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With the opening of Panasonic's $4 billion electric vehicle battery plant just months away, the city of De Soto is making improvements to prepare for the influx of new jobs, traffic, and industrial growth.
In 2022, Panasonic announced it would build an EV battery facility in De Soto, marking what is now considered the largest economic investment in Kansas history. The plant is expected to employ around 4,000 people when it opens in the spring.
With the announcement came $250 million in public infrastructure money. One of the projects that used the funds was a major street upgrade designed to better connect the plant to K-10.
The city is also enhancing its water systems, with a new water tower being constructed and upgrades to both water and sewer treatment facilities currently underway.
“A lot of those projects would’ve happened eventually; it would’ve been a much slower timeframe,” said De Soto Mayor Rick Walter. “We knew we needed to make improvements to our water treatment plant, and we have been headed down that path so incrementally we were doing projects as we could afford. A project like Panasonic allowed us to have that happen in a lot shorter timeframe.”
De Soto is contributing $2 million of the nearly $250 million toward road work, with the remaining funds coming from the state, county, and Panasonic.
Other projects include a new fire station, fire truck, and the city council recently passed a $3 million project to renovate City Hall.
“We’re out of room here at City Hall. It’s an old school building built in 1918, so renovations will essentially make more office space available,” said Mike Brungardt, De Soto’s City Administrator.
Panasonic’s plant will occupy only 300 acres of the 9,000-acre site owned by the Sunflower Redevelopment Group. Walker and Brungardt are optimistic that the area could evolve into a major manufacturing hub in the coming years.
