By Megan Moser
Matt Pivarnik, CEO of the Greater Topeka Partnership, was the final speaker of the day for Friday’s Regional Growth Summit, a day-long conference put on by the Manhattan, Junction City and Wamego chambers of commerce.
He and colleagues discussed combining Topeka and Manhattan — as well as Lawrence and possibly other cities — to form a bigger metropolitan statistical area (MSA). The benefit, they said, is showing a higher population to be able to compete for businesses and economic development projects or programs that might have a higher population cutoff than any of those cities has on its own.
He said he got the idea when he was traveling near Tucscon, Arizona, and drove to Nogales. He wondered what MSA Nogales was in and found that it was in Tucson’s.
