Ottawa, Kansas, a small highway town about 50 miles southwest of Kansas City, is getting a set of fast-charging stations for electric vehicles at the Love's Travel Stop on East 27th Street, funded by an $892,496 federal grant through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program.
The money comes from the NEVI Formula Program, created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build a national EV charging network and address what planners call "range anxiety", the fear of running out of charge between stops. Kansas received roughly $40 million in total NEVI funding over five years, and the state's Department of Transportation has been working through a federally approved deployment plan that prioritizes filling gaps along Interstate corridors. Ottawa's placement on I-35, directly between Kansas City and Wichita, makes it a logical link in that chain. Federal rules require chargers to be spaced no more than 50 miles apart along designated corridors, with at least four 150-kilowatt DC fast chargers at each site, powerful enough to add significant range in the 20 to 30 minutes it takes to grab food or use the restroom.
The Love's partnership reflects how the NEVI rollout has worked nationally. The Oklahoma City-based chain, with over 640 locations, has become one of the most active private-sector recipients of NEVI grants, offering highway-adjacent real estate and existing traveler amenities that satisfy program requirements.
For Ottawa itself, a city of roughly 12,800 where Kansas registered EVs number only in the low tens of thousands statewide, the immediate beneficiaries will largely be through-travelers heading between Kansas City, Wichita, and points south into Oklahoma and Texas, not necessarily local residents. The city's median household income sits around $48,000, below the national average, and Franklin County voted for Donald Trump by roughly 40 points in 2020.
That political backdrop matters. The Trump administration has shown skepticism toward federal EV subsidies, and the NEVI program faced criticism even before the current administration for a sluggish rollout: by early 2024, only a handful of stations had opened nationwide despite years of funding. The fact that this grant was posted in April 2026 suggests Ottawa's project survived any funding disruptions, but the broader program's trajectory remains uncertain.
Construction and installation timelines have not been publicly detailed. Once the Ottawa chargers open, drivers on one of the busiest north-south corridors in the middle of the country will have a new option for topping off, whether or not many of their neighbors in Franklin County are plugging in yet.
