City Budgets

[W. Gray]

The KC Star reports that the Kansas City city budget for the next year is proposed at $1.3 billion. That is quite a shocker.

I looked up the Denver budget and it is $838.4 million.

[Tobina+1]

Is that Kansas City, KS... or Kansas City, MO?
Kansas City, KS is a much smaller community than Kansas City, MO.  On the KS side, all the areas of the city are broken into smaller towns that each have their own government (and budget).  Overland Park, Lenexa, Olathe, Mission, etc.  On the MO side, Kansas City spreads all the way up North at the airport to clear down south.  I would be interested to see the difference in square miles of Kansas City, MO vs. Denver.  I think the Denver-area is also broken into smaller towns that each have their own government, but I have no idea how large the actual Denver area is.

[W. Gray]

I was speaking of Kansas City, Missouri, which has the KC Star newspaper.

KCMO is in three counties but is still one city with one budget. There are a myriad of towns surrounding it. There are even some cities located within the city limits of KC but they remain a separate town with independent budgets.

                         Denver            KCMO                  KCK
Area                    154 sq mi        318                   127 sq mi

Pop                      566,867          447,306             147,867

Metro Pop               2.5m              2 m

Both Denver and Kansas City, Kansas, are simultaneously a county and a city.

Kansas City, Ks does have a uniifed government and budget sharing with two other cities, Bonner Springs and Edwardsville.

Kansas City, Missouri, has been the largest city in Missouri for quite some time. St Louis has dwindled to around 335,000. The metropolitan area though may be bigger than both Denver and KCMO.

Aurora, Colorado, which abuts Denver has a population of 250,000. Centennial, where I am located, has only been a city since 2000 but has a population of 106,000.

[Tobina+1]

Interesting.  So, it looks like KCMO is about twice the size of Denver, but has about 100,000 less people.  I wonder with the amount of city streets that KCMO has to maintain, if that is why the budget was bigger?  I know that KCMO has been trying to catch up on road repairs over the last 5 years... due to poor maintenance over the course of many years.  When I lived in Overland Park, you could tell when you passed into MO because of the immediate demise of road conditions.  HORRIBLE pot-holes.

[W. Gray]

Kansas City apparently does not publish the miles of streets they maintain but Independence (MO) next door has 78 square miles with 540 miles of streets. Based on that density, KC would have about 2200 miles of streets.

Overland Park, by the way, says they maintain 1,800 miles of "lane miles."

I have always thought the monetary problem in KC was connected to their general increase in bureaucracy, red tape, and cronyism resulting in a downhill trend over the last thirty years.

The KCMO school district is a case in point. That school district has a 357m budget but is not accredited and cannot get accredited because the overwhelming majority of students cannot or will not learn anything.  Apparently, the bureaucracy is so entrenched, nothing allows an environment in which the kids can improve.
The last chief administrator was the 23rd in 39 years and he is now gone.