After a long and openly-divided debate that ran through four failed motions, the Unified Government Board of Commissioners voted 6 to 3 Thursday, Jul. 16, to notify the state of its intent exceed the revenue neutral rate. In a compromise to get to the legally required decision, the board capped the increase at one mill for both the city and the county.
The vote sets the maximum mill levy at 37.219 mills for KCK, and 36.704 mills for Wyandotte County, each one mill above the current rate, a potential increase of approximately 2.7 percent. While this decision doesn’t set the tax rate or budget by itself, it establishes the upper bound that the UG will work with as it builds the 2027 budget. The budget is scheduled to be introduced Aug. 6 and adopted in late August. A public hearing on exceeding the revenue neutral rate is set for Aug. 24 at 5:30 p.m. in the commission chambers.
Interim County Administrator Alan Howze, presiding over the first meeting since his appointment, opened the discussion with dry understatement. “For my first meeting as interim, we thought we’d start with an easy topic of budget and taxes,” he said.
Commissioner Christian Ramirez (District 3) was not at the meeting, with an absence memo noted at roll call.
A ceiling, not a final rate
Under Kansas law, the revenue neutral rate is the mill levy that would raise the same amount of property tax revenue as the prior year using the new total valuation. To collect more, a taxing body must formally declare its intent, notify the county clerk, and hold a public hearing. Because the county’s total valuation has increased, holding revenue flat would mean cutting the mill levy.
Commissioner Andrew Kump (At-Large District 2) pressed that point for the record, noting that going revenue neutral does not freeze anyone’s bill. A jurisdiction that stays revenue neutral collects only as much property tax as the year before, and mill levies are generally trimmed to offset rising appraisals, he said.
Howze framed the night’s decision as setting a threshold, not a rate. It “sets the ceiling,” he said, and determines how much flexibility the commission wants during its own deliberations. The clerk’s office had to be notified of any intent to exceed the rate by Jul. 20, and an approved budget is due by Sept. 30, a timeline the mayor noted could force a special session if the board asked staff to rework the numbers.
Five rounds of voting
The board worked through the deadlock one motion at a time. Commissioner Carlos Pacheco (District 5) first moved a ceiling of four mills for the city and two for the county, the level the UG staff had proposed. Mayor Christal Watson seconded it, but it failed 2 to 7. A motion by Commissioner Chuck Stites (District 7) to hold at revenue neutral, seconded by Commissioner Phil Lopez (District 6), also garnered only two votes.
A third motion, from Commissioner Melissa Bynum (At-Large District 1), to declare intent to exceed the rate but hold both mill levies at their current numbers, failed on a tie the mayor broke after a confused roll call in which one member switched sides. Pacheco then moved a two-mill city and one-mill county ceiling, which failed 4 to 5.
Commissioner Andrew Davis (District 8) finally moved the one-mill compromise on both sides, seconded by Pacheco, and it carried. Lopez, Stites, and Kump voted no, the first two because they favored revenue neutral, Kump because he wanted no county increase at all.
“Service neutral,” not revenue neutral
Pacheco attempted to reframe the argument away from the tax rate, saying the real question was not revenue but service. “It’s more of a service neutral,” he said. “What level of service are you okay with having?” The cost of running a city climbs every year regardless of efficiency, he argued, and the only way to ease the burden on residents is to grow other revenue. “In order to take less of it out of your pockets, our pockets, everybody in this community’s pockets, we have to expand the pie,” he said. Even at revenue neutral, he added, rising valuations mean “your taxes would still go up.”
In a social media post after the meeting, Pacheco expanded on his vote for residents. Exceeding revenue neutral “isn’t ‘growing government,'” he wrote. “It’s keeping the services you already rely on from shrinking.” Anticipating the call to cut waste, he argued that most of the budget is fire, police, roads, jail, and debt service, and that true waste is too small to move tax bills. “You can’t cut your way out of inflation,” he wrote.
Staff and commissioners spent much of the discussion tracing what the last revenue neutral budget, adopted for 2024, had cost in services. The Street Division fell from 30 full-time positions to 22, community policing was scaled back, and the Parks & Recreation Department cut recreation programming and reduced mowing frequency. Howze said the deeper damage was financial: the UG “gutted the capital side of the budget” to protect personnel, deferring vehicle purchases and maintenance in a way that “grew this deferred maintenance overhang.” The previous deferred maintenance is not becoming apparent in higher maintenance costs for streets, parks, and the jail. Budget staff put the reduction in the mill levy that year at a $24.6 million revenue sacrifice, alongside $682 thousand in senior rebates and a $430 thousand community benefit fund.
Davis defended that record while arguing against repeating it on the county side. The UG’s rebate programs, he said, put more money in the pockets of seniors and people with disabilities “than what revenue neutral ever could do on its best day,” reaching more than 2,000 households. He said he would not put revenue neutral “on the backs of” smaller, non-unionized departments, and that going revenue neutral on the county side “simply is not smart” given thin reserves. Forecasts showed the county’s reserve falling below one percent of its budget under a revenue neutral scenario, with the fund depleted by the end of the decade.
High, and increasing, service costs
Several commissioners used the presentation to explain to residents why Wyandotte County property taxes rank among the region’s highest. Lopez pointed to the many other taxing bodies on a single tax bill. “You want to know why our property taxes are through the roof? It’s not the UG, these other taxing entities,” he said, ticking through school districts, the library, and the community college.
Staff reported that the county’s mill levy of 35.704 ranks 98th among the state’s 105 counties, and that Kansas City, Kansas, collects about $485 in property tax per resident. Deputy budget staff attributed the gap with a suburb like Overland Park to density: Overland Park generates roughly $4 million per mill against the UG’s $2 to $2.3 million, because it holds far more assessed value in a smaller footprint over which to spread police, fire, and infrastructure. Pacheco and others returned repeatedly to a related figure, that the city and county together account for about 45 percent of a resident’s tax bill while providing more than 90 percent of the services residents use day to day. The county alone carries 13 state-mandated services, from the jail to elections, that the state requires without fully funding, with the Sheriff’s Office accounting for roughly 45 percent of the county budget.
Calls to find cuts first
The commissioners who opposed the increase pushed hardest on spending. Stites said the board keeps skipping the first question. “What does it cost for us to run this city and county, and then we can look at what we add on,” he said. “We haven’t talked about what it is that we’re going to cut. All we’ve talked about is how much we’re going to spend.” He compared the budget to buying a truck loaded with options, and pointed to roughly $43 million in discretionary spending identified in a prior budget, most of it on the city side, along with past deals he considered poor value, including the UG property sold to the community college for a token sum.
Kump argued the county could capture its appraisal growth without raising the mill at all, noting that county revenue of $99.5 million against expenses of $100.2 million left a gap of about $750 thousand, less than one percent of the budget. Kump, along with Bynum and Watson, had asked the UG’s legislative auditor to look for savings in third-party contracts and redundancies. “These are not just numbers in front of us,” he said. “These are people’s lives that we’re talking about.”
Bynum cautioned that the board first needs a shared definition of discretionary spending, listing seven constituent requests she had fielded in a single week, from a repaved street to mowing of land bank lots to extra patrols for a frightened older resident. If the board wants to hold the levy steady, she said, it will have to decide which of those it is willing to stop doing.
Commissioner Evelyn Hill (Dist. 4) said the 2024 experience had reshaped her thinking. Residents “pleaded with the commission” to go revenue neutral, she recalled, and then services stopped and hiring froze even as the same residents asked why roads went unrepaired. “Revenue neutral does not mean that taxes will not be raised,” she said. “That’s the part that blew me away.”
Casino grants fund 97 organizations
Earlier in the evening the board unanimously approved its annual Hollywood Casino grant awards, distributing the yearly payment the casino operator makes to the UG. Under the casino’s development agreement, the funds support social services and charitable community activities. Each commissioner and the mayor directed $43 thousand of the approximately $473 thousand award pool.
This year 97 of 129 applicant organizations received awards, averaging $4,876 each. The largest award, pooled from several commissioners’ shares, was $22 thousand to Full Throttle Foundation KC, which provides youth sports performance training and mentorship. The Climate and Energy Project and McNewtons Community Outreach Foundation each receieved $20 thousand.
Honoring a native son’s jazz legacy
Watson proclaimed recognition of jazz trumpeter Carmell Jones, a Kansas City, Kansas, native and Sumner High School graduate who emerged from the 18th and Vine district, recorded as a bandleader by his mid-twenties, and spent years performing in Europe before returning home. Jones died in 1996, and Jul. 19 would have been his 90th birthday. Jazz writer and historian Vince Magers, who has documented Jones’ career for JAM Magazine, accepted the recognition and said he met Jones in 1981 and has worked since to carry “his name and his music forward.”
Parks month and a national honor
The board also proclaimed July as National Park and Recreation Month. Howze used the occasion to note that the Parks & Recreation Department, with more than 90 full-time and 30 seasonal employees, had garnered six awards at the state level and that the National Recreation and Park Association named Director Angel Ferrara its Robert W. Crawford Young Professional Award winner, the only such honoree in the country. Ferrara accepted with a smile, saying parks earn a full month “because parks and recreation is fun.” Howze and Commissioner Bill Burns (Dist. 2) had cut the ribbon a day earlier on a new playground at St. Margaret’s Park.
Other business
The meeting opened with a moment of silence for two UG employees, one from the Board of Public Utilities and one from Parks & Recreation, who recently died. Watson welcomed Howze to his first meeting as interim administrator and Rodney Lucas to his first as permanent assistant county administrator. The board, sitting as the Land Bank Board of Trustees, approved property transfers and 23 applications for single-family homes, and it approved a consent agenda that included a four-year, $500 thousand-per-year federal maternal health grant application, a resolution setting a Sept. 3 hearing on a downtown self-supported improvement district, and the county’s five-year solid waste management plan. All passed 9 to 0.