Hello, Kansas City, and welcome to this year’s State of the City Address. Today marks my fifth State of the City and this week, we will unveil this year’s budget for the people, which amounts to almost $2.3 billion to address city priorities.
I am proud today to be joining you at the Children’s Mercy Research Institute. Three years ago, Children’s Mercy Research Institute joined the heartbeat of our downtown community. Thank you, Children’s Mercy for hosting us today, Ms. Jodi Coombs for emceeing, and other Children’s Mercy Hospital executives and staff joining us in the audience, for leading this organization and ensuring our community is at the forefront of the most innovative and exceptional healthcare for our children.
Displayed on the outside of this building, when lit at night, are beautiful, colorful DNA sequences of those confronted with rare, challenging, but survivable diseases. The lights represent the hidden genetic codes scientists have to crack each day in order to find diagnoses and cures for childhood illnesses. Those lights give a sense of hope to those still looking for a cure and inspire Children’s Mercy researchers to continue their work to save and improve lives of thousands of patients each year. There is incredible, groundbreaking work happening inside this building at this very moment today and every day and we are grateful for each of you.
While different than the human body, myself and other leadership at City Hall work every day to improve our city’s health and “crack the code” in our community to find the best strategies and cures to solve issues, including housing insecurity and homelessness; blight and illegal dumping in our neighborhoods; disparities affecting our young people, like childhood asthma and gun violence; and disinvestment in many areas of our community. Cracking Kansas City’s genetic code plays a major role in how well our city functions and our quality of life, and we are here today because we have four more years to get it done and to ensure the DNA of Kansas City is strong, healthy, resilient, and successful for generations to come.
In this moment, Kansas City is on fire. 2023 was an exciting year. The Kansas City International Airport Terminal opened ahead of time and on budget and we continue to break passenger records and add more flight destinations for travelers. Continuing a dream that seemed unimaginable for many of us who grew up in Kansas City, the Chiefs will play in the Super Bowl for a fourth time in five years this Sunday. The eyes of the world will return to Kansas City this March, as the Kansas City Current bring a new and exceptional dedicated women’s professional sports facility to the Missouri River, cementing Kansas City’s role as a leader in sports access and equity for all. And in two years, Kansas City welcomes the world to town, hosting six Soccer World Cup matches, including one quarterfinal, bringing more investment, jobs, and visitors from around the world.
Events, large and small, make a financial difference for Kansas City. In the past year, Kansas City sold more than three million hotel room nights, generating more than $450 million in total room revenue to Kansas City businesses.
As we reflect on our successes today and set for the years ahead, it’s worthwhile to reflect on where we were four years ago. Just as we were taking down the banners of the first Chiefs Super Bowl parade in fifty years, we as a community, as a country, as hospitals, as schools, and as a City confronted the COVID-19 crisis. The very real human crisis led to immeasurable challenges to the City.
In late 2020, City Hall faced a $70 million budget shortfall, leading to the shuttering of vital city services, ongoing disrepair for our roads and infrastructure, and woefully low pay for our city employees. Consideration of mass layoffs and tax and fee increases were among the thoughts considered to address the crisis.
Growing up the child of a government worker, I knew we had to do better and the Council knew we had to do better… by our citizens, by our employees, and for the future of Kansas City. I remembered from my childhood that government budget cuts too often meant pain for worker’s families—fewer visits to the doctor for their kids; painful changes to retirement incentives for those who’d dedicated their lives to public service.
But, we made a commitment then—we would right our financial ship, not just for the temporary crisis, but also for the next generation. We would not then and we will not now hand fiscal, staffing, service delivery, and debt crises to the next mayor and Council. And, we will never turn our backs on the workers who keep our City going.
Today, I am proud to say we are in Kansas City’s strongest fiscal position ever, with a record high rainy-day fund balance, strong credit ratings, and we have reduced unnecessary spending, taking on fewer risky debt obligations and have improved the delivery of important city services across our community.
Throughout my lifetime, Kansas City and its mayors have often reflected a pendulum, and sometimes-dramatic shifts within it. At times, viewing development at all costs to be the priority of a community while at the next believing that our focus should be exclusively on reducing costs, limiting new development, and watching innovative peer cities and suburbs pass us by. To paraphrase a predecessor, a view that we’d “compete with Prairie Village, rather than Paris.”
My friends, I believe you can do both. Kansas City today is proving how successful we can be at delivering the basics our residents expect while building a City that is welcoming events, investment, and visitors from all over the world. The ‘Paris of the Plains’ can also get the basics right.
Due to our strong and responsible fiscal management over the past four years, Kansas City this year will purchase and deliver 170,000 trash carts to our residents in every single district, moving on from plastic bags on the curb, reducing dumping, and making our City cleaner. As an expectant father once more, I look forward to never again retrieving diapers stretched across the street after an adventurous animal explored the contents of a bag put out in the early morning hours. Our trash cart program follows the delivery of 162,000 recycling carts to Kansas City residents in the past year, reducing the waste going to our landfills.
Due to our strong and responsible fiscal management over the past four years, every single Kansas City employee will get a raise this year set to outpace the rate of inflation in 2024 to ensure we remain competitive as an employer and respectful of the work that thousands of our employees do each day.
Due to our strong and responsible fiscal management over the past four years, Kansas City will by the end of this year have funded through our new affordable housing trust fund more than 1,800 new units of housing, giving new homes to an estimated 4,000 Kansas Citians searching for attainable and affordable housing.
Due to our strong and responsible fiscal management over the past four years and the outstanding work of the Public Works Department, Kansas City has quadrupled since 2019 the number of street lane miles we resurface each year, reducing in the future the number of potholes that will form and allowing smoother and safer drives for all. We have also invested substantially in pedestrian and cyclist safety. No matter how you traverse our City, you deserve to be safe.
We are doing more than we have ever done before and we are doing it better than ever before.
Our City can walk and chew gum. We can grow and develop while taking care of our necessities.
We also can make sure that our growth and development touches all areas of the City, particular areas of east Kansas City where we have traditionally done far too little. In the past year, we have seen groundbreakings in areas I know well, like the 18th and Vine Jazz District, where the 2000 Vine project welcomes new businesses, including Missouri’s first Black-owned brewery and where the towering One Nine Vine Project, provides not only some of the City’s best views, but also hundreds of units of mixed income, including market rate, housing to East Kansas City. Several blocks away between Truman Road and 18th Street, the City is working actively with our federal government to preserve the Parade Park neighborhood, ensuring space and a right of return for all current residents, pledging to build hundreds of new units, and to keep the neighborhood mixed use, affordable, accessible to residents of all ages, and to maintain the history of one of the finest Black cooperative housing development our country has ever seen.
Further south, I joined my colleagues and the City Manager recently for a groundbreaking at the 63rd and Prospect Southpointe development. Most Kansas Citians under the age of 40 cannot remember a time when there has been development or even a physical structure at the northwest corner of 63rd and Prospect or new development on one of the most important arteries in our City between 55th and 63rd Streets. The next several years will usher in new housing, a hotel, and office development for southeast Kansas City in areas that have been overlooked for far too long. Before my term is done, we will see a new day in southeast Kansas City.
Developing our City, however, is not done through just building new structures. In the year ahead, the City, working with our federal partners, and the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council will dedicate $1 million to mitigate lead in soils of vacant properties in the Ivanhoe neighborhood and to prepare the property for use as infill housing. In the past year, the City planted more than 3,000 trees; rapidly approaching our goal of planting 10,000 trees by 2027 with the assistance of a $12 million grant we obtained to ensure we improve the environment and air quality in all of our City’s neighborhoods.
Recognizing that growth is important for our City also means we must find ways to make it easier to do business and attract talent in Kansas City. Last year, the United States Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration named Kansas City a “Tech Hub” for the biotechnology industry, unlocking more than $75 million in federal funding opportunities for our region. Opportunities like this one create thousands of high-paying jobs for our community in a growing industry.
We are also ensuring our small businesses have the opportunities and support they need to thrive. Last October, I appointed the Small Business Task Force, chaired by Councilman Wes Rogers and tasked with creating a strategic plan to help the City foster an inclusive and equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are committed to breaking down common barriers that are preventing small businesses from succeeding and ways the City can help—or simply get out of the way. The upcoming budget also provides funding once more to support small business and incentives for restaurants as we approach major events in the years ahead and restaurants look to expand seating capacity, add patio spaces, and make permanent many of the changes in outdoor dining seen in recent years.
To expand our businesses, Kansas City needs to attract talent, found both within Kansas City and our surrounds, as I call them, but also from around the country and world. Many will be immigrants, and many are already here. I was proud, late last year, to appoint the New Americans Commission to find ways to better support the growing community of immigrants and refugees living in Kansas City and organizations like Della Lamb and Jewish Vocational Services that work with them. Council, led by Mayor Pro Tem Parks-Shaw, is also working to improve language access, particularly when it comes to translating city services, documents, and meetings, so everyone can participate in local government and receive the resources they need. Our next budget addresses not only language access, but also ways we can ensure that those arriving anew in our community and perhaps our country can find work, education, and healthcare resources that will help them succeed while here. Kansas City does not control our nation’s immigration policy, however, for our humanity, our health, our safety, and to support our schools, we will make sure all present in our city—particularly children—have the resources, identification, and language access necessary to build a strong quality of life.
We also will continue to do all we can to ensure there is housing for all. Over the past four years and thanks to respectful prodding from many advocates, we have expanded the rights of renters, produced thousands of new housing units, incentivized thousands more, approved new development plans in the Northland and every part of our City, and seen our City’s population rise to its highest level ever. While we want to grow, we want to ensure people can stay. Part of tackling housing insecurity is ensuring renters are able to stay in their homes and have legal support when facing an eviction. Our Tenants’ Right to Counsel program, one of the first in the nation, continues to work to prevent evictions and keep people housed. Since the start of the program in June 2022, the Right to Counsel program was able to resolve more than 1,600 cases for a tenant-positive outcome. That’s more than 1,600 Kansas Citians who are now able to stay in their homes and off the street. We will propose in the budget an additional $800,000 to fund the current demand for right to counsel to ensure we continue to keep people housed.
We will also continue our work diligently to ensure the estimated 2,000 homeless Kansas Citians have a stable and safe place to lay their heads at night and ultimately are able to find homes off of our streets.
During the recent cold snap, we served more than 1,300 unique individuals, totaling almost 10,000 bed nights taking people out of dangerous winter weather and off our streets. There are differences on how we solve our homelessness issues, but I believe all agree that all deserve homes, support, and a pathway off the streets no matter where they live in our community.
Today we have…
Our highest City population ever;
Billions in expected development over the years ahead from the river to Brush Creek, including new ownership for the Country Club Plaza;
• Completion of Kansas City’s Streetcar expansion and evaluation of an east-west route linking the VA Hospital with KU Med;
• Thousands of new residential units and population growth in Kansas City, North;
• Resurgence of neighborhoods and focus on hard-to-do developments like Independence and Hardesty; the West Bottoms; and 63rd and Prospect;
• Last year, our Kansas City Fire Department welcomed the state’s largest and most diverse class of firefighters in history;
• Better pay and benefits for our workers;
• The best service delivery, such as snow removal, codes compliance, street resurfacing; and 311 responses in the City in at least my lifetime; and
• A Super Bowl and certain famous artists visiting us on the regular;
• This is an outstanding time to be in Kansas City and I am damn proud of who we are, what we have been through together, what we have accomplished, and where we go ahead.
The State of the City is strong and getting even stronger, but we have far, far more work to do.
A few months ago, I went to Grandview for the funeral of a teenage girl who had lost her life to homicide in our city. Amauri Hughes. She was, by all accounts, an amazing young person, with a beautiful voice, an enjoyable demeanor, a fun dancer, and a leader in her classroom at Grandview High School. She came from a good family. Mentored her siblings. Was involved in activities. But, became another life lost in a year and in a city where too many knew the same pain as those assembled in the church that day.
Around the time of her passing, I spoke to a teacher of hers who noted simply to me, “this is tough.” In Kansas City in 2023, far too many teachers likely said the same thing. Too many teens saw friends buried. Too many of us saw and knew lives lost.
More recently, I talked to a business owner about public safety and we talked about what we could do: Was it the guns? Was it the number of police? Was it early intervention programs for our young people? She had the right answer—it was all of the above.
In a City that has improved in almost every measurable way since 2020, violence remains our greatest challenge. Many of the programs discussed before—housing, equitable development, healthcare, addressing poverty—certainly will help reduce violent crime numbers, but so do some things that are simpler. We have to have enough police in this city. We have to have call takers who answer 911 when our residents call. We have to have services for those in crisis. We have to speak to our young people before they solve disputes with violence. And, we, as leaders and adults, have to show a path of collaboration in how we address our issues.
I sometimes joke with a heavy dose of truth that the February Chiefs Super Bowl Parade is the last thing from 2020 I like to remember. After that point, through pandemic and protests, we saw battle lines form that for years after defined how we would respond to our homicide epidemic in Kansas City and in other American cities. What many along the way forgot was that we are all on the same side. I never want to go to the funeral of a teenage murder victim again. Our police never want to work a preventable scene of tragedy again. We all want our families to be safe during a day out in Kansas City. Lawlessness and shoot-outs in the heart of our city have no justification and will never be tolerated.
In this year’s budget, we work to collaborate more than we ever have in my eight previous years in office. Our budget proposes the City fully fund Kansas City Police Department personnel and, indeed, exceeds the Kansas City Police Department’s submitted personnel budget request, proposing pay raises for all officers and a $15,000 or 30 percent increase in starting salaries from $50,000 up to $65,000 for Kansas City Police officers. In this year’s budget, we propose a hiring and retention incentive for all 911 call takers and dispatchers of $2,500 per employee and propose that incentive also be applied to all other civilian employees of KCPD.
I also call on my colleagues charged with managing the police department, those appointed by the Governor to the Board of Police Commissioners, to expeditiously complete the salary review of all positions and adjust 911 call taker and dispatcher salaries to among the top in our region, as we are proposing today with police officers, so that no one, ever in the future has to wait on hold when calling 911 and facing potentially one of the greatest emergencies in their lives. Police officers, call takers, and dispatchers have uniquely challenging jobs and their reward should be more than our thanks. Our budget proposes the most aggressive salary increase for police in more than a generation and we expect the Board of Police Commissioners to ensure money goes only to salaries, not contracts; to people, not professional services, and that we have removed any need for late-year budget transfers to cover other operational expenses.
Much has been said about legal and political debates over state-mandated funding and a lack of local control of police in Kansas City and no other major cities in Missouri or our country. And let me be clear, my view on the rightness and necessity of local control of policing, self-determination for Kansas Citians, and accountability to the people of our city, not appointees, remains. But, while our discussions can persist in courtrooms and legislative chambers, we have to provide all tools available to make our community safe. This year’s budget proposal for the police exceeds the state law mandated amount Kansas City is required to give police. This year’s budget proposal does not address long-term fiscal challenges that the City and the department must address in future years to ensure we control costs in our most expensive department. But, this year’s budget proposal recognizes the central role of the police in addressing our public safety crisis.
Our recommendation and my faith are based in no small part on my confidence in the woman leading our police department, Chief Stacey Graves. In little over a year, Chief Graves has shown a refreshing willingness to enter any room and consider any creative idea that will make Kansas Citians safer and will support the women and men of the Kansas City Police Department in so doing. I and we expect a lot from our police. I hope the City’s investment will help give them the resources they need as we all work together for safer streets. Thus far, we are at five homicides compared to fifteen at this point last year. I pray the current trend continues.
Ending gun violence also means stopping it before it starts. It’s why we continue to prevent dangerous people or youth from getting their hands on guns. Over the past year, we have passed legislation prohibiting the sale of bullets to minors and another banning the use of switches, which make guns much deadlier. We continue to also invest millions in violence prevention funding for community-based interventions and youth-focused programming to keep kids enriched during the summer and after school. This year, we are proposing to allocate $7 million out of our budget, dedicated to violence intervention and prevention. We are also continuing to bolster our Partners for Peace program, which reached more than 500 people impacted by shootings last year, giving them resources to heal and lead a successful life. We know that when people have their needs met, including safe housing, employment, and access to mental health and substance abuse support, they are less likely to engage in violent, deadly behaviors.
Last week, I visited with a group of about 50 primarily Black and Latina eighth grade girls from Kansas City, all just a few years younger than Amauri Hughes when she lost her life. We talked about their dreams—playing in the WNBA; becoming an accountant; moving to a big house; one even becoming mayor—and their concerns, Kansas City not having enough jobs; their neighborhoods not being a safe place for them or their family. In the budget we will announce tomorrow and in the policies we address each day, we are working to address their concerns and help them pursue their dreams.
Kansas City gave this child of Bellefontaine, Indiana, Troost, Askew, Paseo, Blue Ridge, 19th Street, and 350 a life beyond his wildest imagination. My simple dream today is that we make that a possibility for every young person in Kansas City. The DNA of this City, the underpinnings of this City, have us destined for even more greatness in the years ahead. Let’s continue to work to make it a reality for all.
Thank you for listening. May God bless you all.
