The Kansas City Council has passed the city’s largest budget after months of planning and debate.
Budget increases are relatively normal; the city’s budget has increased by hundreds of millions of dollars each year. But this fiscal year’s planning document defies that pattern.
The proposed budget is about the same amount as last fiscal year, as the city works to fix its projected deficit. The city is not in an immediate funding crisis, but expenses are rising while revenue growth has slowed. That combination means a tighter budget this year, with only a few budget amendments adding to categories like police, transit and infrastructure projects.
The $2.6 billion budget will guide the city as it prepares to welcome people for the World Cup in just a few months while simultaneously fulfilling the everyday needs of its residents.
This budget will also bring Mayor Quinton Lucas into the last year of his term. He said the city can “walk and chew gum” with big projects and everyday necessities. Lucas also said he’s proud of the 2026-27 budget because it fulfills a promise he had for his time in office: “you're not going to see us going broke.”
“I am proud that through the pandemic, through challenges, through what seems to be a pre-recession environment right now, this city, despite what people try to say, just passed a budget with a strong rainy day fund and a strong position giving employees pay raises and increases,” Lucas said. “Are we tightening our belt? Absolutely, just like any American family or business will do, but Kansas City is in a strong position as, yes, it hosts a World Cup, but it takes care of a whole lot of people in ways we didn't used to.”
Here’s a look at how the city is spending money in categories residents consistently rank as the most important to them, and how that budget has compared to previous years.
Police
Police funding is one of the only areas that saw a major increase since last year’s budget. The city, which, along with St. Louis, is one of the only major cities that lacks control over its own police department, ultimately gave about $364.5 million to police.
Missouri law requires that Kansas City allocate at least 25% of its general revenues to the police department, even though the city does not control how that money is spent. The Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, which includes four members appointed by the Missouri governor and the city’s mayor, controls that money once it’s appropriated.
The city’s $364.5 million budget for police is millions more than the state requires for funding. It’s also about $19.5 million more than last year, which set its own record for most police spending ever.
The Kansas City Law Enforcement Accountability Project, or KC LEAP, issued a statement after the budget was passed, condemning the increase in police spending. The group said the city’s continual increases in the department’s budget without accountability measures “doubles down on the very system producing the harm.”
“Increasing funding without structural reform is not an investment in public safety—it is an endorsement of the status quo,” KC LEAP said in the statement. “Kansas City residents are now being asked to pay more for the same outcomes: preventable violence, avoidable deaths, and growing legal liabilities. A department with one of the highest rates of police-involved killings in the country has been rewarded, not required to change.”
Transportation
Kansas City is giving the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority $83.8 million for buses and the city’s rideshare program, IRIS. The city originally proposed giving the KCATA the same budget allocation as last year, which would actually amount to less due to inflation.
That $6 million increase from last year’s budget came after the KCATA said it would have to cut about one-third of its routes without more money from the city. Activists packed the city’s budget hearings to demand that the city give more for transit.
The $83.8 million should be enough to stop some of the cuts, but not all of them. The KCATA said it needed about $16 million more to fully fund Kansas City’s current routes and service levels.
During a city council meeting, council member Johnathan Duncan attempted to divert some KCPD funding to bus service.
“It is a policy choice to fund the KCPD $20 million over the state mandate while we cut bus service and leave people stranded,” Duncan said. “We know robust public transit reduces crime. For every dollar that we reduce in public transit, we increase the likelihood of criminal activity, we increase the likelihood of crime, we decrease the ability for people to access jobs and economic prosperity.”
Ultimately, the city council rejected Duncan’s budget amendment. The only other vote in favor was from council member Eric Bunch, who also serves on the KCATA’s board of commissioners.
The city has also steadily increased its funding for the KC Streetcar, which is getting more than $34 million this year. That’s about $2 million more than it got last year, when it opened the long-awaited extension from Union Station to the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The streetcar authority aims to open its next extension, to the riverfront, before the World Cup.
Housing and community development
Lucas has touted the city’s investment in housing, like building 10,000 units of affordable housing and enacting the tenant’s right-to-counsel program, as one of his biggest successes as mayor.
The city’s $56.5 million for housing and community development includes nearly $28 million for affordable housing development and preservation, $5 million for year-round emergency homeless shelters and homelessness prevention and $2.6 million for the right-to-counsel program. The city also recently began its Housing Gateway Program, which will invest $1 million to expand the housing stock and help with chronic homelessness.
That funding is only a slight increase from last year, mainly going toward the city’s homeless population and to rehabilitate housing.
Though the funding for housing and community development has remained stable, the city could gut its affordable housing policy under an ordinance being considered by the city council. The proposal would roll back some of the city’s affordable housing rules by slashing the fee that it requires developers to pay for affordable housing units when receiving public funds.
“Kansas City does not lack development,” KC Tenants, the citywide tenants union, said in a statement opposing the change. “It lacks housing that people can actually afford. Ordinance 26086 does nothing to make housing more affordable. It allows developers to benefit from public support without supporting what the public actually needs — truly affordable homes.”
Infrastructure
Sidewalks and infrastructure improvements, along with public safety and transportation, consistently rank as one of residents’ highest priorities for the city.
Kansas City will spend nearly $240 million on public works infrastructure. That includes waste management, road maintenance and repaving, streetlights, sidewalks and traffic signals.
That includes $4 million for Vision Zero, the city’s effort to end traffic fatalities by the end of the decade. The city also plans to resurface about 300 miles of roads through its nearly $40 million budget for road maintenance.
The city council approved an amendment to add more money for road maintenance. Even so, the public works budget for infrastructure was cut by about $18 million this year, one of the area that remained flat or decreased so the city could target its deficit.
