As reported on KCUR – NPR Kansas City
With the Kansas City Area Transit Authority within a few weeks of cutting a forth of it’s routes, the City of Kansas City stepped up and gave them the 8 million dollars they say they needed in order to maintain the current level of service. The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority was originally set to eliminate nine bus routes and reduce the frequency on four others because the city’s budget for the transit agency was not enough to cover current service levels. The City Council unanimously approved another $8.3 million for the KCATA. That’s enough to stop the cuts from going into effect Sept. 6 as originally planned.
The $8.3 million will prevent service cuts until April, when the city and the transit agency meet again to set a contract for the next fiscal year’s service.
The city and KCATA announced in May that service cuts would be necessary, after final contract negotiations between the two parties didn’t result in enough to cover daily bus routes.
The KCATA was able to keep service levels the same, and even expand them in some areas, during the World Cup thanks to federal funding and the reappropriation of grant funding to service during the tournament. But that money ran out, and the KCATA used its reserves to cover the rest.
This is the fourth time that budget issues have necessitated service cuts at the KCATA since 2025. In each case, Kansas City came through with a last-minute funding plan to stop at least a majority of the cuts from happening.
Council member Melissa Robinson, who sponsored the ordinance to give the KCATA more funding, advocated for the city to direct online tax money to sales tax funds.
Currently, money collected from online purchases goes into the city’s general fund. The KCATA would receive about $27 million a year if online tax money was directed into the KCATA and public mass transit sales tax funds. That money would essentially end the transit agency’s budget deficit.
“That funding would not only sustain the level of services we have, but provide an opportunity for us to expand,” Robinson said. “We have to get to a point where we’re not in an emergency situation, but we allow those monies to flow where voters intended them to.”
The Jackson County Legislature is considering putting a countywide half-percent sales tax on the ballot. If voters approved the measure, it would provide more stable funding each year to transit.
The KCATA is also working closer with Kansas City’s planning department to better align bus service with where it’s most needed in the city and set route frequencies to match demand.
“Nobody appreciates the grim reaper mentality of talking about service reductions,” Ferguson said. “The work with the city on a near term and then a long range of what transit can look like, I think, is how we start solving some of these problems about intermediary budget concerns and late interjections in the budget.”
