By Rhys Baker

Grow Clay County has completed the production of a talent recruitment video. Director Natalie Muruato says the video’s production will also benefit attractions and organizations in Clay County, “As part of that, we were able to provide little snippets for the farmer’s market and the zoo, promotional videos for them, small little videos for them, and we’ll be sharing those out, providing those to the individual organizations we’re able to showcase and, again, to help promote our community. It’s not just about talent. It’s promoting all the great things that we have. But the goal is to bring people to fill the jobs we have open and show them our great quality of life.”

In addition to the talent recruitment video, Grow Clay County is coordinating various incentives for workers to move and live in Clay County, “We’re going to try and target maybe some of the larger cities to see if people would like, maybe a little bit slower pace of life, do the strategic placement of some of those videos or ads per se, you know, some in Nebraska, some in Missouri, kind of in the Midwest again. There’s also the ROZ program, which is a student loan repayment program, and the county helps participate. So the state pays half of the student loan repayment, and the county pays the other half for those people who move to our town from another jurisdiction.”

The ROZ program Muruato mentions is also known as the Rural Opportunity Zone program and is available as an incentive in 40 of the 105 Kansas Counties via the Kansas Commerce Department.