How to find out who owns a billboard in Kansas City

There are 593 permitted billboards in Kansas City, and the city will tell you who owns each one. It publishes the list free, on a map anyone can search by address, with the permit number and the owner printed beside the pin.

The trouble is the date on it. The file went up on January 28, 2024, and nothing in it has moved since — not the owners, not the statuses, not the count. Four hundred and six of the 593 signs are credited to a company that stopped calling itself that in 2014.

The thirty-second version

• The map is dataset 363v-j4ey, “Outdoor Advertising Signs,” at data.kcmo.org. Free, no account, 593 signs, searchable by address. Each row gives a street address, a permit number beginning CVOA, an owner name and a status.
• The live file is w8jz-wjgn, the city’s building-permit dataset. The billboard permits are the rows whose permit_number begins CVOA — there are exactly 593 of those too.
• Look up the address on the map, read off the permit number, then check that permit number in the live file. The map is the index. It is not the answer.
• Where they are allowed: within 660 feet of an interstate or national-highway right-of-way, and no closer than 500 feet to anything wholly occupied as a home, an institution or other noncommercial use. §88-445-14 of the Zoning and Development Code.
• Registration is mandatory and must carry the owner’s contact information (§88-445-14, Registration A and C).

Route one: the map

Go to data.kcmo.org and open 363v-j4ey. The whole thing is 593 rows and about 111 kilobytes as a CSV, so you can take it in one piece rather than clicking around:

# Download the whole billboard list as a spreadsheet
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/363v-j4ey.csv?$limit=1000' -o billboards.csv

Every row gives you a point on the map, an objectid, a permitnumber like CVOA-42, a name, up to four face identifiers, a pin, an address and a status. The Kansas City Stare pulled the file on September 18, 2026. The statuses read:

That is the picture the city publishes. Now the date.

The catch: the map was uploaded once and never touched

Socrata, the platform data.kcmo.org runs on, keeps three timestamps on every dataset and hands them back to anyone who asks:

# Ask the portal when the billboard map last changed
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/363v-j4ey.json'

On this file, createdAt, publicationDate and rowsUpdatedAt are 1706442883, 1706442884 and 1706442886 — three consecutive seconds on the morning of January 28, 2024. viewLastModified is the same morning. The file was created, published and filled in one motion, and in the thirty-one months since, neither the rows nor the view has changed.

The owner column is where that shows.

Four hundred and six of the 593 signs — 68.5 percent — are credited to CBS OUTDOOR. CBS spun its outdoor advertising division off as a separately traded company in March 2014, and that company renamed itself Outfront Media effective November 20, 2014, changing its ticker from CBSO to OUT. Kansas City uploaded a file naming CBS Outdoor as the owner of two-thirds of its billboards more than nine years after the name was retired.

Twenty signs carry no owner name at all. The rest run: LAMAR ADVERTISING on 65 and LAMAR on two more, WAITT OUTDOOR on 27, UMB BANK on nine, KLS ADVERTISING and CJF FAMILY, LLC on six each, then a long tail of single signs held by small partnerships, trusts and individual property owners.

Two of those tail entries are what looks like one person’s name spelled two different ways. The names of private individuals are in this file, and The Stare is not reprinting them; the point of counting them is that the city’s registry of who is responsible for a structure hanging over a public road cannot reliably spell its own entries.

In fairness to the city, and it is worth saying plainly: CBS Outdoor becoming Outfront Media was a corporate rename, not a sale. Subsection E of §88-445-14 puts the notification duty on a buyer and a seller within 30 days of a sale, and a rename is neither. The permit record may be naming exactly the right legal entity under a name it no longer uses. That defence covers how the file got stale. It does not cover publishing it, unlabelled and undated, as the current answer to who owns the sign.

Route two: the live permit file, where the statuses have moved

The same permit numbers live in w8jz-wjgn, the file behind the city’s permit search, and that one is current — it took a sign-permit application as recently as September 14, 2026.

# The same 593 permits, read from the live file
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/w8jz-wjgn.json?\$select=permit_status,count(1)&\$where=upper(permit_number)%20like%20'CVOA%25'&\$group=permit_status"

It returns the same 593 permits, and two statuses the map has never heard of:

Five permits left Open-Active, and the arithmetic closes exactly: three revoked, one suspended, one closed. Read back one at a time against the map, they are:

The map credits the first and last of those to CBS Outdoor, the two middle revocations to Lamar Advertising, and the suspension to Waitt Outdoor.

If you are trying to establish whether the sign over your street is permitted today, those five rows are the whole argument for not stopping at the map.

The columns that do not work, and what that means for you

Three of the live file’s date columns are unusable on billboard permits, and it is better to know that than to read meaning into an empty cell:

• expiration_date is empty on all 593.
• issue_date is filled on 95.
• application_date carries a placeholder of January 1, 1900 on 498 of the 593. The 95 real dates all fall between July 2, 2013 and April 10, 2017.

It is tempting to read that last line as Kansas City having permitted no new billboard since April 2017. Do not. With 84 percent of the column filled with a placeholder, the file cannot support the claim in either direction — which is a different thing from the claim being false.

The map’s own columns are thin in the same way. It gives up to four face identifiers per sign — 569 have a first, 418 a second, 37 a third and 20 a fourth, while 24 rows have none — but it records no size, no height, no sign type and no installation date, all four of which §88-445-14 requires an owner to hand over at registration.

One more: the name column has the permit serial glued onto the end of it, so the value is CBS OUTDOOR CVOA 42 rather than CBS OUTDOOR. Group the file by owner in the portal and you get several hundred groups of one. Strip the trailing serial first, and the same company shows up written more than one way — LAMAR ADVERTISING against LAMAR, PORLIER OUTDOOR ADVERTISING CO. against PORLIER, AD TREND INC against AD TREND against ADD TREND COMPANIES, LLC.

A second permit track the map does not cover

The map holds only CVOA permits, which the live file classifies as periodic permits with the work class Outdoor Advertising Sign. There is a second work class, Off-Premises Outdoor Advertising, and it holds 14 permits, six of them still Issued. None appears on the map.

The newest was applied for on March 7, 2025 and issued on September 22, 2025, for 1310 E Truman Road — twenty months after the map was published. Another, CPS-2021-00289, was issued in January 2022 for 4100 Raytown Road, which is the same address where the map still shows CVOA-88 as Open-Active and the live file shows it Closed.

Whether those 14 are new structures, replacements or changes to existing ones is not something either file will tell you; the work class is the only label on them. What is certain is that a reader checking the published map for that Truman Road address in 2026 finds nothing there.

What the code actually requires

§88-445-14 of the Zoning and Development Code, last amended by Ordinance 170365 on May 25, 2017, sets out both halves — where a sign may stand, and what its owner owes the city.

On location, outdoor advertising signs are not permitted in Kansas City except within 660 feet of the right-of-way of highways on the interstate or federal-aid primary system as it existed on June 1, 1991, or on the national highway system. They may not be located within 500 feet of any improvements which are wholly occupied as a residential, institutional, or other noncommercial or nonindustrial use, and separate 500-foot setbacks apply to boulevards and parkways and to public parks and playgrounds. New electronic copy is prohibited; signs that already carry it run under brightness and message-change limits.

On registration, subsection A: “All new or existing outdoor advertising signs in Kansas City shall be registered with the City Planning and Development Department.” Subsection B gives the owner 90 days from the ordinance’s effective date, or 30 days from installing a new sign, and if the sign’s owner does not register it, puts the duty on the owner of the property it stands on within 30 days after that. Subsection C says the registration “shall identify the size, height and type (electronic, static, trivision, etc.) of each sign, shall include a photograph of the signface(s) and structure of each sign, shall provide an address, if one is available, the geographical coordinates of the sign location, and a detailed description of its location, shall state the date on which it was installed, if known, and shall provide contact information for a representative of the sign’s owner.”

Subsection E: “Sign registration is transferable and in the event of sale of the sign, the buyer and seller shall be responsible to send written notification of the sale to the Department within 30 days of the sale.”

The code asks for size, height, type, a photograph, an installation date and a live contact. The published file carries none of the first five, and the sixth is a company name from 2014.

Check us

Every number above came back from one of these. They are free, they need no key, and they will answer you as readily as they answered us.

# the map: 593 signs, and the statuses it froze on 2024-01-28
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/363v-j4ey.json?$select=status,count(1)&$group=status'

# the same permits, live
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/w8jz-wjgn.json?\$select=permit_status,count(1)&\$where=upper(permit_number)%20like%20'CVOA%25'&\$group=permit_status"

# the five that disagree
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/w8jz-wjgn.json?\$select=permit_number,permit_status,main_address_line1&\$where=upper(permit_number)%20like%20'CVOA%25'%20AND%20permit_status%20in('Revoked','Suspended')"

# when the map last moved
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/363v-j4ey.json'

One trap on the way out, because it has bitten this desk already. A Socrata count comes back as [{"count_1":"593"}]. Strip the non-digits out of that to get your number and you will get 1593 — the 1 from the key survives. Parse the JSON.