The caption says "without." The ordinance says "with."

There is an ordinance sitting in front of a Kansas City Council committee that says two different things about the same $1.9 million contract, and it has been saying both of them for weeks.

Ordinance 260711 would renew the city’s contract for curbside traffic control at Kansas City International Airport. Those are the people who keep the arrival and departure lanes moving, 365 days a year, from nine in the morning until two the next. Sixteen of them, plus two supervisors, every day, at an airport that handled about 11.9 million passengers last year. It is not a glamorous line item. It is the reason you can stop the car.

The disagreement is about what happens after this year.

The entry in Legistar, the city’s public legislative database, is the line that appears on the printed agenda, that the city’s own search returns, and that any reporter or resident or automated feed pulls when they ask what the Council is considering. It reads that the ordinance authorizes the procurement manager “to amend and renew the contract for up to four (4) additional one-year terms without City Council authorization.”

The ordinance attached to that entry, the document that would actually become law, reads in Section 2 that the procurement manager “is authorized to renew the contract for up to four (4) more additional one-year terms with additional Council authorization.”

One word. Opposite meanings. The first says the Council is done voting on this contract after this month. The second says it has four more votes coming.

The likeliest explanation is the boring one, and it favors the city

Start where the evidence actually points, because it does not point at a scheme.

The ordinance draft is the document with the sign-off blocks on it: the Director of Finance’s certification that the money is there, and an associate city attorney’s name typed beneath it. The docket memo filed with it, the one department directors are required to write, summarizes the ordinance in its own executive summary as authorizing those four renewals “with City Council authorization.” Two of the three documents in the file agree with each other, and they are the two a lawyer touched.

They are also using the department’s house language. Searching every ordinance in the city’s archive for that exact construction — “with additional Council authorization” — returns two other matters. Both are General Services Department procurement ordinances. Both passed. Both passed as committee substitutes, meaning a committee rewrote them before the full Council said yes.

So the ordinance text is normal. It is what this department writes when it renews a contract, and it is what the Council has approved before. The caption is the thing that does not match.

A drafting error looks like this: the caption is the one line in the file nobody has to sign.

Which of the two was written first, the public record does not say, and this newspaper is not going to pretend otherwise. The matter was introduced on April 24. Its attachments were not posted until August. Neither the ordinance draft nor the docket memo carries a date anywhere inside it, and Legistar publishes no revision history for the caption, so anyone who tells you the order of drafting is guessing. What can be checked is which version matches the language this Council has actually passed, and that is the ordinance.

There is a second reason to think a correction may already be moving: the ordinance has been held on the agenda twice. Once on August 18, in the Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee. Again on September 1, in the Transportation, Infrastructure and Operations Committee, which now has it docketed for September 29. Ordinances get held for all sorts of reasons, and neither hold is recorded anywhere as being about this. But holding a matter twice and moving it between committees is consistent with something in it being reworked.

Which does not make the caption harmless

Here is the part that survives the generous reading.

The caption is not a summary of the record. For most purposes, it is the record. It is the line printed on the committee agenda that a resident reads to decide whether to come downtown and speak. This newspaper checked two archived copies of that agenda, and both carry the caption exactly as it reads now. It is what comes back from the open data interface that every civic-tech project, every newsroom scraper, and every one of these articles is built on top of. Almost nobody who encounters Ordinance 260711 will open the attachments. Anyone who does not will come away believing the Council is about to hand over four years of renewals, because that is precisely what the city’s own public record tells them.

Nor is the caption stale in the sense of forgotten. The city touched this matter’s record on September 1, the day the committee held it. As of this writing it still reads “without.”

The fix is a keystroke. Until someone makes it, the public file on a ten-million-dollar question is wrong in the one field most people will ever read.

Three prices for one year

While reading the attachments, read the numbers, because there are three of them for the same twelve months of work.

The ordinance and the docket memo both say $1,942,859. The Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity Department’s contractor utilization summary, dated August 28, says $1,942,827.82, thirty-one dollars and change lower, which is the kind of gap that is somebody rounding and not worth a paragraph on its own. The General Services presentation prepared for the committee uses that same figure.

Then there is Modification No. 1, the contract-modification form sitting in the same packet as the other four documents. It renews contract 6224020014 for one year, May 1 2026 through April 30 2027, at $1,867,859.00.

That is seventy-five thousand dollars below the number in the ordinance the Council has not voted on — a suspiciously round gap, and one nobody has explained on the record.

The form is not signed. Its signature line, its title line and its date line are all blank, and the only image on the page is the city seal at the top. So it is the version of the paperwork the committee was shown, not proof that anything has been executed. That cuts both ways: it is weaker evidence than it first looks, and it is also the only document in the packet that states a price the city’s own procurement office wrote down for this renewal.

Note the term on that document too. The year it covers began May 1, 2026, and the docket memo agrees, starting its own table of future years at May 1, 2027. The Council is scheduled to authorize that term on September 29, 2026, four months into a year of work already under way, at a price the ordinance in front of them does not name. None of that is necessarily improper; contracts routinely operate under prior authority while paperwork catches up, and this one is expressly funded from previously appropriated money. But a councilmember voting on September 29 is voting on $1,942,859, and the modification in their own packet says $1,867,859.

This newspaper does not know which figure is correct. Neither, on the face of the file, does the file.

What else the packet says plainly

The money is not general revenue. It comes from the Aviation Fund, account 27-8300-622310-B: airport money, budgeted for the coming fiscal year at $290,424,363 in expenses against $289,943,259 in revenue. The Office of Management and Budget confirmed on the memo that no general fund supports it and that the fund carries no structural imbalance. Anyone who tells you this is coming out of your property taxes has not read it.

This renewal was not competitively bid. The docket memo answers “No” to whether the contract came from an invitation for bid and “No” to whether it came from a request for proposals, writing in “A Cooperative agreement” instead. The underlying contract was competitively solicited and drew two responses. LAZ Parking Midwest, LLC won it.

When it won it is a fourth thing the packet disagrees with itself about. The presentation prepared for the committee says the contract was solicited and awarded in June 2024. The modification form says “Original Contract Signed: 05/01/25.” Those can both be true, since an award and a signature are different events, but eleven months is a long gap and nothing in the file accounts for it.

Two staffing subcontractors, Image Staffing, LLC and Crowd Systems, Inc., hold $246,108 each. The city’s diversity goals on the contract are 11 percent minority-owned and 11 percent women-owned participation.

Under “Prior Legislation,” on a document that describes itself as the first renewal of a contract awarded two years ago, the memo says: N/A.

If all four renewals happen

The memo does the arithmetic itself, in the section asking about future fiscal years: $2,024,673 for 2027–28, then $2,112,408, then $2,204,092, then $2,299,901 for 2030–31. Add the renewal on the table and the city’s own projection for keeping the KCI curbs clear through April 2031 is $10,583,933.

That figure is a forecast rather than an appropriation. It is also the number that makes the difference between “with” and “without” worth one keystroke of someone’s attention.

How to check this yourself

Every document behind this story is public, free, and takes about four minutes.

Go to kansascity.legistar.com and search the file number 260711. Open the matter. Read the title on the screen. Then open the attachments (there are five) and read Section 2 of the one called “Ordinance draft,” and the effective date and dollar amount on the one called “MOD 1.”

You will be looking at the same disagreement this article is about, in the city’s own file, without asking anyone’s permission.

The committee takes it up September 29.

The Stare asked for no comment on this story and drew no conclusion about anyone’s intent. Every fact above is quoted from a document the City of Kansas City published itself. Where two of those documents disagree, both are printed.