Editor’s note: Brian Platt, the new city manager in Kansas City, Missouri, is Jewish, and his wife has deep ties to the local Jewish community. The Chronicle asked Platt to reflect on his early days in his new position.
The official 100 day mark for me as the 16th city manager of Kansas City initially felt so far away as my wife, daughter, and I first moved to Kansas City in early December.
Reflecting back on those first few months, I’m really proud of the transformational improvements we have made in delivering city services and for navigating through the $70 million budget shortfall caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We still have much more work to do but we have already made so many positive and exciting changes.
Immediately after the first snowstorm I witnessed here in Kansas City on Jan. 1, we implemented a series of changes to our snow removal operation, including 24-hour residential plowing shifts, better allocation of existing resources to add 100 drivers and 50 vehicles to the operation, and more aggressive and proactive responses including our “blue” salt.
As the snow began to melt, we instituted a comprehensive strategy to dramatically improve street maintenance and road pavement quality with three key components: digital analysis of pavement to create an equitable and technology based prioritization schedule; more than doubling the funding for street resurfacing with a new goal of 100 miles of streets to be paved this year; and adopting a stricter excavation policy that requires better coordination between the city and utility companies.
Bold steps
We are taking bold steps to build a more inclusive workplace and ensuring our workforce best reflects and supports the people we serve. We are in the final stages of hiring the city’s first chief equity officer, doubling the size of our HR team responsible for investigating complaints, and also for professional development and training. We are also making significant changes to our fire union contract to improve management and oversight of firefighters.
Affordable housing and homelessness are two urgent areas of need for our city as well.
Our new land bank program seeks to sell vacant and abandoned homes for $1 as long as those new owners provide homes to the unhoused and those at the lowest income levels across the city. We opened the region’s largest warming center that served hundreds of people each night, prevented any further weather-related deaths during one of the coldest periods in our history, and led to successful relocation to permanent housing for over 100 people.
We have begun efforts to build hundreds of transitional housing units using quick-build tiny home structures as well as hundreds of more traditional affordable housing units on the Barney Allis Plaza site. We are also creating a standalone Housing Department with new staff and resources focused on addressing homelessness, creation and preservation of affordable housing, and tenant advocacy, among other things.
The budget has been a significant challenge for the team and one that we are particularly proud of mitigating. Facing a $70 million shortfall this year because of negative economic impacts related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we utilized a targeted approach to closing this gap without layoffs, furloughs, or reductions in city services, while also investing in all of the priorities listed above.
Many reforms
This has been one of the most exciting things to work through with the team particularly because it is an opportunity for us to reform our government operation for years to come and create a more fiscally prudent organization. Our list of 30-40 budget savings and revenue generating items and initiatives will provide long standing benefit to taxpayers for years to come.
Beyond working for the city, we are so grateful to the Jewish community here for welcoming us so warmly and supporting us during a cross country move from New Jersey during a pandemic. We have already made great connections and future lifelong friends through the JCC and we look forward to meeting everyone in person soon.
So what’s next? We are finalizing plans and initiatives related to traffic and pedestrian safety (vision zero) that includes a rapid deployment of protected bike lanes, some innovative sustainability and energy efficiency efforts, and much more. Stay tuned!
