Street smart—street clearing and repair among top priorities for city manager

When Brian Platt began his tenure as city manager of the City of Kansas City, Missouri, in December, 2020, the two most frequent complaints he heard were that Kansas City can’t plow the snow and that the city is full of potholes.

Platt discussed how he has addressed those concerns at last week’s luncheon of the KC Downtowners, just a few days after Kansas City experienced its largest snowfall in 32 years.

Soon after Platt arrived in Kansas City, it snowed.

“I remember getting on a snow plow with someone who had been doing it for 20 years. Big truck. We met up at the command center, and we got a truck and went to go get some salt from the salt dome. . . . We’re driving through the parking lot and I see a row of 10 or 20 trucks covered in snow. Snow plows. And I’m asking, what are we doing with those? I’m told we don’t usually have enough drivers, but we’ve got all these trucks. . . . We’re driving around, and I’m hearing these stories about how we don’t really pre-treat the roads before the storms. We just kind of do one pass through neighborhoods. Just check the box for each neighborhood was the approach. Just send a truck down one time at some point and call it a day,” said Platt.

Platt recognized right away that there are several easy ways to change the snow removal procedure. He had many conversations with city staff about ways to get more drivers and more trucks without spending any additional funds.

“We found 100 more drivers week one,” he said.

Those drivers were city employees like health inspectors, building inspectors, and garbage truck drivers who are not otherwise on the roads during snowstorms. In an organization with 4,500 employees, Platt said it was easy to find 100 employees who already drove for the city. In addition, the city’s vehicle fleet had many pickup trucks on which the city could install a plow on the front, remove the bed, and install a salt spreader on the back.

“So we did that. We found 100 drivers and 50 trucks without really having to do anything,” said Platt.

With more manpower and trucks, Platt said the city is much more aggressive when it comes to snow removal. Two days before the recent snowstorm began, the city pretreated the roads using a magnesium chloride salt, which is much more

effective to melt ice when the temperature drops below 20 degrees than the calcium chloride rock salt used by many other jurisdictions.

In addition, snow removal is a 24-hour operation, with drivers working 12-hour shifts from days before the storm starts until everything is clear. The snow is plowed curb to curb rather than a single path the width of the plow blade.

Platt said the city instituted a digital route mapping system. Each plow is equipped with a tablet, which allows the city staff and the drivers to track how much of the city has been plowed and where.

“We’ve got 6400 miles of streets to take care of. We have 103 routes . . . that’s 60 miles a route. . . . You might miss a cul de sac. You might not get curb to curb everywhere, . . . but we’re going after it,” he said.

Platt said every neighborhood has the same priority.

The city also is trying to rebuild its fleet, Platt said. The city has 300 trucks in its fleet and 400 drivers in its system. Many of those trucks are 2023 and 2024 pickup trucks that easily convert to snow plows. No commercial driver’s license is required to operate them. In fact, Platt himself, as well as other department heads, have been out on the streets plowing in city-owned pickup trucks.

“As city leaders, we have to listen to the people of the city. A lot of what we do involves just hearing people out. And people in the city want to be heard. . . . That’s customer service. That’s just what we’re all about now,” Platt said.

With respect to tackling street repair, Platt said the city has made tremendous improvements since he started as city manager. Kansas City is paving “exponentially more” than it ever has.

“Rather than putting band-aids on all these potholes, we’re building new streets. We’re just going to redo them. Inevitably, if you’ve got a lot of potholes, that means the street is failing. It’s just not in good condition anymore,” he said.

Last year, Kansas City rebuilt 519 miles of streets. In the past three and one-half years, Platt said the city has rebuilt 1500 miles, which is 25 percent of the city’s streets.

Platt said the city added $10 million to the budget last year to tackle sidewalk repairs.

Platt addressed measures the city is taking to prepare for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The city is focused on making Kansas City look great.

“We’re going to focus a lot on business districts and places we think people are going to be traversing. . . . We want to not go too crazy and spend too much money building a bunch of things that, after the three months of the World Cup, we just don’t have anything to do with, which happens in a lot of places. . . . We don’t want to waste our money, but thinking about what are those things that we’re going to do to make our city look nicer,” he said.

One idea the city is pursuing is making improvements to the secondary corridor between Downtown and the stadiums, adding safe mobility lanes for bikes and scooters. In addition, there are plans to transform Yvonne Starks Wilson Park into a destination park with some FIFA relevance like mini pitches for soccer.

Platt also addressed Kansas City’s “visionary project” of creating a park over Interstate 670—the South Loop park, which he projects to break ground perhaps in March. He also expects that at least two of the four sections of the project will be completed for use by the World Cup, but likely not the full park.

Platt does not foresee the city tackling the North Loop in the next 10 years because there still is adjacent land housing surface parking lots that can be developed.

“Why would we make land for billions of dollars when we already have land that’s available to develop? Once all those surface lots get developed and we need more land Downtown and there’s a demand for it, then we can spend the money and do it that way because there’s a need,” Platt said.

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Header Image: Brian Platt addresses a group at the January KC Downtowners luncheon. Image credit: Marcia Charney

Panel unveils plans to add sparkle to KC’s crown jewel

When it opened in 1923, Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza was the first planned regional shopping center in the United States designed with parking to accommodate shoppers who traveled by car.

For a period from about 1905 to 1919, developer J.C. Nichols was assembling the land for the Country Club District, of which the Plaza was a part, according to Kate Marshall, president and founder of Plaza District Council. Marshall said Nichols was very focused on the Country Club District being trolley-centric.

Marshall was one of the speakers at last week’s luncheon hosted by CREW Kansas City to discuss future plans for the Plaza. Marshall was joined by panelists Aaron Mesmer, chief investment officer of Block Real Estate Services, LLC, and Mark O’Briant, COO of HP Village Partners, LP. Tyler Enders, founder and owner of Made in KC, moderated.

For its first 75 years, the Plaza was owned by J.C. Nichols Company. In 1998, J.C. Nichols Company merged with Highwoods Properties, a North Carolina-based real estate investment trust.

HP Village Partners, a Texas-based company with ties to the Hunt family (owners of the Kansas City Chiefs), recently purchased the Plaza from The Macerich Company and Taubman Centers, Inc., which acquired it in 2016.

The Plaza is often called Kansas City’s “crown jewel,” but as tenants have left and crime has climbed in recent years, the jewel has lost some of its luster. HP Village Partners seeks to polish it up and make it shine again.

O’Briant said HP Village Partners has been working to acquire the Plaza since the summer of 2023 when it was approached by the property’s lender.

“I think they saw us as the right operator. They saw the tenants that we bring, how we manage properties, how we operate properties and said this is really a good marriage, a good fit. . . . The problem is that through the 10 months - 12 months [before closing], the tenants started leaving,” he said.

O’Briant said HP Village Partners are legacy owners with no plans to sell the Plaza.

“So in 10 years, we’re still here. We’re not going to come in and fix it up and sell it off. Everything we do right now is to fortify the asset for the next 15, 20, 30 years,” he said.

O’Briant said no institutional money is involved with its Plaza ownership.

The CREW KC Panelists take questions from attendees regarding the future or the Country Club Plaza. Photo credit: Marcia Charney

“What we saw was something unique to Kansas City that we’re not bringing in a Wall Street firm offering institutional money. We’re teaming up with local people - it’s important that we share things with our neighbors. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much interest and excitement in buying real estate. This is not like real estate. This is truly like we’re coming into a community that wants to be involved and wants to help morph and transition this into something that’s really unique,” said O’Briant.

O’Briant said the first battle the new owners will fight is security because neither tenants nor customers will come to the Plaza until they feel safe.

He said they meet with the police regularly. There also have been meetings with the prosecutors and judges.

“You’ll start seeing now that we’re relighting the parking garages, restriping the parking garages. We’ve already started working on that. It’s brightening them up, lightening them up. Put more signs out, more cameras out,” he said.

HP Village Partners already has installed Flock Safety cameras, which are license recognition cameras, at some garage locations.

“Police can look for a certain car. If that car pulls in, it automatically notifies the police. They don’t have to look for them. They know they are in this garage,” said O’Briant.

“We need more police officers. Communication is really big. Communication with other owners in the area. . . Why are we not talking to each other, making the tenants more aware? We’ll have people come in and do personal training on how you can store your stuff or show your stuff inside your store so that it creates less of an opportunity for someone who’s just looking for an opportunity. There are little things that we can do, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to get more people to the Plaza,” he said.

O’Briant said it’s important to get more Plaza offices leased, and he has a little more than $2 million slated to create some spec suites.

“We need to get some office leasing going quickly, and that’s kind of a low-hanging fruit. We’ll start bringing in retailers. We’ll start bringing in restaurants,” he said.

With regard to the planned tenant mix, O’Briant said the new owners want local tenants who bring local flair along with a mix of national and luxury tenants. He said they’ve already met with many local chefs.

One of dozens of fountains found throughout the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Mo. Photo credit: Country Club Plaza

“We work with a lot of restaurants that are very unique places that you would drive 20 or 30 minutes to go eat at because it’s unique and different,” he said.

O’Briant said there are plans to reskin some of the buildings that don’t have the Plaza’s signature Spanish motif and to expand the sidewalks.

In addition, HP Village Partners will be tackling some capital improvements that have been neglected.

Although the improvements to the Plaza will take several years to complete, HP Village Partners plans to stick around.

“I think what you’ll see is a cleaner, nicer, healthier market, a more secure market and more vibrant market,” O’Briant said.

With plans to improve the Plaza underway, other investors will be undertaking more development in and around the Plaza.

According to Mesmer, during the last five to 10 years, it’s been harder and harder to make that investment.

“I think that today, though, what we’re seeing is that there’s a much greater level of civic support, whether it’s the mayor’s office, with the city staff helping to break down some of those barriers that make it a little more challenging to do business there than it might be in other municipalities. That’s a big change. But, really, for us, now that the Plaza has returned to someone with a long-term outlook, and someone who is going to be a generational owner of the Plaza, that is very much aligned with how we invest,” he said.

And, harkening back to the Plaza’s early days when trolleys transported people to and from the Plaza, the streetcar soon will be dropping off an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 people a day into the Plaza District.

“The streetcar is going to change everything,” Marshall said.

Header Image: The panelists at the CREW KC luncheon last week from left to right: Tyler Enders (moderator), Mark O'Briant, Kate Marshall and Aaron Mesmer. Photo credit to Elizabeth (Liz) Wampler.