First published in The Manhattan Mercury, November 1, 2006.

Strawn has enlightened vision for renewable energy resources

To the Editor:

Recently I had the opportunity to visit with Bob Strawn concerning his ideas, vision and technical and business-oriented plans for increasing the efficiency and use of the Kansas natural renewable resource base to develop alternate energy sources and bioproducts. With our renewable resource base, Kansas has the very real opportunity to be a national leader in each of these areas in terms of education, research, development, implementation and utilization.

Developing our renewable resources in a practical, prudent and sustainable fashion will help improve our domestic energy base as well as provide for environmental enhancement and offer localized and statewide economic development. I found Bob's breadth of understanding of the agricultural, economic and technical-research issues related to furthering renewable resource development to be right on target, and his suggested solutions to be practical and achievable. The fact that Bob essentially started his own bioproduct business from scratch after a career in the energy business and has been actively involved in the research, financial and managerial capacities of this business would undoubtedly be a tremendous asset to K-State and Kansas not only in this area, but also in others pertaining to taxation and education.

Without a doubt, we need and deserve good leadership in Topeka regarding development and use of our resources as we face a multitude of issues related to energy and the environment. It is my strong opinion that Bob Strawn has the right vision and plan to lead us in this area.

Richard Nelson
2825 Lawrence