The city's directory has a button that says Find my neighborhood. It asks you to type your neighborhood association's name, which is the thing you came to find out. There is a page on the same site that works without it. The open-data copy of the list is no help: it stopped changing in 2021, has no phone number or email address in it, and most of its links are dead.
KC Water keeps a list of current water main projects and mails a postcard to every address on one. The list has no status column, and much of it is past the finish dates printed on its own mailers. The city's open-data file on main replacement stopped in 2016, and its miles do not square with the utility's own milestone.
The city publishes one list of downtown garages and lots. It has not changed since the day it went up in 2023, and it is two lists pasted together, so the same lot can appear twice at two prices. It also marks employees-only the lot the streetcar says is free on weekends.
The city publishes a monthly count of every call to 311, sorted by the line it rang on. Since January 2019 the count has not added up: every month, thousands of calls are recorded as received and never as answered or abandoned. Since May 2025 the water line has read zero, while 311 phone operators kept logging water requests.
Kansas City law makes the energy score of every large building public, and the city posts the numbers in two places. In one of its files, a building that never reported gets a zero, so a list sorted by energy use puts the buildings that ignored the law at the top as the most efficient in town.
Jackson County's parcel viewer shows it in one line, as a code. The city's five abatement maps won't help. None has changed since August 2021, the newest plan on the 353 map dates from 2011, and a Westside plan covering hundreds of houses that the Council passed in 2022 appears on none of them.
Call 311 and the request goes to a city crew that, most months, closes it within two weeks. For requests filed from July 2025 through January 2026, the city's record says they waited months, and then 1,391 of them were marked resolved on a single day in March. The record cannot tell you when the trash actually left.
Kansas City publishes a list of the land it owns, and it has not changed since December 2023. Checked against Jackson County's records, it still lists lots the city no longer holds, misses hundreds it does, and leaves out the Land Bank, the public body that owns many of the city's vacant lots.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. For the week of September 19–25: moms and sons on a Rebuilding Day crew, a KCK tree finally lifted off a roof, flying squirrels confirmed in three Johnson County parks, a Ninja Warrior playground in Lenexa, a Roeland Park listing that led with barbecue, two barbecue kitchens eating the price of beef, and a Mission storefront holding eighty small businesses.
Kansas City's open-data portal still maps ten National Register buildings that have been torn down, and it is missing every listing since 2019. Its local-register file has missed at least five designations the Council has passed. Use the state's list for the national register and the Council's own records for the local one.
Use the city's Parcel Viewer, not the zoning file on the open-data portal. That file has not changed since December 30, 2023, and more than a hundred rezonings passed since then are on the city's live map and missing from it. Even the live map cannot name the ordinance behind most of the city. One more trap: type Street instead of St and the search returns nothing.
Kansas City's open-data portal carries two bus-stop files, and neither matches the stops KCATA's own schedule serves. The older one, still a click away, shows more than a thousand stops with no scheduled bus anywhere near them. The newer one is a November 2024 snapshot, and its search returns nothing if you type a stop's name out in full.
There is a working way to ask, and 4,909 requests have gone through it. What there is not is a way to check the answer: the city's list of streets to be resurfaced carries 1,570 segments and not one date, and the file named for how bad your pavement is has a single row, written in 2017, now sitting in the portal's delete queue.
The city publishes the whole lot list free, and it is a better list than you would expect: 139 of the 140 vehicle identification numbers check out against the federal decoder. What the file cannot tell you is when the auction is. Its rules also name a buyer premium exactly once, in the clause explaining what you get back if the car turns out to be stolen, and never say what the premium is.
The city's composting map has fourteen locations, four of them still labelled Coming Soon in a file that has not been edited since the day it was created, two years ago. It also lists two sites run by a private company without mentioning that the free drop-off is Saturdays only, requires a Kansas City photo ID with no exceptions, and costs $2.00 a bag if you turn up on a Tuesday.
The city publishes a map of every permitted billboard in Kansas City. It was uploaded once, on January 28, 2024, and has not been touched since. Four hundred and six of its 593 signs are credited to a company that stopped using that name in 2014, twenty have no owner at all, and five that the map calls active have since been revoked, suspended or closed in the city's live permit file.
The city publishes its animal control cases in four separate files, three of them frozen, with a 565-day hole where nothing is published at all. The one file that is current carries timestamps on two different clocks, which is why the city's own response-time measure, still sitting on the portal, stopped in November 2017.
A Community Improvement District can add up to a full penny on the dollar to what you pay at the register, and Missouri law says a sign has to be up telling you. The city publishes a map of where those districts are. It has not been refreshed since November 2023, and twenty districts now collecting a sales tax inside Kansas City are missing from it, ten of which were already collecting before the map last moved.
Reporting it works, and works fast: the average streetlight request Kansas City actually resolves closes in 2.8 days. What does not work is the city's published map of where the street lights are. It has not moved since August 2021, and 3,938 of its 92,536 lights are ones the city had already retired.
Kansas City takes short-term rental complaints through 311 and publishes every one of them, updated to yesterday, which makes this the rare city file that is actually current. Read it before you file: half the complaints come from one council district, the median resolved case took 40 days, and the field that records whether the rental was even registered is stored as broken text on 1,263 of the rows.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. For the week of September 12–18: a $2.87 million connector that ties the Little Blue Trace to the Rock Island, a Riverside bridge nobody will put a date on, a Crossroads izakaya that seats twenty and just made the New York Times' fifty, a Westside bistro closing after twenty-five years, a Lee's Summit firefighter who went to a Chiefs game and came home with Super Bowl tickets, and four Frenchmen who cover the Chiefs in French.
The city owns thousands of empty parcels and will sell one to you for two-thirds of its assessed market value, with slivers and side lots that price under a thousand dollars. The Land Bank's own website will not show you a single one: every page on kcmolandbank.org now redirects to a login, including the policies that govern the sale. The map that does work sits on a different domain, and about two in five of the properties it displays are flagged in the city's own data as not available.
Kansas City publishes every business license it has issued, free, with the address and the trade, and it takes about a minute to search. The file has not been refreshed since January 15, 2026, and 94 percent of the licenses in it expired before this year began. A search that comes back clean is telling you about last year, and one wrong keystroke returns a confident zero.
The city publishes every open dangerous-building case, free, with the address, the case number, and where it sits in the demolition pipeline. The file says it is updated daily. It has not changed since August 19, 2026, its newest case was opened on June 1, and one of the buildings it still lists as an ongoing case is one the city's own demolition file says came down in January.
Kansas City requires a limited liability company that rents out property here to file an affidavit naming a person, and it publishes the result free. The point of the file is to put a human behind the company. On 383 of its 1,733 records there is no human, and the city has not refreshed the file since July 31, 2024.
Kansas City publishes every restaurant inspection it writes, free, searchable, and updated within days, including the inspector's own account of what was wrong. It also calculates a numeric score for every inspection, sends that score to your browser, and then hides it with two lines of CSS. The Stare read 97 of them off the wire. Five inspections that recorded critical violations scored a perfect 100.0, which is probably why nobody wants you to see the number.
The city publishes 174,999 property code violations in a free database, addressed, dated, and quoting the ordinance. It stopped adding to it on April 30, 2026, and has added nothing in the 135 days since, while the permit file from the same city system took in more than 16,000 new records over the same stretch. Here is how to search what is there, the one keystroke that makes the search lie to you, and why 19,890 rows cannot agree with themselves about whether the problem was ever fixed.
Committee Substitute for Ordinance No. 260748 passed 9 to 3 on September 10, 2026. It appropriates $150,000. The $185 million is a pledge to put debt service on someone else's borrowing into the city's budget request every year, behind a bank letter of credit, with a special assessment on the stadium as the last backstop. Between introduction and passage the Finance Committee cut both cushions from 1.25 times debt service to 1.10 and struck the sentence that made the city the expected bond issuer. None of the three stations that covered the vote reported either change, and one names as a no vote a council member the city's own roll call records as a yes.
Kansas City publishes every permit it issues in a free database, 1,529,255 of them, and it will answer for any address in under a minute. Read it the way it looks and it will also tell you that 300,863 permits are 'Issued' when three-quarters of them are more than five years old, that the newest permit was issued in the year 3036, and that four commercial permits from 2006 are each worth $6.4 billion. Here is how to search it, how to match it to the county parcel viewer, and where the file the city stopped updating in 2025 kept the contractor's name.
Kansas City was promised 650,000 visitors and $653 million. A bank says the city led every U.S. host in card spending. A restaurant survey says most of its members lost money. Both can be true at once, because the money went where the map sent it, and nobody who counted it has said where that was.
The American Royal cut the ribbon Thursday on 390,000 square feet of barns and exhibition hall at 118th and State Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, the first campus it has ever owned. STAR bonds cover $155 million of the $375 million project. The first public ticket is a $22 seat at a cutting horse show; the World Series of Barbecue, three weeks out, will have no main stage and no public activities this year.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. For the week of September 5–11: a KCK sports bar that opened its doors during the blackout and is now one of eleven kitchens serving $9.13 plates, 700 volunteers and 193,000 meals, 250 ash trees an HOA refused to lose, the American Royal's first barn of its own, and a surgical tech who has clocked in at the same hospital since 1966.
The U.S. Department of Labor publishes every wage-and-hour case it has concluded, and it runs a separate free tool that will tell you whether it is holding unclaimed back pay with your name on it. In the Kansas City metro the federal record holds 2,957 cases, $31.2 million in back wages owed to 41,005 workers, and 748 minors employed in violation of child labor law. It also has a three-year clock on the money, and a repeat-offender field that is blank 94 percent of the time.
Kansas City takes 311 requests by phone, app, and web, and publishes every one of them in a free database anyone can search. That database will also tell you something the app will not: 22,655 requests are still open, the oldest since the system's first day in 2021, and 41 percent of all requests carry no work order number at all.
Amendment 6 and Proposition A were certified on September 8, the last day the Supreme Court of Missouri gave the Secretary of State to do it. Neither certificate says he found the petitions sufficient. Both say he certified them pursuant to the court's opinion — a clause that appeared on one of four citizen petitions certified in 2024, and on two of two in 2026. One of the two decides which congressional map Kansas City votes under.
Missouri makes every TIF district file an annual report, and the State Auditor has to publish all of them in a searchable database. It is free, it needs no account, and it will tell you what a redevelopment near you promised and what it delivered. It is also missing a year. The Kansas City Stare pulled all 7,266 records on September 8, 2026: report year 2021 is not there, and 95 percent of report year 2020 is a second copy of report year 2019.
Kansas City Irish Fest spent Labor Day weekend sending people into the shade of a municipal park, under an extreme heat warning, until storms shut it down early Sunday night. Fifteen days earlier the Council passed the ordinance authorizing the ballpark agreements. The enacted documents mention that park twice, promise year-round activations free to the public, and name no event at all.
Every ordinance Kansas City has on the books is free to read online, in a searchable code, with no account and no records request. It is also not the law currently in effect. The city's code is codified through an ordinance the Council passed on April 16 — and the Council has passed 211 more since. Across the metro the gap runs from 83 days to three and a half years, and the three jurisdictions furthest behind are the exact three whose sites have no place to show you what is missing. Also, with citations: what is actually in there — the streetcar-spitting ban that outlived the streetcars and then got them back, the rooster rule, and the barking-dog complaint that commits you to testifying.
Every roll call the Kansas City Council takes is published, free, with each of the thirteen members named. The city's vendor will also hand you a members list that mixes people who left office in 2023 with people serving today, a former councilwoman who appears twice under flags that contradict each other, and — if you ask the ordinary way — a roster that silently omits the entire sitting council. Here is how to get the vote, and how to not get the wrong person.
Sixteen days before the ordinance, the city came to the North Lawn apartments with police, and what was said at those doors is still disputed. Then on July 23 the Kansas City Council appropriated $500,000, gave itself two days to go and look, and took the authority to bill the landlord for anything it fixed. Twenty-one days later the council repealed its own order, kept the $500,000, and spent it moving people out instead. The repairs were finally scheduled by the tenants, bargaining for themselves.
A $1.9 million contract for traffic control at the KCI curbs comes back to a City Council committee this month. The public agenda entry says the city's procurement manager could renew it four more times without a Council vote. The ordinance itself — the part that would become law — says the opposite. Both have been sitting in the same public file for weeks.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. For the week of August 29–September 4: a $1,500 goal that came in at $1,740, Merriam's first grocery store in eight years, a $51 million yes with two noes worth printing, KCK's first Black Restaurant Week, and an elementary school where your birthday present is a book.
Kansas City, Kansas holds its first Black Restaurant Week Sept. 7–13, eleven kitchens running specials priced at the area code. Here is the lineup, the four dishes the organizers' own page ties to a restaurant, and what two of them cost the rest of the year.
Johnson County commissioners adopted a $1,911,043,781 budget Thursday morning, 6-1-0, in three motions, without changing the total by a dollar. The documents behind the number show a reserve floor the county breaks in its own 2028 projection, $10.2 million of a sales-tax reserve budgeted for a building a court may have put out of reach, and the tax itself expiring five months into the year it helps pay for.
The county's property map is free, public, and will tell you the owner of any parcel in about thirty seconds. It will also, right now, tell you what was true in 2024. Every one of Jackson County's 300,626 parcel records on the public viewer carries the 2024 tax year, which means a building sold last month still shows you last-cycle's owner. Here is how to look it up anyway, and how to catch what the map cannot show you.
Platte County's newspaper has printed every week since September 1865. Its owners have been, in order: a 16-year-old apprentice, his widow, the man she called when the press broke, his widow, their youngest son, and now a reporter who left for California and came back. A story about a paper that has kept passing itself to the people who already worked there.
Kansas City's new disease dashboard promised an update every Wednesday, and today it delivered one, sometime between 11:24 a.m. and 1:32 p.m. But the summer's headline number has moved three times in five days without a single case changing, because the dashboard slides its own comparison window. Here is how to read it.
A free concert in the Wilson's Pizza parking lot set out to raise $1,500 for storm recovery in northeast Kansas City, Kansas, and came back with $1,740 — raised in the same blocks the storm tore up. Week three of the Quindaro corridor pulling itself back.
Fourteen pairs of bartenders, servers, and cooks put on gloves in the West Bottoms on Sunday and fought one-minute rounds in front of their whole industry. It was the best sports night in Kansas City, and I had a seat. A dispatch from the Wettest Block in the World.
Today is day sixty — the charter's deadline for the Council to act on the two certified citizen petitions it referred in July: one would require a public vote before the city backs any big stadium, the other would fund a KCI-to-Union-Station monorail with forty years of sales taxes. Nothing has moved since July 13. At midnight the decision passes to the five petitioners, who get ten days to demand a public vote.
Every route into KCPD's records — online, by phone, by mail, in person — with the real fees and the real waits, from the department's own pages. One of those pages says a mailed request now takes 24 weeks. Another says 30 days. Both were live this morning. Here is the map, and the contradiction.
A new public dashboard posts reported case counts for every condition doctors, labs and hospitals must report to the city, by category, back to January 2024, refreshed weekly. The first thing it shows: intestinal illness in Kansas City this summer ran more than three and a half times last summer's count. Here is how to read it without scaring yourself.
The Landmark has printed every week since 1865. Ivan and Linda Foley, who owned it since 2002, have sold it to Stacy Wiedmaier — a Landmark reporter from 2006 to 2008 who first asked about buying it over Thanksgiving four years ago. What is confirmed, what the paper says about itself, and what to watch September 2.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. For the week of August 22–28: the storm cleanup that turned into a block party, a $1.1 million sculpture that isn't a memorial, the biggest ribbon in the metro this fall, a Liberty pitmaster headed for the airport, and the high school that has been running a free preschool for fifty years.
Kansas City's legislative calendar is a marvel of long-range planning, except for the sixty days when it mattered. A column.
No special session was called, no notice was set in motion, and the deadline for the November 3 ballot passed Tuesday afternoon with both citizen petitions exactly where they have sat since July 13. The clocks still running now decide which election — and the city's own charter says when the next regular one is.
The notice deadline for the November 3 ballot expires at 5:00 p.m. today. The City Council held a regular session five days ago with 71 items in front of it, and the two certified citizen petitions were not among them. As of this morning's pull, no further meeting is posted.
The monorail petition would commit Kansas City to two sales taxes until the 2070s — roughly $2.8 billion at today's collection rates, by our arithmetic, because the city's own file offers none. The fiscal-impact form behind ordinance 260610 answers the money question in one sentence, and the budget office checked no boxes.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. Retropublished for the week of August 15–21: a storm that stripped northeast KCK and the block that cleaned itself up, a 24-year-old chicken counter the New York Times just told the country about, two pizzerias crossing the state line, and a rescue dog with a stage role.
Kansas City has spent the summer watching a sixty-day clock that runs out August 31. Missouri's election-notice law sets an earlier one: August 25, five days from now. The Stare read the charter clause everyone skipped — and it rules out the extension. If the Council keeps not meeting, neither petition reaches the November ballot.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. Retropublished for the week of August 8–14: the Rye co-owner who finally opened her own bakery, Oak Park Mall's plan to become a neighborhood, a $3.7 million answer to lead in a KCK neighborhood's soil, and every backpack in the metro.
Kansas City's charter gives the Council sixty days to act on a certified citizen petition. The Stare read the provision — Section 702 — and the sixty days started July 2. What no one has reported is the second deadline it creates: after the sixty days run out, five residents have ten days to act, or the petition never reaches a ballot at all.
The committee that got the lease five days after introduction held it Tuesday morning without advancing it. It is due back September 1 — the day after sixty days from July 2 run out, by straight arithmetic. The ballpark rezoning and an $11 million transit amendment held with it. Three 2031 World Cup agreements advanced.
Missouri passed 1,500 cases the same week its health department first said the climb is slowing. Kansas' last weekly count added 154. The recall is three and a half weeks old, product testing has still not confirmed the parasite on a single sample, and the county numbers a Kansas City reader needs surfaced only because a TV station asked. A column.
A council committee takes up the Royals lease Tuesday morning, five days after it was introduced. The certified citizen petition that would put stadium subsidies to a public vote was referred on July 2 to a committee whose last meeting was March 23 — and which appears nowhere on the city's published calendar through June 2027.
Two statehouses spent a session asking voters to change the machinery of government. Two statehouses got the same answer, by margins you almost never see. Meanwhile the same voters cheerfully signed off on $1.7 billion in pipes. A column.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. A second restaurant from a man who already had one, the metro's only bagpipe shop moving into Old Town, an Overland Park native on the Booker longlist, and the Westside cantina that asked for help last week — and got it.
The whole state voted on a single Jackson County job, and it was not an accident. Behind Amendment 2 sits three years of unlawful assessments, a court fight, and a settlement that could return $250 million to property owners.
Kansas City approved five ballot questions on Tuesday and the biggest yes vote of the night went to sanitary sewer rehabilitation. Here is what each one actually funds, what it costs you, and the one line in the city's pitch worth reading twice.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. KC Bier Co. finally opens in Kansas, Disco Burger gets its second room in a week, a tea shop becomes a cocktail bar, Restaurant Week hands over $125,000, and Jackson County plants a field just to look at.
A 27-state recall with zero confirmed lab results, a fast-food chain turning a parasite into a promotion, and the case for lettuce with a name on it. A column.
Trending — The Stare's weekly recap of the small, local, good-spirited stuff. A burger joint opens in Brookside, a biergarten circles Monday, a park opens decades after an Eagle Scout drew it up, and yes, we still need to talk about the lettuce.
Tom's Town Distilling built its first bottles around the villains of Kansas City's machine era — a corruption gin, a strong-arm vodka — then quietly retired the names. The story of why they existed at all is the best KC history you can drink.
Kansas votes August 4 and in-person advance voting in Johnson County starts Saturday. The Johnson County Post spent weeks asking candidates its readers' questions, one issue per day — the series wrapped Friday. Here is all of it, organized by race, plus the rest of the metro's homework.
A metal coffee shop rises in a beloved Waldo space, a bookstore-bar gets a second life in Hyde Park, and the West Bottoms loses a decade-old dive with the best Fillet-O-Fish in town.
Kansas City has plenty of news. What it doesn't have is one honest place to see all of it at once — and a newsroom that would rather be trusted than first.
The city is never boring. Finding the good stuff just takes knowing where to look — and a little less doomscrolling.