprehensive Quenemo Emergency Plan. The third seg-ment is introduction of a Citizen

Emergency Response Team. The team will be local citizens trained by Homeland Security and FEMA trainers. The team will be a back up to emergency services already in place by Osage County and the local volunteer fire department. The last segment is Quenemo Block Watch Crime Prevention Program. Zerbe indicated that the Citizen Corps was sponsored by Quenemo PRIDE and Block Watch has already been operating on a limited basis before its official launch March 19. He said PRIDE has evolved into a corpora-tion over the last year and will be taking an active part in Quenemo planning moving forward.

Zerbe said the next PRIDE event is a March 14 supper. He reported that another home improvement grant was approved and grant work will begin on another home.

PRIDE members attended a Lyndon PRIDE meeting where they talked about a collaborative ef-fort between Lyndon, Melvern and Quenemo to create a long-range calendar for event planning and to create a master vendor list to invite vendors to events in all cities. A

template will be created and either a new site or an updated site will be available.

The council will have a work ses-sion March 17, and Zerbe suggested at that time, the council contact Melvern to see if a police officer could be hired by both cities at a substantial savings and share work hours of the officer.

John Hall addressed the coun-cil, notifying members about his preliminary plans to bring hous-ing to Quenemo for homeless and disabled veterans. The new pro-gram is called Team DD214 and will provide low cost housing options with no money down and 10-year interest free payments. Hall has secured two possible building lots and has shown possible interest in some of the vacant and aban-doned properties in the city limits of Quenemo. He believes the small town environment and efforts to revitalize the town make Quenemo a good location for the program.

The council met for 15 minutes in executive session, with Luckman, for the purpose of protecting the attorney client relationship, where-

by the closed session was extended another 15 minutes. Upon return to open session, the council voted to take over the enforcement of city nuisance ordinances being held by a designated city employee, with another 2-2 tie (Devin and Rose cast dissenting votes). Mayor Moore voted in favor of the motion, which passed 3-2.

Mayor Moore asked if the council would like to bring up the subject at the next public work session scheduled for March 17. Work ses-sions are open to the public but with no comments. The council does not vote on any action in a session. It will be added to the work session agenda.

In other business, the council:approved a resolution from

Emergency Management for grant applications and mitigation plans.

Approved a request by PRIDE to hold the organization and its affiliates exempt from three codes pertaining to city park use from Aug. 21 to Aug. 23, in conjunction with the Quenemo 150th Birthday Festival.

Superconducting Super Collider: Osage County dodges physics Gary Rush | Staff Writer

Theoretical physicists from around the world flocked to the Mariott Hotel and Con-vention center in downtown Overbrook last weekend as the city prepared for this year’s annual Quantum Me-chanics Conference. The elite within the ranks of science did not come merely for the conference, however, as sev-eral notable researchers were spotted across the county at festivities accompanying the 2020 event. In fact, James Peebles, one of the three researchers to win the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics, was discovered in the front row at the Carbondale Miners’ G-League basketball game, while Didier Queloz, a fellow Nobel Prize winner in physics, was seen eating sushimi at Scran-ton’s nationally renowned sushi bar, “Nagasakiblu.”

This would all be true, in theory, had events that took place here in Osage County back in the late 1980’s gone a bit differently. Believe it or not, Osage County nearly became the pinnacle of the world’s scientific research community when the state put in a bid to build what would today be the largest Large Hedron Collider (LHC) on earth.

At 54.1 miles in circumfer-ence, the proposed Super-conducting Super Collider (SSC) would have been three times larger than the current leading CERN (Council of European Nuclear Research) LHC in Geneva, Switzerland, and would have had four times the output capacity. Ovular in shape, it would have stretched beyond Wanamaker Road to the west, Stubbs Road to the east, and from Highway 268 in the south to well past Highway 56 to the north. The tunneling required

to contain the SSC would have had an average circumference of 30 feet and maintained an average depth of 220 feet below the surface. Once complete, the SSC would have encompassed the towns of Overbrook, Scranton, Wash-ington Valley and Vassar, as well as the entirety of Pomona Lake, Osage County Lake and a large portion of Carbondale East Lake (denoted as “Strow-bridge Reservoir” on the site proposal map). It should also be mentioned that the future of the Carbondale Cemetery was being strongly considered for possible relocation.

The majority of the super collider’s structure would have been under ground, but it was the 7,863 acres of Osage County surface area the state intended to confis-cate for the project by using the Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policy Act of 1970 (“emi-nent domain”) that sent area landowners into a frenzy of fear and anger. Many of the landowners affected had lands, which were passed down through generations of family, and had themselves given freely their lives in the betterment and production of their heritage. The reward for their life-long efforts was to forcefully accept “current market value” for their home and land and leave behind all they had known just to start over from scratch for the mere sake of “theory.”

The most visually and structurally evident portion of the SSC was the proposed operational campus, which would have contained a central laboratory, several research buildings, ware-housing, a hospital and even an 80-acre recreational area complete with four baseball fields, a golf course and a gymnasium. The campus

area, which would have been located just east of Berryton Road and both south and north of 149th Street, four miles southeast of Carbon-dale, would have consumed the land and home of cur-rent resident Jim Badger who was proactive in the fight

against the project.“All the landowners within

the proposed construction area were against the super collider,” Badger said. “They were going to take our lands and most of the farmers were strongly against it. At the time, I was working hard

on turning my barn into a National Historic Site, but when the bid went to Texas, I put a stop to all that. I did not want a bunch of people stop-ping by at all hours wanting a tour, but to save the land my family had worked for the past century. But I could have handled a few tourists.

“Aside from the accessibil-ity to water in all our lakes and the power from the Wolf Creek Power Plant, the best excuse they could come up with for putting it here was the proximity of our institu-tions of higher education,” Badger said. “We are nearly halfway between both Kansas University, in Lawrence, and Kansas State University, in Manhattan.”

“The funniest part of it all was that the Kansas delega-tion took their proposal to Washington, D.C., in a station wagon or some sort of RV, while Texas took theirs by cavalcade,” Badger said. “It’s no wonder Texas won the bid.”

Texas did, in fact, win the bid for the funding from the U.S. government to build the world’s largest super col-lider, and construction began on the project nicknamed the “Desertron” in 1991, just south of Dallas near Waxahachie, Texas. Much to the delight of a select group of Osage County residents, Desertron never went online and just after one-third of

the project was completed, the U.S. government lost all interest. Some attest the halt in construction was a lack of funding after half of the $4 billion set aside for the en-deavor had already been used up. Others believe it was due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of techno-logical competition previously spurred by the “Cold War.”

Whatever the reason, Waxahachie, Texas, is now the proud owner of 15 miles of useless tunnels and several buildings historically occu-pied by vagrants and drug abusers. The tunnel was filled with water to maintain struc-ture and the buildings were recently privately purchased and refurbished to houses and construct oil drilling equipment.

In all appearances, it seems Osage County dodged a very fast bullet, but within remains the query of “what if.” If the Superconducting Super Col-lider had, indeed, been buried under Kansas soil and had been completed in the mid 1990s, as it was supposed to, one of two things would be fact. Either Vassar would now be home to the world’s longest roller coaster in their new theme park or Osage County would be the epicen-ter of the universe’s newest black hole. In theory, either scenario could possibly be the case.

Gary Rush/Herald-ChronicleImage of the plans for the proposed superconducting super collider campus on the southern end of Carbondale East Lake.

Gary Rush/Herald-ChronicleSite map of the proposed superconducting super collider that was to encom-pass Pomona Lake in Osage County.

Headed to Hutchinson

Katie McMurray/Herald-ChronicleThe Osage City Lady Indians are headed to the Class 3A State Basketball Championship March 12 at the Hutchinson Sports Arena after a sub-state win March 7 against Garnett-Anderson County, in Burlington. Teammates are, from left, front row, Sarah Allen-Custodio, Jordan Sage and Taylor Wes-sel; back row, Hayden Serna, Liz Devoll, Danni Kerns, Trista Anderson, Jenna Hastert, Hannah Jones, Sara Davis, Taylin Kirkpatrick and Greta Crawford. They play 3 p.m. Thursday (today) against Seneca-Nemaha Central. See page 11 for more information and photos.