How to find out when your street will be repaved in Kansas City

Your street is bad enough that you have started counting the patches. You want to know when the city is going to repave it.

There is a real way to ask, it is free, and 4,909 requests have already gone through it. Dial 311, ask for Street Maintenance, and say resurfacing. The most recent such request in Kansas City’s own file was filed on September 14, 2026, five days before The Stare pulled it, so the door is open and somebody is on the other side of it.

Checking the answer is the part that does not work.

Kansas City publishes a list of streets to be resurfaced. It has 1,570 segments in it, and not one date — no year, no season, no status, nothing marking a segment as planned rather than finished. Its rows were last written on November 23, 2021, which is 1,760 days before this morning. The city also publishes a file named for the measure behind the whole question, how bad your pavement actually is. That file has exactly one row. It was written in 2017, it has never been revised, and the city has filed it under the category Candidates for Deletion — where it has sat, public and downloadable, while 510 people downloaded it.

The thirty-second version

• To ask: dial 311 inside Kansas City, Missouri, or (816) 513-1313, or use the myKCMO app on iOS and Android, or the city’s web intake. Category Street Maintenance, sub-type Resurface Streets.
• How well used: 4,909 resurfacing requests since March 22, 2021. 4,850 are marked resolved, averaging 8.4 days — which almost certainly means a referral closed, not pavement laid. More on that below.
• To see if your street is on the list: data.kcmo.org, dataset 29kx-jr9v, or the map version 74z9-yu3f. Free, no account. Search your street name.
• To see when: you cannot. The list has no date column. Neither does the map.
• Smaller jobs have their own sub-types: Seal Cracks in Pavement (642 requests) and Resurface Alleys (292). A crack is a cheaper ask than a resurfacing, and it is a different one.

The route that works

Everything goes through 311, and all the channels land in the same system: 311 from a phone inside the city, (816) 513-1313 from outside it, the myKCMO app, or the web intake.

Ask for Street Maintenance, then Resurface Streets. In the city’s published 311 file, dataset d4px-6rwg, that sub-type has been used 4,870 times since March 2021. A near-identical label, Resurfacing, accounts for another 39 — the same request, stored under two names, which is a defect this paper documented across the whole 311 system on September 10 and again on September 19. Together: 4,909 requests.

Two things worth knowing before you file.

Bad pavement has two front doors, and the labels will not help you pick. Kansas City’s 311 system carries Street Maintenance (46,276 requests) and A Pothole (23,215) as two separate top-level issue types. Inside them the pothole label splits yet again — Pothole at 23,637, Pothole in the Street at 22,608, and Pothole in the Alley at 361. File under whichever you find first. They reach the same place.

Ask for the right size of job. A resurfacing is the whole segment. If what you have is a network of cracks rather than a failed surface, Seal Cracks in Pavement (642 requests) is the honest ask, and Resurface Alleys (292) covers the alley behind the house. There are also three referral sub-types that tell you where these requests go when they leave the call centre: Capital Projects Referral (718), Mill Out PW Referral Only (230), and Street Preservation Referral (148).

THE CATCH

The list of streets to be resurfaced contains no dates

The city’s answer to “is my street on the list” is dataset 29kx-jr9v, still carrying the machine name it was created with, Street Resurfacing_data, and its map twin 74z9-yu3f. It holds 1,570 street segments across 286 distinct street names — Wornall and Truman lead with 34 segments each, then Lydia with 31, Broadway and 88th with 24.

Here is the file’s complete column list, every field it has: a map line, an object id, a direction prefix, a street name, a street type, and a segment length.

That is all of it. There is no year. There is no date of any kind. There is no status column, so nothing in the file distinguishes a segment scheduled for work from one finished years ago. The city publishes no description for either asset to explain which it is — the description field on both is empty. Which program year these 1,570 segments belong to is not a question the file can be made to answer, and The Stare does not claim to know: what is on the record is that the rows were last written on November 23, 2021 at 22:08 UTC, and that both assets were created on June 8, 2019 by an account named ArcGIS Connector, one second apart.

Two more defects a resident will hit inside the first minute:

For 599 of the 1,570 segments — 38.2 percent — the direction prefix is empty. North 10th Street cannot be told from West 10th Street on well over a third of the list. Seven rows are missing the street type too.

The one quantity in the file has no declared unit. SHAPE.LEN carries no column description, and the dataset description is blank, so the segment lengths sum to 698,209.85 of something. If those are feet — the convention this kind of ArcGIS export normally uses in Missouri — the list covers about 132.2 miles. The file never says, so neither will we.

The map inherits all of it, and titles your street with a row number

The map at 74z9-yu3f is not a separate, better-maintained thing. Its own configuration names 29kx-jr9v as its data source, and it carries the identical row-update timestamp, so it is exactly as current as the table and no more. It has been viewed 2,409 times, more than twice the table’s 1,104.

When you click your street on it, the label at the top of the flyout is the segment’s object id — an internal database row number — with the prefix, street name, street type, and length underneath. Still no date. The most-used view of Kansas City’s resurfacing programme introduces your block by its primary key.

The file named for the question has one row, and it is queued for deletion

Search the portal for how bad Kansas City’s streets are and you arrive at Street Condition Ratings (PCI), dataset fw8j-csny. PCI is the Pavement Condition Index, a 0-to-100 score for a stretch of road, and it is the number every city uses to decide what gets paved.

The entire file is 188 bytes. One row:

It was created and written 291 seconds apart on March 14, 2017, and has not been revised in the 3,475 days since. The city’s category for it is Candidates for Deletion — and it is still public, still free to download, and has been downloaded 510 times against 2,534 page views. Its view record was last modified on December 29, 2023, six years after the data was written, so somebody went into the file, changed something about the record, and left the single row where it was.

A deletion queue is ordinary housekeeping for an open-data portal, and being in one is not evidence of anybody hiding anything; we are not suggesting it is. What is worth a resident’s time is narrower: this particular file has been marked for deletion since at least the end of 2023 and is still what the portal hands you when you ask Kansas City how bad its streets are.

Read at face value, that row says 51 percent of Kansas City’s street inventory rated Poor or worse — poor 20, very poor 18, serious 10, failed 3 — against 29 percent Good or Satisfactory, with 21 percent Fair. It is the last such figure the city has published, and it describes the streets of 2017.

Then there is the arithmetic. The seven percentages add up to 101.

The description says the file covers “the entire street inventory in KCMO,” and all seven columns are formatted as percentages of 100, so the extra point wants explaining. Two things would do it, and the file settles neither. The first is that the city’s own bands overlap at every boundary: Good is 85 to 100, Satisfactory 70 to 85, Fair 55 to 70, Poor 40 to 55, Very Poor 25 to 40, Serious 10 to 25, Failed 0 to 10. That is six shared endpoints and no stated rule about which side a street scoring exactly 85 falls on, so a segment can meet two definitions at once. The second is far duller: rounding seven independent percentages produces 101 often enough, with no overlap needed. We print both because the file supports both and resolves neither.

One last detail, small and strange. The row’s fiscal-year date is April 30, 2017. The file was published on March 14, 2017 — a fiscal-year snapshot stamped 47 days after the day it went out.

What “resolved in 8.4 days” does not mean

Of the 4,909 resurfacing requests, 4,850 are marked resolved, and those averaged 8.4 days to close; the longest took 468. Fifty-five were canceled, and four are still open.

Resist the obvious reading. Resurfacing a street segment is a capital paving job with a contract and a season attached. A record closed inside eight days is much more likely to be a referral passed along than a street repaved, and Kansas City’s own categories point that way — the referral sub-types named above exist precisely because these requests get handed onward. There is no field in the file that separates a request acted on from one forwarded, which is why this piece does not tell you the city is closing requests dishonestly. It is telling you that a closed 311 record is not evidence of new asphalt, and that the data cannot make it one.

A related defect, credited to this paper’s September 10 work on the same file: 50 rows carry a resolved date without being resolved. Of the 4,909, some 4,900 have a resolved date while only 4,850 are marked resolved, and the 55 canceled requests carry an average days_to_close of 58.6 anyway. Read the status column before you believe the clock.

The city’s best defence, and what survives it

Kansas City can answer most of this, and the answer is reasonable.

A PCI survey is a real capital expense — crews or a van with sensors covering the whole inventory — and cities run them every few years, not annually. Pavement condition is normally managed inside an asset-management system rather than on an open-data portal, and Kansas City plainly has one: the sibling columns in its 311 file point at exactly that kind of software. The resurfacing programme itself is decided in the capital budget, in public, with council votes attached. None of that obliges a city to publish a PCI file at all, and The Stare is not claiming Kansas City has stopped measuring its pavement. There is no evidence of that in anything above, and we looked.

What survives the defence is narrower, and it holds.

The portal carries a file named for the measure residents most want, it holds one row from 2017, it is queued for deletion, and it is still being served to people who go looking — 510 of them. Next to it sits the list of streets to be resurfaced, 1,570 segments with no date on any of them, last written in 2021, fronted by a map that labels your block with a row number. Those two files are what a resident who does the sensible thing and checks the city’s own data will find. Meanwhile the 311 channel is current to five days ago. Kansas City has kept the door for asking in good repair, and let the record of the answer go to seed.

Check us

Everything above is one curl away, no key and no account. Paste any of these into a fresh terminal.

# The entire PCI file. All 188 bytes of it.
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/fw8j-csny.json"

# 1,570 resurfacing segments. Alias the count -- see the warning below.
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/29kx-jr9v.json?\$select=count(1)%20as%20n"

# Direction prefix missing on 599 of them.
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/29kx-jr9v.json?\$select=count(1)%20as%20n&\$where=prefix%20IS%20NULL"

# The resurfacing requests: 4,850 resolved of 4,909, averaging 8.4 days.
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json?\$select=current_status,count(1)%20as%20n,avg(days_to_close)%20as%20avg_days&\$where=issue_sub_type%20in('Resurface%20Streets','Resurfacing')&\$group=current_status"

# The category, the timestamps, and the seven overlapping band definitions.
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/fw8j-csny.json"

One warning, because it will bite you. $select=count(1) comes back under the key count_1. If you strip the non-digits to get at the number, the 1 in the key survives and you get an answer with an extra leading digit that looks perfectly plausible. Parse the JSON, or alias the count to something without a digit in it, as every query here does.

Sourcing. Every figure was pulled on September 19, 2026 from Kansas City’s own open-data portal at data.kcmo.org — datasets fw8j-csny (Street Condition Ratings), 29kx-jr9v and 74z9-yu3f (Street Resurfacing, table and map), and d4px-6rwg (311 Call Center Reported Issues) — using unauthenticated requests and server-side aggregates. Dataset timestamps are read from each asset’s own metadata. The 311 file grows daily, so its counts will have moved by the time you read this; the two street files have not moved since 2021 and 2017 respectively.

The 311 phone number and channels are carried over from this paper’s September 10 guide to filing a 311 request, where they were sourced to a city department’s own page. www.kcmo.gov refuses automated requests at every free rung and did again, so the city’s own help pages could not be archived alongside this. maps.kcmo.org returns 404 and gis.kcmo.org redirects to a login, so no route to the city’s GIS services was available either. The full capture, the findings, the six claims we deliberately did not make, and a re-runnable query for every number are in the packet at editorial/_sources/street-repaving-2026-09/.