The Moral to the Story
At the beginning of the summer of 2026, I posted this “Balance KC’s Budget” puzzle depicting Kansas City’s budget situation with a suggestion that trying to solve it could be a way to pass your downtime. To be fair, I warned that every city council member knows it’s not solvable. In retrospect, I may have been incorrect. This city budgeting is fuzzy stuff. It’s not clear that many people fully understand it, including me for certain and probably most if not all of our council representatives. None of the above are CPA’s, if you’re wondering.
Kansas City tries to operate on revenues that are about 20% short of obligations. That’s why our streets are a mess, why our pipes break all the time, why our parks seem to operate on a shoestring budget. To fully fund the city we’ve built, we would need to increase total revenues by 20%. That’s like tripling what KCMO gets in property taxes or doubling the Earnings Tax. Neither are remotely feasible. We need a plan for solving this. To my knowledge, no plan exists.
You may be confused because we’ve always heard cities are required to balance their budget. That requirement is a myth. The state laws that require cities to have balanced budgets don’t require of cities the same accounting rules required of private businesses (you know, GASB as opposed to GAAP and ERISA). Cities have much more wiggle room for funding benefits, and they don't have to account for the cost of taking care of the streets and the administrative buildings that allow cities to function, or fully funding our parks or public health programs. As a result, when there is not enough funding available to cover the bases, those parts get cut back.
If you were Kansas City and you owned this house we call a city and weren’t taking care of it, you would be considered foolish for not protecting your investment. If you rented this house, you might be considered a slumlord. This is not intended as a critique of our elected officials. It’s a critique of you and me. You see, it’s our job to oversee our elected officials, and it’s their job to oversee the city manager, and it’s his job to oversee the staff.
For proof of our neglect, the city manager has publicly shared annual satisfaction surveys that for years have shown that our streets are not being maintained to anywhere near a satisfactory level. What have we the public done about it? Not much, in terms of making sure that issue be addressed, and that is just an example of the most basic service we should expect.
Our original vision statement had two parts:
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the right to live our lives as we choose, and
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the responsibility to see that our government protects that right for all of us.
Here’s the part 1 of that vision statement you may recognize:
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
Now, part 2:
that to secure these rights governments are instituted,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;
that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
We take great pride in part 1. Most of us can quote at least part of it from memory. Part 2 on the other hand . . .
After establishing the vision for the society we seek in our Declaration of Independence, the founders went on to create the Constitution to institutionalize that vision, giving we the people the right to vote on certain things, including who we want as our delegates, our representatives. The thing about delegating is that while you can delegate responsibility, you can’t delegate accountability. For us to enjoy the rights we desire, we have to own the responsibility for our governance. In this effort to make a great city, “The Buck Stops Here” sign ultimately sits on the desks of us Kansas Citians.
The moral of this story:
You and I are ultimately accountable for the city we make.
We will soon have the opportunity to exercise our responsibility by electing a new city council and mayor. This website is intended to provide a baseline understanding of why we struggle to care for our city and it offers suggestions for what we do next. The goal is to make the case that a truly balanced budget should be the next council’s highest priority, with a balanced budget being one that fully funds the obligations we have to one another as Kansas Citians to take care of our city and each other in ways that are fair and equitable. A balanced budget won’t happen during the next council's term, but it also won’t happen at all unless somebody takes the first step and builds a plan for how we’re going to get to a balanced budget, then pursues that plan. It will take years, but being the council that finally got things started would be a legacy worth running on.
Our job is to identify and elect an informed group of delegates as our next city council, then stay attentive to see that they do their job, which is to make a great Kansas City.
More details are provided in the Next Steps section at the end, but unless you are already familiar with our predicament, please CLICK HERE to continue on into the next section.