It all began in 1978 as an organization known as “Kan-U-Dig-It”, a small call center located in the Southwestern Bell Telephone office in downtown Wichita, serving only the City of Wichita area. In the beginning, there were only four member utilities that had underground facilities in the City of Wichita. During the early 1980’s, the Department of Transportation’s Office of Pipeline Safety began to encourage/require that all interstate pipelines either join or create a notification center to accept notices of intent to excavate. These companies, along with several telecommunications companies, approached the original four members about creating a single statewide notification center for the State of Kansas. Committees were formed and seed money was raised to hire an attorney to fill out and file all of the necessary paperwork to create a corporation (Kansas One-Call System, Inc.), by-laws, IRS Not-for-Profit status, and create an RFP for call center operations. Academy Computing out of Oklahoma City was hired as the first operator of the call center. Within the first year of operation, Kansas One-Call grew from four members to over ninety members.
