Highlight Kansas City projects
HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS
While Kansas City’s housing affordability and homelessness crisis have existed for years, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the challenges faced by our residents. After improving coordination with homelessness outreach teams and opening the largest winter emergency warming facility in the Midwest during the pandemic, Kansas City is pursuing bold and innovative permanent solutions to resolve homelessness and provide more affordable housing. This includes creating a living wage jobs program (CleanupKC) for people living in homeless shelters, converting a hotel into transitional and supportive housing for the homeless, and creating a new Housing Department that includes the City’s first Tenant advocate, the 13th city in the United States with a Right to Counsel program, and the City’s first Homelessness Prevention Coordinator. Kansas City’s Right to Counsel program has also already prevented hundreds of evictions and likely kept hundreds of individuals and families from being homeless in the first place!
Streets: street resurfacing, potholes, and snow removal
Last year a record 469 miles of city streets were resurfaced in Kansas City, more than 3.3 times the historic rate. The City is using new image analysis technology to determine pavement quality, and it is also seeking more resident engagement to help identify priorities. Stronger street excavation rules are extending pavement life and limiting future potholes and other quality issues. The City has also dramatically improved the snow removal operation by adding 100 additional drivers and 50 additional snow removal vehicles, utilizing a new type of snow melting product called “Ice Ban” that works better in colder temperatures, expanding residential street plowing to 24 hours a day, and creating a more proactive pre-treatment of roads before storms arrive.
sustainability: LED streetlights, 100% electric municipal vehicles, planting 10,000 trees, and New renewable energy sources to power the city
Kansas City adopted a regulation in the summer of 2021 requiring all new municipal vehicles to be zero emissions and 100% electric power. The City is also underway converting all of the 90,000 streetlights to more efficient LED bulbs that will save the City over $5 million each year in energy and maintenance costs plus reduce emissions by the equivalent of taking 6000 cars off the road each year. The City is also on track to plant 10,000 trees over 3 years. But perhaps the most exciting sustainability project on the horizon the construction of a solar array at the airport that when complete, could provide up to 500 MW of solar panels- enough to power 70,000 homes, as much as one third of the entire city!
Diversity and equity
Kansas City recently hired the City’s first ever Chief Equity Officer (also the first in the entire Midwest) that will be tasked with building a work environment that is not only inclusive and supportive of our diverse employees but also our many diverse communities. A reimagined Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity Office (CREO) with new leadership and stronger oversight and support for MWBE’s is resulting in more participation of minority and women owned businesses. The most recent Firefighters contract (Local 42) included revisions and new policies that unwind from possibly discriminatory and unequal treatment of employees. The City also has implemented some of the most progressive legislation in the Midwest to support the LGBTQ community, including expanding our employee healthcare policy to include gender reassignment treatments and procedures, an all-gender bathroom policy, and additional support for LGBTQ owned businesses.