Pittsburg, Kansas

4 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 7 P I TTSBURG, KANSAS its economy. “Over the years since I’ve been here, the economy of the town has kind of moved away from dependence on the university,” Byers admits. “It used to be the standard thought that ‘as the university goes, so goes Pittsburg’. That link still matters, of course. The university is our biggest employer and it’s certainly an engine of activity for the town, but it’s less crucial how the university does in terms of the wellbeing of the economy here in town.” Now, the city’s major economic drivers run the gamut from education to steel work. “If you look at the ways you can identify economic diversity on a scale of zero being not diverse and diverse as 100, we would score in the 90s in terms of range of businesses,” Byers explains. “We have the headquarters for the largest short line railroad, Watco, in the country here. They are literally doing almost a billion dollars’ worth of business. We have one of the largest photo processing companies in the world here, MPIX, a division of Miller’s Professional Imaging. If you’ve ever had any photos processed online that you got in the mail, they were probably done here.” The city also has a unique range of metal fabrication operations. “If you’re familiar with the Las Vegas Raiders and their stadium in Las Vegas, a majority, if not all the steel used to build that structure was fabricated here in Pittsburg,” says Quentin Holmes, Pittsburg’s Director of Community Development. Education still remains prominent, with the school district and the university providing a large number of jobs to the area. “Now we have a really diverse economy that has allowed us to weather the economic ups and downs over the years,” Byers says. “I think our diversity has been a real strength.” Pittsburg’s population, which had stalled under 20,000 for almost a century, has recently seen an uptick. With that increase has come a need