How to find out if you're paying a CID tax in Kansas City

There is a line running through Kansas City that decides what you pay at the register, and you cannot see it. Cross it and the sales tax on a sandwich goes up by as much as a penny on the dollar. It does not follow a street, a neighborhood, or a council district. It follows the edge of a Community Improvement District, and there are at least eighty-one of them inside the city limits.

Missouri law says you are supposed to be told. Section 67.1545.11 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri reads, in full: “In each district in which a sales tax is imposed under this section, every retailer shall prominently display the rate of the sales tax imposed or increased at the cash register area.” Whether those signs are up at Kansas City registers is a question for a walk around a shopping center, and The Kansas City Stare has not made that walk. What can be established from a desk is where the districts are, and there the city’s own answer is three years out of date.

The thirty-second version

• A Community Improvement District is a taxing body created under the Community Improvement District Act, sections 67.1401 to 67.1571 of the Missouri statutes. One that is a political subdivision may impose its own sales tax in increments of one-eighth of one percent, up to a maximum of one percent, after a mail-in ballot of the qualified voters inside it (§67.1545.1).
• The register is your first check. The rate has to be posted at the cash register area (§67.1545.11).
• The state’s quarterly rate table is the record. The Missouri Department of Revenue publishes every taxing jurisdiction in Missouri, with every district named inside it, as a spreadsheet and a PDF at dor.mo.gov. It is free, needs no account, and comes back to plain curl.
• The city’s map is the picture, and it is stale. data.kcmo.org, dataset ugzk-gnff, and the clickable version 8hu9-s7df built on the same rows. Seventy-three shapes, last refreshed November 14, 2023.
• In Kansas City the base combined rate is 8.725 percent in the Clay and Platte County portions of the city, 8.975 in Jackson, and 9.100 in Cass. The highest jurisdiction in the city is 11.975 percent. That is a spread of 3.25 points, and it can change across a parking lot.

Route one: the state’s rate table

This is the authoritative list, and it is the one to use.

Go to dor.mo.gov, then Taxation, Business, Sales/Use Tax, Rate Tables, and pick the year. Each quarter is posted twice, as a PDF and as an .xlsx spreadsheet, under a URL of the form dor.mo.gov/pdf/rates/2026/july2026.xlsx. The Kansas City Stare pulled the July, August, and September 2026 table on September 18, 2026. It carries a run date of May 22, 2026 and holds 2,550 taxing jurisdictions across the state.

Search it for Kansas City. One hundred and ten of those 2,550 jurisdictions sit inside the Kansas City, Missouri city limits — every one of them carrying a jurisdiction code beginning 38000. Each row names the city, the county, the zoological district, and then every special district layered on top, one per line, with the combined rate beside it.

Eighty-six of the 110 name at least one Community Improvement District.

Four of them stack two CIDs on the same ground. Waldo and Wornall Village overlap at 10.475 percent; Waldo and Romanelli Shops overlap at the same rate; 46th and Wornall CID #1 and #2 overlap at 11.975 percent; and 12th and Wyandotte overlaps the Historic Kansas City Club CID, also at 11.975 percent. Those last two are the highest-taxed retail ground in Kansas City, tied with a downtown jurisdiction carrying three port improvement districts.

A worked comparison, all from the same table, so the arithmetic is visible:

The last row is two CIDs and a transportation development district on one piece of ground. Nothing in the statute stops districts from overlapping, and the cap of one percent is a cap per district, not per corner.

Rates change quarterly. The figures above are the July, August, and September 2026 table. Take the current quarter’s file from the same page rather than trusting a number printed anywhere, including here.

Route two: the city’s map, and what it leaves out

Kansas City publishes the district boundaries itself, free, at data.kcmo.org. The data version is ugzk-gnff; the clickable map is 8hu9-s7df, and its metadata confirms it is built on the same rows. Either is one unauthenticated GET:

# List every CID on the city's map
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/ugzk-gnff.json?$select=name,ordnum&$limit=500'

That returns 73 districts. The city’s Socrata record for the file carries no description at all, no attribution, and no license. Its rows-last-updated stamp is November 14, 2023.

The catch

Twenty Community Improvement Districts are collecting a sales tax inside Kansas City right now and have no shape on the city’s map. The Kansas City Stare established this on September 18, 2026 by joining the two files above, district name against district name:

906 Grand · Ambassador Building · Blue Ridge Crossing · West Bottoms Central · Linwood Shopping Center · Linwood Square Shopping Center · Historic Kansas City Club · Twin Creeks Village East · Twin Creeks Village West · Metro North Crossing · Crossroads · Tiffany Square East · Freight House · Tiffany Frolics · Northland Gateway · Hillcrest · Maple Park · Palestine · Pioneer Plaza · Wagon Trails

The obvious explanation is the map’s age, and it is a real one. A file frozen on November 14, 2023 cannot be blamed for missing a district created in 2025. So the same join was run against the state’s October, November, and December 2023 rate table — the quarter the map refreshed in, downloaded from the same DOR page.

Ten of the twenty were already collecting then. The Historic Kansas City Club, Freight House, Metro North Crossing, Pioneer Plaza, Linwood Shopping Center, Linwood Square Shopping Center, Tiffany Square East, Twin Creeks Village East, Twin Creeks Village West, and the Ambassador Building all appear in the state’s table for the quarter in which Kansas City last updated its map, and none of them is on it. Staleness accounts for half the list. It does not account for the other half.

The field that would let a reader chase any of this back to the law that created a district is empty, too. The city’s file carries a column named ordnum — the ordinance number. It is blank on all 73 rows: null on 67, an empty string on six, populated on none. Every district in the file was created by an ordinance. The column that would name it is a column of nothing.

That omission is sharper than it looks, because the ordinance is exactly what the state asks for. Section 32.310 of the Missouri statutes requires the Department of Revenue to maintain a public mapping feature showing sales and use tax information for political subdivisions with taxing authority — with community improvement districts listed second among the eleven kinds it must be able to display. Subsection 3 puts the duty on the district: it “shall provide to the department of revenue mapping and geographic data pertaining to the political subdivision’s borders and jurisdictions,” and “shall certify the accuracy of the data by affidavit.” Subsection 7 adds that when a boundary changes, the subdivision shall forward to the director of revenue, “by United States registered mail or certified mail, a certified copy of the ordinance adding or detaching territory from the political subdivision within ten days of adoption of the ordinance,” with a map attached.

The state is entitled by statute to a current boundary and a certified ordinance within ten days. The city’s published map is three years behind, and its ordinance column is empty.

What is on the map but not in the tax table, and why that is fine

The join runs the other way too: twelve districts have a shape on the city’s map and no sales tax in the state’s table. They are the 45th and Main CID #1, NW 112th Street, 27th and Troost, Red Bridge, Shoal Creek Valley, Downtown KC, Greenway Fields Neighborhood, MidTown KC, River Market, Renaissance Plaza, Truman Plaza, and Zona Rosa.

This is not a second error. A Community Improvement District may be funded by a special assessment levied on the property inside it rather than by a sales tax, and a district that never adopted a sales tax gives the Department of Revenue nothing to publish. To be sure the absence was that rather than a failed name match, each of the twelve names was searched against the entire statewide rate table, not just the Kansas City rows. Eleven appear nowhere in it, under any district type, in any city. The twelfth, Shoal Creek Valley, matches only a street name and a separate transportation development district. The city’s map is showing something real that the tax table has no reason to carry.

Checking us

Everything above comes from four files, all reachable with curl and no key. To re-derive the two counts that carry the story:

# Count the districts with no ordinance number
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/ugzk-gnff.json?$select=name,ordnum&$limit=500' \
  | python3 -c 'import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin); print(len(d),"districts;", \
      sum(1 for x in d if not (x.get("ordnum") or "").strip()),"with no ordinance number")'

That prints 73 districts; 73 with no ordinance number.

# Ask the portal when the CID map last changed
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/ugzk-gnff.json' \
  | python3 -c 'import json,sys,datetime; m=json.load(sys.stdin); \
      print(datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(m["rowsUpdatedAt"]))'

That prints 2023-11-14 08:48:57.

One trap on the state’s spreadsheet, and it is the kind that fails silently. Nearly every rate cell in the DOR workbook is stored as text — the literal string 9.7250%. Fourteen cells statewide are stored as numbers instead. Two of those fourteen are in Kansas City: the Maple Park CID row, holding 0.09725, and the Hillcrest CID row, holding 0.09975. Code that strips the percent sign and parses what is left returns 0.1 for both, or throws. Neither district is on the city’s map either, so a reader chasing them has two chances to get a wrong number and no obvious sign that anything went wrong. Handle both cell types.

What this does not tell you

It does not tell you whether the sign required at the register is actually up; that needs a person in a store, not a query. It does not tell you what any district spends its money on, which is a separate filing. It does not tell you whether a district’s boundary on the city’s map is correct for the districts that are on it, only that twenty that should be are absent. Because rates move every quarter, a figure here is evidence about July through September 2026 and nothing else. The file is one GET away. Take the current one.