Republican and former Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer spoke to KMAN Tuesday about former Lt. Gov. Tracey Mann’s bid to represent Kansas’s 1st Congressional District in this year’s election amid the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Colyer, if Mann is elected, Kansas will be getting someone who is not in favor shutting down businesses.
“He wants to make sure you have good testing and tracing, but it’s important that we get the economy going,” Colyer said. “We’re going to have to live with this. We can and we can accommodate that.”
One area of testing Colyer would like to see improved is the time in which it takes results to be returned to patients, which in some cases can take one to two weeks.
“It’s really worthless if it’s more than 48 hours after you get the test because now you’re in a whole new environment,” Colyer said. “If you were positive, after two or three days, it’s very hard to go back and trace.”
As for how schools have responded to the pandemic, Colyer says there shouldn’t necessarily be a one-size-fits-all approach since each school district is dealing with a different set of circumstances.
“We have some counties that have had five cases or no cases at all and then we’ve had other counties where we’ve had a big breakout,” Colyer said, “Those require different solutions.”
After Colyer took over as Kansas’s governor in 2018 following former Gov. Sam Brownback’s resignation, he appointed Mann as his lieutenant governor.
Colyer and Mann lost to Kris Kobach and Wink Hartman in the 2018 governor primary.
Among the candidates Mann is facing off against in this year’s Republican primary are Bill Clifford, Jerry Molstad and Michael Soetaert.
Mann is currently endorsed by a variety of groups, including the Kansas Farm Bureau, Kansans for Life and the National Rifle Association.
Colyer says he can see Mann taking over as the chair of the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee if elected.
Mann is from Quinter, KS, and currently lives in Salina, where he has worked as a commercial real estate agent.
Colyer’s full interview with KMAN can be found below.
