The Kansas Health Foundation will have $3.5 million to distribute when it begins granting money for health testing related to the 29th and Grove chemical spill later this year. That’s thanks to several donations this week that helped clinch a time-limited funding offer from the state legislature.
Starting in June, the Kansas Health Foundation will open a grant portal to allow local health clinics to apply for funds. The funds are intended to be spent on equipment, testing costs and staffing that will build out the local testing capacity.
An advisory group of city and county officials, health care experts and community members will help guide the grant process. Applications will be considered over the summer before awards are announced in late August.
Funds will be distributed to clinics by late October.
For the past several months, questions have swirled around whether Wichita would be able to secure a $1 million contribution from the state legislature that was contingent on a local dollar-for-dollar match. The money would be on top of $1.5 million already committed by the Legislature, but fundraising had to be completed by the end of June.
The Kansas Health Foundation promised to contribute half of that goal, while the city of Wichita and Sedgwick County each decided to donate $125,000. That left a $250,000 gap.
This week, donations from the Wichita Foundation, Fidelity Bank, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, the Stand Together Foundation and Sunflower Foundation met the fundraising goal.
Local leaders said during a press conference at the Atwater Neighborhood Center on Friday that the fundraising was a milestone worth marking, but not the finish line.
“Many months of meetings and planning and raising support have brought us to this point of accomplishment,” Sedgwick County Commission Chair Ryan Baty said. “People in this community who fear the health effects of contaminated water will have options for testing long into the future.”
“But please know,” Baty added, “that we’re not done here.”
Baty and Wichita City Council member Brandon Johnson said that the last bit of funding was secured by demonstrating to local organizations a more “sustainable” plan than previous testing efforts.
The city of Wichita discovered groundwater contamination near 29th and Grove in 1994. Water and soil in that area was contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) which is used as a degreaser. It’s a carcinogen that has been linked to kidney, liver and blood cancers, among others.
In 1998, the state identified a Union Pacific rail yard as the source of the spill. Further investigation identified a two-mile plume of contamination stretching south from the rail yard.
In 2023, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment released the results of a health study looking at cancer rates and birth outcomes in an area around the spill. It found that there was a higher incidence of liver cancer and low-birth weights among people who lived in the study area than recorded in the county or state.
In late 2023, the Kansas Health Foundation gave $50,000 each to Hunter Health, GraceMed and HealthCore to lead education efforts for potentially affected residents. The foundation then made $400,000 available to cover testing for people who lived near the contaminated groundwater.
Less than a tenth of those funds were ultimately used to test 73 patients.
“We knew that we needed some type of plan that was going to be more inclusive than that, more sustainable than that going forward,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t just going to be screening and testing, it had to be something that would last for multiple years [and] serve a lot of people.”
Johnson said for local leaders, the goal wasn’t to come up with a solution for just the next year, but the coming years.
Teresa Lovelady, the CEO of HealthCore Clinic, said at the press conference that much of the work produced by the grant will be about building infrastructure within the local health care system “to make certain that nobody’s left behind.”
Lovelady said that the kind of testing required to monitor a patient that’s been exposed to the contamination is much more involved than a simple one-time, positive or negative test like a COVID test.
The city, county and Kansas Health Foundation signed a memorandum of agreement that covers the cost for different cancer screenings and testing methods like metabolic panels, urine tests and blood tests.
“We will set the protocols up within our systems to make certain we’re providing routine care to our patients and even if there’s something else that comes up, they are now connected to a health care provider,” Lovelady said.
Baty said that while the officials involved are dedicated to making sure that the residents and former residents of the 29th and Grove area get the full benefit of this funding effort, officials also hope they’re building something more enduring that can be modeled and mobilized for other environmental issues.
“The idea here is to build a system that can outlive the dollars and make sure that we’re serving those that are in the most desperate need,” Baty said.
