When the Colby City Council met to discuss a new STAR bond project on Oct. 7, 2025, they had to vote on the proposal without seeing the full feasibility study done by the Kansas Department of Commerce.
This is because Commerce requires governing bodies to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to receive the entire study. If they decline, they’re given a summary.
Colby City Manager Ron Alexander told The Sentinel in a phone interview that he declined to do so because he was uncomfortable with the requirement.
“My philosophy on that was, if we get our hands on this, and I’m going to be tied to not being able to discuss anything that’s in it, I don’t want to get myself in trouble, or any of my council members,” he said. “If the state produces a feasibility study at some point, it needs to be public record. Why would we hide that?”
Colby is looking to establish a Sales Tax and Revenue — or STAR — Bond district that would include an equestrian arena, multi-use sports facility, and additional hotel space, just off Interstate 70.
The Sentinel asked Commerce for a copy of the feasibility study and was refused.
“It is the position of the agency that until STAR Bonds are issued, the KORA exceptions under K.S.A. 45-221(a)(20). and K.S.A. 45-221(a)(31) would apply,” Department Spokesman Patrick Lowry said. “Once the project is approved or denied, then the records would become public.”
Max Kautsch, an attorney who works with government transparency issues, took exception to that line of reasoning.
“Even if refusing to disclose the feasibility study may not technically violate KORA, given the disconcerting breadth of the exception shielding records related to an agency’s internal decision-making, it is nonsensical for the department to exercise its discretion to withhold a document of significant public interest now that the project proposal is in its final stages,” Kautsch said. “How can the community or its leaders consider the plan without knowing what it says? The department should reconsider its decision to keep the study under wraps because the public interest in the document far outweighs any state interest in keeping it secret.”
The Sentinel last week filed a request under the Kansas Open Records Act asking for all such NDAs that had been fully executed within the last two years.
Commerce refused to provide any records.
Commerce Department Attorney Brian Deiter said under state law, an agency “is not required to disclose any records when specifically prohibited by another Kansas statute.”
Additionally, he said, state law says “no information shall be disclosed by the secretary of commerce … if such disclosure would … violate the confidentiality provisions of any agreement executed before July 1, 2025.”
He also said it is illegal to disclose a feasibility study prior to the issuance of bonds.
“I would also note that our agency is statutorily precluded from disclosing any records where disclosure would likely ‘be detrimental to the development of a STAR bond project or jeopardize an economic development incentive program or project,'” Deiter said. “Given the highly confidential and proprietary nature of the information contained in them, this statutory provision generally prohibits disclosure of feasibility studies prior to bond issuance.”
The problem with this line of reasoning is that neither governing bodies nor the public is able to know if a project is likely to succeed until it is too late.
Dave Trabert, CEO of Kansas Policy Institute and The Sentinel, believes the Legislature should require feasibility studies to be made public before any votes can be taken.
“The pubic has a right to know the details of a project, including the degree to which it is feasible, who will benefit, and any potential cost to taxpayers, before votes are cast to approve a project. Government-conducted feasibility studies are notoriously shaded in favor of approval to justify subsidies, which in turn create ‘look what we did’ opportunities for government officials. If subsidy applicants don’t want the project to be open for public disclosure, they should not seek public support.”
Commerce Department’s continuing history of opacity
This institutional opacity is nothing new for the Commerce Department, which routinely tries to hide what is going on with taxpayer money.
The Americans for Prosperity Foundation — Kansas has been forced to sue over routine KORA requests involving STAR Bonds in the past, and what data they were able to obtain showed a startling lack of oversight over the program.
Moreover, it’s not clear that the department even knows how many grants it has awarded.
Indeed, just about a year ago, The Sentinel sent a KORA request for the number and dollar amount of grants it had awarded for the previous decade.
Nearly a month-and-a-half after filing the request, Commerce Department Attorney Samuel Blasi responded, denying the request entirely — and pointing the Sentinel at their “transparency database.”
That was in October 2024, but just two months later, the Kansas Department of Legislative Post Audit found that the database was out of compliance with state law.
Commerce is responsible for developing and maintaining the database, which includes information on programs—like certain tax credits—administered by other state agencies, such as the Kansas Department of Revenue.
What Post Audit found was that, in many cases, the database is out of compliance with state law.
Indeed, auditors said 13 of 60 programs they expected to find were missing from the database.
“In total, 13 of the 60 incentive programs (22%) we evaluated were absent from the database because they were missing from the program list, the recipient table, or both,” the report reads. “These included programs such as the Fire Marshal Tax Credit and the Economic Development Initiatives Fund.”
Post Audit specifically looked for the controversial STAR bond program, which the agency had audited before, and found it was not included in the database despite the law requiring it to be included by name.
“In the case of the STAR bonds program, statute specifically requires that information about STAR bonds be included in the database,” the auditors said in the report. “When we conducted our review, the STAR bonds program did not have any records in the recipient table. However, after our work was complete, we noticed the database homepage included separate buttons that took users to a STAR bonds overview page and a static PDF. That PDF contained a list of projects with certain information, such as principal officers. However, STAR bonds still lacked other statutorily required information, such as program history. Because it was not contained in the database, we did not evaluate it further.”
