The Council met Thursday. Neither petition was on the agenda.
The notice deadline for the November 3 ballot expires at 5:00 p.m. today. The City Council held a regular session five days ago with 71 items in front of it, and the two certified citizen petitions were not among them. As of this morning's pull, no further meeting is posted.
The deadline this newspaper has been counting since August 14 expires at 5:00 p.m. today.
Under Section 115.125.1 of the Missouri statutes, a city cannot place a question before voters at the November 3 general election unless the officer or agency calling the election notifies the county election authorities in writing by 5:00 p.m. on the tenth Tuesday beforehand. Counting back ten Tuesdays from November 3 lands on today, August 25.
Between that deadline and the two citizen petitions certified to the City Council on July 2 sits a single procedural fact, and it is the one this piece exists to report.
Seventy-one items, and not these two
The Council met in regular session on Thursday, August 20, at 2:00 p.m., five days before the notice deadline. Under Section 2-42 of the city code, that Thursday session is not extraordinary; it is what the Council does every week. The minutes for the August 20 meeting are marked final in the city’s own legislative system.
Seventy-one items were before the Council that afternoon. Ordinances 260609 and 260610 were not among them.
That is a records finding rather than an inference. The item list for the August 20 session was pulled this morning from the city’s Legistar API and checked against all four file numbers in the petition trail: 260522, 260577, 260609 and 260610. None appears.
The two ordinances themselves are also unchanged. Both remain in status Referred, and the last-modified stamp on each is still July 13, 2026, forty-three days ago. That is the same stamp we reported on August 20, and the same one reported on August 14.
What is scheduled between now and 5:00 p.m.
Nothing.
A pull of the city’s forward calendar for all public bodies, taken this morning, returns 28 upcoming meetings. Five of them are today: the Board of Police Commissioners, the Public Improvement Advisory Committee, the Equity Task Force, the Central City Economic Development Sales Tax Board, and the Mayor’s Commission on Reparations Committee. None is the Council. None is the Special Committee for Legal Review, which has held both ordinances since July 2 and last met on March 23.
The next meetings of any Council committee are three standing committees on September 1. No Council session appears on the posted calendar between August 20 and September 4.
What would still have to happen
One route remains open on paper, and it is worth stating precisely rather than dismissing.
Section 210(b) of the city charter provides that on the written request of the Mayor, or of three or more members of the Council, the City Clerk shall call the Council into special session, and that the Council has the same power to transact business in special session as in regular session. Section 2-43 of the code adds the City Manager to the list of officials who may request one, and directs that the session be noticed under Section 610.020, the Sunshine Law. Seven of thirteen members are a quorum.
The Sunshine Law’s default notice period is twenty-four hours. It is a default, not a wall: the statute permits shorter notice where “for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical,” in which case as much notice as is reasonably possible must be given. So the arithmetic does not by itself foreclose a session today.
What forecloses nothing and settles nothing is the record: as of this morning, no such request has produced a posted meeting.
The suit, stated carefully
A federal lawsuit over the referral is pending in the Western District of Missouri, filed August 5 by the petition’s lead petitioner, appearing without a lawyer. The court deferred his motion to proceed without paying fees on August 13 and ordered a completed financial affidavit by September 14, a date that falls after every date that decides November.
One new entry appeared on that docket on August 21, after our last report. In the free public record it carries a document type of “Hearing” and no text. The Stare is not characterizing an entry it has not read. What can be said is what the docket shows: the complaint has not been screened, no defendant has been served, and no order has issued that would direct anyone to call an election.
The one statutory route to a later notice (the court-order extension in Section 115.125.2, which runs to the eighth Tuesday) is the route Section 703 of the charter refuses for initiative ordinances. There is no live motion in front of any court asking for it.
After today
The clocks that Kansas City has been watching all summer do not stop at 5:00 p.m. They simply stop deciding November.
Day sixty under Section 702 of the charter is Monday, August 31. The committee of petitioners then has ten days, to roughly September 10, to require that their ordinances be submitted to the voters. Those dates now govern which election, not whether November.
We will report tomorrow on what the answer to which turns out to be.
Every fact above was pulled from primary sources this morning and archived: the city’s legislative API for the meeting record and matter statuses, Municode for the charter and code sections, the Missouri Revisor for both statutes, and CourtListener for the federal docket. Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com.