As Kansas City grapples with hotter summers, the city council on Thursday approved legislation to better protect renters during extreme heat.
The council passed two measures unanimously. One directs City Manager Brian Platt to develop a citywide emergency response plan for tenants experiencing life-threatening situations in apartment buildings. The other tweaks the city’s Healthy Homes law to require landlords to notify the city of an HVAC outage.
4th District-at-Large council member Crispin Rea sponsored both in response to elderly tenants losing air conditioning at Westport House Apartments in June.
“It put seniors and disabled folks in the building at risk during a time while we were experiencing pretty extreme heat temperatures,” Rea said.
Residents at Westport House had no air conditioning for five days during Kansas City’s first intense heat wave of the summer. City officials first heard about the outage through political canvassers, and responded by sending city buses to act as cooling centers, providing fans and having emergency medical services and health department staff conduct wellness checks on residents.
“While I greatly appreciated that response, what I did not like was the informal way in which we were notified,” Rea said.
The change to Healthy Homes mandates a landlord to notify the city of an HVAC outage that lasts more than 12 hours, which can include broken air conditioning. It applies to multi-unit apartment buildings like Westport House.
Rea said the 12 hour timeframe will give landlords time to assess whether they can fix the problem before reporting it to the city.
Landlords are already required under Healthy Homes to notify the city of a “life-threatening violation” that includes a “fire, flood, extended interruption of electrical or water service, sewage backup, gross insanitary occurrence or condition, or other circumstance that may endanger health.”
The city council directed Platt to develop the emergency response plan and present it to city council within 90 days. The resolution says the plan should include a reporting mechanism for landlords and tenants to notify the city of a life-threatening situation.
Neither Missouri nor Kansas City require air conditioning in rental housing, though state and local law requires landlords to provide heating for tenants. The city’s Healthy Homes Rental Inspection Program does not explicitly mandate landlords to provide air conditioning.
Healthy Homes law states that any appliances provided by a landlord, which can include air conditioning, must be in good working condition.
The city council passed another resolution, also sponsored by Rea, that directs Platt to develop heat safety regulations for city employees who, by nature of their job, are exposed to extreme heat. The regulations would be triggered by the heat index.
“We're talking about our Public Works employees who are riding on the backs of trash trucks or filling potholes,” Rea said. “We're talking about water department employees who are fixing water main breaks. We're talking about parks employees who are out cutting the grass in our parks in the heat.”