The Sentinel is pleased to announce it has won four awards in the 2026 Kansas Press Association’s “Awards of Excellence” contest.
The Awards of Excellence is an annual event celebrating the best stories and advertising content by publications in Kansas for the previous year.
This year, The Sentinel will bring home four awards for its editorial content from the Kansas Press Association Convention on June 4-5.
Reporter Patrick Richardson was awarded first place, Division VII (for publications with a readership of 5,601 or above) for his news story on retaliation by the Montgomery County Commission against County Clerk Ami Standridge.
Standridge, at the Sept. 29, 2025, regular commission meeting, explained to Montgomery County Commissioners that when they voted to raise taxes after closing the Revenue Neutral Rate hearing earlier that month, and without passing the required resolution during the hearing, the tax increase was therefore unlawful, and the commission would have to pass a revenue-neutral budget before the Oct. 1 deadline.
The commission, one day later, passed a revised revenue-neutral budget, but they cut more than $38,000 from Standridge’s budget, while increasing others, some of which were substantial.
Dave Trabert, CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute — which owns The Sentinel — took two second-place awards for a pair of editorials.
The first took the Kansas House Tax Committee to task for attempting to repeal the “Truth in Taxation” legislation passed by the Kansas Legislature in 2021.
Trabert said the Kansas revenue-neutral law is seen as “the gold standard of property tax reform.”
“Rather than pressure local officials to not raise property tax, HB 2396 would reward them if the tax increase does not exceed inflation plus taxes from new construction, which combined can easily exceed a 5% increase,” Trabert wrote. “The bill recreates a version of the Local Ad Valorem Tax Reduction Fund (LAVTRF) with $60 million set aside to ‘reward’ cities and counties that don’t exceed the threshold.”
Calling it a “master class of political spin and deception,” his second editorial blasted the Kansas State Department of Education for pretending state testing standards had not been lowered when testing results showed they had.
“Board members were given the 2025 state assessment results based on a new test and cut scores to determine achievement levels, and were told to ignore conflicting historical results and accept the new numbers as gospel,” Trabert wrote. “For example, the percentage of 8th-grade reading proficiency more than doubled, jumping from 22% last year to 46%.
“The only plausible explanation for the miraculous turnaround is that the new test is easier, standards are lower, or some combination of the two. We don’t know if the new test is easier (the public isn’t allowed to see the questions), but KSDE did say the test has fewer questions. KSDE insists that the new cut scores that determine performance are just as rigorous as before, but that is hardly believable. The magical improvements seem akin to changing the grading scale for an “A” from 90-100 to 70-100.”
Sentinel Reporter David Hicks also takes home a third-place award for his piece on the “financial boondoggle” of the Ivanpah solar project.
When it went online in 2014, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert was the largest solar facility on Earth. The plant, which features three 459-foot towers and thousands of computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats, cost some $2.2 billion to build.
When it closes next year, some 13 years ahead of schedule, the victim of newer, less expensive, and more efficient technology, the lost investment of the $2.2 billion, ($1.6 billion in federal loan guarantees) will dwarf the other failed, high-profile Green New Deal initiative, Solyndra, which went bankrupt in 2011; that California project taking $535 billion of taxpayer money with it. The U.S. Department of Energy funded both projects during the Obama Administration.
Hicks related the failure of Ivanpah to large-scale solar projects planned for Kansas, which, while they use a different technology, will replace large areas of productive farmland with acres of solar cells. There are also questions about the effect on the property values and rights of landowners surrounding such projects.
Trabert thanked the Kansas Press Association for the recognition.
“The common theme among our award-winning articles and editorials is holding government accountable. That is the Sentinel’s mission, and we’re honored to have our work recognized by our colleagues in journalism,”
