Forty years of two taxes, and the fiscal note is blank

Somewhere in the file for every ordinance Kansas City considers, there is a form that answers the question a voter would ask first: what does this cost, and where does the money come from?

For ordinance 260610, the certified citizen petition that would fund a citywide airport monorail with forty years of two sales taxes, the form is there. The City Manager’s Office docket memo asks, “Is this legislation included in the adopted budget?” The box checked is No. It asks, “What is the funding source?” The space is blank. Its account of what the measure does to the city’s finances is one sentence: “Voter approval will enact a new sales tax.”

That is the entire fiscal record, in the city’s own file, for the largest transit commitment on any Kansas City ballot in a generation, if it reaches one. As we reported Thursday, the window for the November 3 ballot closes at 5:00 p.m. on August 25 unless the Council acts.

This is what can be established about the money anyway, from records that exist. Where a number below is our arithmetic rather than an institution’s statement, it says so.

What the two taxes are

The petition’s ordinance does two things, per its own executive summary in the city’s file. It continues the existing three-eighths-cent bus sales tax for an additional forty years when it expires in 2033. It also enacts a new quarter-cent capital improvement sales tax for forty years, “beginning 1/1/2026,” in the memo’s words, a start date that had already passed before the petition was even certified. Nothing in the file addresses the discrepancy.

Run the clocks out and the commitment looks like this: the new quarter-cent would run to the mid-2060s, and the bus tax continuation to 2073. A voter who was twenty-five when the sixty-day charter clock started this July would be seventy-two when the last of it expires.

What voters most recently said about one of these taxes

Kansas City voted on the three-eighths-cent bus tax two and a half years ago, in November 2023, and renewed it for ten years, with 73% of the vote. The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority estimated that renewal would bring in about $421 million over the decade; the same tax had generated about $371 million from 2010 to 2023.

The petition would replace that ten-year decision with a forty-year one, made once.

What the taxes would raise — our arithmetic, because the file has none

On KCATA’s own $421 million ten-year projection, the bus tax collects roughly $42 million a year. A quarter-cent levied on the same sales base is two-thirds of a three-eighths-cent tax, or roughly $28 million a year. Together: on the order of $70 million a year, and something like $2.8 billion across the forty years, in flat, today’s dollars, with no allowance for growth or inflation, because a projection is the budget office’s job and the budget office checked no boxes. None of those figures appears in any document in the city’s file. They are ours, derived from the agency’s published projection, and they are the only estimate this story has to offer because nobody whose job it is has published one.

What the money is supposed to build

The petition that voters signed — headed “PETITION FOR UPGRADES TO KC INCL. AIRPORT MONORAIL CONNECTING KCI TO UNION STATION HUB” — describes a citywide monorail serving Kansas City International Airport, the Northland, downtown, Union Station, the Plaza, the Eastside and the Kansas City Zoo, plus a streetcar extension east to 18th and Vine, pedestrian greenway conversions of selected roadways, a 200-acre car-free Penn Valley Park, and a transit hub in the north wing of Union Station that the petition says requires razing two occupied office buildings at 2300 and 2301 Main Street by eminent domain.

The airport and the zoo, the spine’s two endpoints, are roughly thirty miles apart by road. That measurement is ours; the petition states no mileage, and no engineering document exists in the city’s file.

What monorails have cost the cities that built them

No Kansas City-specific estimate exists, so the only available yardstick is what built systems actually cost. A 2013 survey of monorail construction costs, compiled from government and press records, puts completed lines between roughly $69 million and $215 million per kilometer in the dollars of their day: Mumbai’s Line 1 at about $69 million, Okinawa’s at $85 million, Tokyo’s Tama Monorail at $151 million, and the AirTrain Newark at $215 million per kilometer. In per-mile terms that range runs from about $110 million to over $340 million.

Apply the cheapest of those figures, in decade-old dollars, to a thirty-mile spine and the arithmetic passes $3 billion before a single one of the other projects on the petition is touched: no streetcar extension, no greenways, no park conversion, no Union Station hub, no property acquisition, and no year of operating costs. The two taxes’ entire forty-year take, by our estimate above, is about $2.8 billion.

Those two paragraphs are comparison, not projection. A real projection would account for ridership, federal match, financing, inflation on both sides of the ledger, and Kansas City’s actual corridor. Producing one is precisely what a fiscal note is for, and what a committee hearing is for, and the measure has had neither. The committee it was referred to on July 2 has not met since March.

What the transit agencies have said

As far as we can find, nothing. We searched for any public assessment of the petition by KCATA, whose bus tax the measure would rewrite, or by the Kansas City Streetcar Authority, whose system it would extend, and found none as of August 20. That is an absence, reported as an absence. Both agencies’ silence may simply reflect that the measure has never been scheduled for a hearing at which anyone would testify.

The blank form, the missing estimate, the unbuilt engineering case, the unasked agencies: each is the kind of absence a committee meeting exists to fill. The committee holding the ordinance has four charter days left and, as of this writing, no meeting on the books.

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Reporting method: the fiscal-impact language is quoted from the City Manager’s Office docket memo attached to ordinance 260610 in the city’s Legistar system, archived by The Stare on August 14, 2026. Tax terms and dates are from the same memo’s executive summary. The 2023 renewal figures are from KCATA’s public statements as reported at the time (73%; ~$421 million over ten years; ~$371 million 2010–2023). Per-year and forty-year revenue figures are The Stare’s arithmetic derived from KCATA’s projection, marked as such in the text. Monorail construction costs are from a 2013 survey compiling government and press records (“Monorail Construction Costs,” Pedestrian Observations), in the dollars of each project’s era. The petition language is transcribed from page one of the signature sheets filed with ordinance 260610. The airport–zoo distance is our road-distance measurement. Underlying city records are open under the Missouri Sunshine Law, Chapter 610 RSMo. Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com. Something we missed? tips.