Kansas City To Spend 27 Percent Of All Regional Transportation Funds On Streetcar

In a recent article, the Midtown KC Post reported that Kansas City officials reached an agreement with the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) to fund the proposed streetcar expansion with proceeds from a proposed 0.75-cent statewide sales tax. Under the agreement, the streetcar’s Transportation Development District (TDD) sales tax would be reduced to 0.25 percent. In return, MoDOT would provide $3 million a year in funding for the streetcar.

But anyone who has read the streetcar’s financial plan knows the math for that “swap” does not add up. The streetcar TDD’s sales tax is supposed to bring in almost $30 million a year. If it is reduced to 0.25 percent, the TDD would only raise $7.5 million per year. With an extra $3 million a year from the state, that leaves almost $20 million per year in lost revenue unaccounted for, or $200 million over 10 years. Because the streetcar needs every dime (and then some) of that sales tax money, where is the extra $200 million going to come from?

The answer to this conundrum lies in Resolution 140500, which Kansas City Mayor Sly James introduced on June 19. It proposes spending an incredible $210 million of the 0.75-cent statewide sales tax revenue to fund the streetcar expansion. To get just how incredible of a request that is, consider that the Kansas City region is only supposed to receive a total of $776 million for all of its road, bridge, transit, rail, port, aviation, and greenway projects. In the plan that the regional planning agency (MARC) released, that is almost every dollar the region planned to spend on transit. That original plan had $32 million for the streetcar, but millions more for improvements throughout the entire region.

This money grab for what is essentially a development scheme for downtown Kansas City should enrage not only residents in the Kansas City region, but taxpayers throughout the state. For parts of the Kansas City region not called downtown Kansas City, it essentially means no new funds for more cost-effective transit solutions or other more pressing projects. For the state as a whole, it underlines the incredible waste of a transportation sales tax supposedly needed to fix MoDOT’s highway funding problems. That 4 percent of all sales tax revenue raised over 10 years would go to support an incredibly expensive want with dubious development potential makes the proponents of the sales tax, who constantly argue that our infrastructure is crumbling, look like chicken littles.

If reports are accurate, MoDOT may already have made an agreement with Kansas City to divert this vast sum of statewide sales tax revenue, completely upending the open process through which MARC developed its regional plan and entirely contradicting MoDOT’s preliminary list of projects (which Kansas Citians have been asked to fruitlessly comment on) for the Kansas City region. That should indicate to Missourians just what kind of policy the transportation sales tax would create: wasteful, opaque, and catered to special interests.