How to find out when your water main will be replaced in Kansas City

There is no public list that says when the water main under your street will be replaced. There is a list of the jobs KC Water has already scheduled, a postcard for each one, and a map that is meant to fill the gaps. If your street is on it, that route works.

What it will not give you is a status. The list is called Current Projects, and when The Stare went through it on September 25, 2026, most of the construction windows printed on its own postcards had already ended. The city’s open-data file on main replacement is less help still: it stopped in 2016, and it never said where.

The thirty-second version

• Start here: kcwater.us/projects/current-projects. Scroll to Current Water and Sewer Main Projects. Each job is titled by the streets around it. Click the title for the postcard.
• The postcard gives the construction window, the miles of main, and how to reach the project team. KC Water mails the same card to owners and occupants in the area.
• Not on the list? Try the map on kcwater.us/projects, or call 816-513-0234 and leave a message, or email water.projects@kcmo.org.
• The list has no status. A job on it may be under way, finished, or running late. Check the window on the card, then ask.
• If it is not scheduled, no public record says when it will be. KC Water replaces the riskiest pipe first, and its goal of 28 miles a year would take about a century to cover the system.
• Main broke? That is a repair. Call 311 or (816) 513-1313.

Step by step, in a browser

1. Open the Current Projects page. Go to kcwater.us, choose Projects, then Current Projects, or type www.kcwater.us/projects/current-projects into the address bar. It is KC Water’s own site, free, with no account.

2. Find your area. Under Current Water and Sewer Main Projects, each job is named by its boundary streets: Water Main Replacement: Oak Street to Virginia Avenue, East 43rd Street to East 47th Terrace. The list is not sorted by neighborhood or by street, so use your browser’s find command, Ctrl+F or Command+F, and type your street name. Try the cross streets too, because a job is named by its edges and your street may be inside it.

3. Click the title. It opens a two-page postcard as a PDF. The one for Oak Street to Virginia Avenue says KC Water is replacing about 1.79 miles of main, from July 2026 to May 2027, and invites residents to an online question-and-answer session. The cards carry a map of the area, a line on what the work will mean for traffic and water service, and a contact.

4. If your street is not there, the page says to “enter an address on the interactive map on this page.” The map is not on that page. The link in that sentence goes to kcwater.us/projects, where a city map called the KCMO Capital Project Viewer is embedded. Its instructions: type an address in the box at the top, click the nearest marker or shaded area, then open Details to see the department, the project’s phase (PreDesign, Design, Construction or Closeout), estimated construction start and finish dates, and a contact. The Stare could not load the data behind that map. The city server it draws from refused our connections every way we tried. A browser at home may do better. We cannot tell you whether its dates are current.

5. Ask. KC Water takes project questions at 816-513-0234, where you leave a message, or at water.projects@kcmo.org. Some cards name a project manager with a direct line.

How KC Water picks your block

The honest answer to “when is mine due” is usually “not scheduled,” and KC Water has explained why in public.

In a December 2015 release, the utility said its engineers pulled more than 20,000 records on the pipes, when each was laid and what it was made of, and split the system into more than 70,000 segments, each scored for how likely it is to fail and how bad a failure would be. The riskiest miles go first. That, the release said, is why crews jump from block to block rather than finishing a neighborhood. Some of the pipe dates from the late 1800s.

The goal is one percent of the system a year, about 28 miles of roughly 2,800. At that pace every main in the city is replaced once a century, and the same release calls the program a “100-year investment.” If your street is not on the list, it has not been ranked high enough yet, and no public record shows where it sits in line.

A list of current projects that cannot say which ones are current

The Current Projects page is the best public door into this program, and it has one hole a resident can fall straight into. It has no status. A job is on the list or it is not.

On September 25, 2026, the list carried 28 water main replacement jobs. 26 of their postcards print a construction window. 21 of those 26 windows had already ended. Seven ended in 2024. The oldest belongs to the job around 85th Street to Red Bridge Road and Wornall Road to Blue River Road, whose card reads “December 2022 to March 2024”, thirty months before The Stare checked.

There are reasonable explanations. The windows are estimates printed before the work starts, and utility construction runs late for weather, utilities in the way, and contractors. After the pipe is laid, the street, curb, and lawn restoration can run for months, and a project is not closed until that is done. Some of the 21 are surely finished and simply not yet taken down; some may still be under way. The page cannot tell you which, and The Stare is not claiming that any one of them is late, stalled, or done. The practical point for a resident is narrower: if your street is on this list, the dates on the card are the plan as it stood when the card went to the printer. Call the number.

The Capital Improvements page beside it has the same problem at the level of the whole program. It links a five-year plan and project list for each year, and the newest project list posted there is for fiscal 2023, published in April 2022.

The city’s own record stopped in 2016

Search Kansas City’s open-data portal for water main replacement and you get one file: 2dpc-ia7c, “City Wide Water and Sewer Main Replacement.” Its description says it holds the miles of main replaced “in past (and current) fiscal years.” It has six rows, and its rows were last written on August 30, 2016:

It has no location of any kind, so it cannot tell you anything about your street. The last row is not a year. Kansas City’s fiscal year runs May to April, and 11.64 miles is fiscal 2017 to date as of August 2016, when the file stopped; the only place the file admits that is a column description saying the label exists “so we can chart YTD data.” The row’s own date is August 1, 2017, eleven months after the file was last written. The columns for work in progress read zero on every row that has them, and the 2017 row does not have them.

Measured against the 28-mile goal, the file shows it met in two of five full years: fiscal 2016, and fiscal 2012, the file’s first year.

The file and the utility count different miles

On April 24, 2017, KC Water celebrated “the completion of 100 miles of the Water Main Replacement Program” with a ceremonial pipe signing. The city’s file, by then eight months frozen, already added up to 116.44 miles by the end of fiscal 2016, a full year before the ceremony, and 128.08 counting the partial 2017.

The two can be reconciled. The 2017 release says the program started “a little over four years ago,” which puts its first work in fiscal 2013 or 2014. KC Water’s own 2015 release says it “started in 2012,” so the utility’s two accounts do not agree on that either. Drop fiscal 2012 and 2013 from the file, and fiscal 2014 through August 2016 comes to 89.12 miles. Another eleven miles by April 2017 is well inside the program’s pace. So the milestone and the file most likely count different things: the file includes miles from before the program, possibly from the city’s older small-main replacement work, which KC Water said in 2013 would wrap up by the summer of 2014.

The file never says that. Nothing in it separates one program from another, and a resident, or a council member, reading it at face value would get a different answer from the utility’s own milestone. It is the only year-by-year public record the city has published on the program, and it has not moved in ten years.

If a main breaks

A break is a repair job, and a different crew handles it. Call 311 inside Kansas City, Missouri, or (816) 513-1313, which is also the number at the foot of KC Water’s website, or use the myKCMO app. In the city’s 311 request file the sub-type is Break on Water Main, under Water Service; for no water at all it is No Water. Our guide to filing a 311 request covers how to follow it up. If a replacement job tears up your street and it stays torn up, the paving that follows is Public Works, and our guide to finding out when your street will be repaved is the next stop.

Check us

The open-data file is one request away. The KC Water pages are ordinary web pages and need no command.

# The city's whole water main replacement file, all six rows
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/2dpc-ia7c.json"

# When the file was last written, and what its columns say
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/2dpc-ia7c.json"

Sourcing: the Current Projects, Projects, and Capital Improvements pages at kcwater.us, and the project postcards linked from Current Projects, were retrieved by The Kansas City Stare on September 25, 2026; the construction windows are as printed on each card. The map description is KC Water's own text on its Projects page; the map item's configuration was read from ArcGIS Online, and its data server, mapd.kcmo.org, refused The Stare's connections. Mileage figures are from City of Kansas City dataset 2dpc-ia7c at data.kcmo.org, with its published metadata. The 100-mile milestone, the 28-mile goal, and the risk-ranking method are from KC Water releases of April 26, 2017 and December 9, 2015. The 311 sub-types are from dataset d4px-6rwg. No private individual, address, or property is identified in this piece. The Stare has not established the status of any listed project and does not assert one.