When he started as the city manager of the City of Kansas City, Missouri on December 7, 2020, Brian Platt faced a $70 million budget gap, mostly due to COVID and reductions in taxes generated from lack of business for hotels, restaurants and conventions.
During the January KC Downtowner’s virtual event last week, Platt shared the efforts to reduce costs and City services, including how his team closed the budget gap without furloughs or staff layoffs and without reducing essential services.
Platt’s successes include restructuring City departments and renegotiating leases and contracts to which the City is a party. When he started his job, Platt found an audit report on his desk that revealed that the City Hall had 100 open offices and desks, yet the City was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars leasing office space for City employees in other parts of the city.
“So that’s an example of a way that maybe we can cut some costs and move those people out of those rented office spaces and into a building that we already own and pay for,” said Platt.
One of the areas on which Platt has focused spending is street resurfacing. Platt said the city is on pace this fiscal year (which runs from May 1 to April 30) to resurface 300 lane miles of streets; however, the City has 6000 lane miles of streets, so there is still much work to do, he said.
Snow removal is another area in which the City is investing heavily. The City now pretreats roads and runs a 24-hour-a-day snow removal operation.
“We are being more aggressive with our plowing and making sure we are plowing curb to curb, and that was also not the case. And we're trying to use new types of technology to improve our service delivery here,” Platt said.
The new technology includes turn-by-turn navigation. Each plow has a tablet that sends back data in real-time to a central desk which tracks the progress of the plow operation.
In addition, the City added 100 snow plow drivers, without adding to the City’s payroll. Instead, the City now uses existing employees who are already trained and driving trucks the size of the snow plows.
“So depending upon the time of day and what’s happening, we’ve got all those drivers now in the mix helping with the snow removal team,” Platt said.
Although the lack of affordable housing was an issue pre-pandemic, Platt said the pandemic exacerbated the need.
“We've got to make sure that we're being supportive of everyone's needs. So we've got a goal over the next five years or so, to build 10,000 new affordable housing units or preserve existing affordable housing. That's a very ambitious and aggressive goal,” said Platt.
The City just completed converting a 40 room hotel into transitional housing for the homeless and is in the process of finalizing a deal for a 100 room hotel that will be converted into true affordable housing owned by the Housing Authority of Kansas City, Missouri.
Schools are another option for conversion into affordable housing, and the city is in discussions with the Kansas City Public Schools; however, schools require a lot more work, construction, and retrofitting than hotels to turn them into housing, Platt said.
The City also is investigating whether it can turn the 3000 vacant lots owned by the Land Bank of Kansas City, Missouri into single-family affordable housing.
“They're blighted and they may have a lot of environmental issues on them. And so we're hoping that we can start to develop those 3000 lots, not only to clean up the mess and eliminate the blight but also to create meaningful housing options for people and to rebuild some of the holes in some of our communities across the city,” said Platt.
Kansas City also is pursuing efforts to create a more sustainable city operation, which, Platt said, will provide both cost and health benefits.
He said the City is moving toward a fully electric vehicle fleet and has adopted a rule that every new city vehicle must be electric if there is an option available.
Last week, the Kansas City City Council approved a contract to convert all of the City’s streetlights to LED. Platt said this will save the City millions of dollars each year in energy and maintenance costs.
Platt said the City also is exploring ways to get energy solely from renewable green energy sources. Currently, the City is conducting a feasibility study regarding the installation of a solar farm at Kansas City International Airport that could have the potential to power most of the homes in Kansas City.
“There's a big potential to do something transformative out there when it comes to sustainability, reducing energy costs for our residents, reducing air pollution and creating a more resilient energy grid there,” he said.
Diversity and equity are other of Platt’s priorities, and the City is in the process of hiring its first chief equity officer.
Platt said that new development in downtown Kansas City will be a focus for the next year. He hopes next year at this time to be able to tout five or 10 new downtown area developments that have been approved or broken ground.
At the event, Stan Meyers, president of the KC Downtowners and client development manager at Terracon, recognized Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, as the 2021 Jim Davis Award recipient. KC Downtowners established the Jim Davis Award in 2009 to honor a prominent downtown contributor.
“The story of the Negro Leagues is an American story, and as you said, it’s told by Kansas Citians really. It’s inspirational that you and your team are keeping that memory alive because it has such resonance for us all today,” said Meyers.