Please join us to provide your feedback on next year’s budget.
The Proposed Budget is posted at www.KCMO.gov/Budget
Lend Your Voice!
It’s that time of year again. The FY 2021-22 Budget was submitted Feb 11th and will be adopted March 25th.
Attendees will have the chance to hear from the Mayor and the City Council, and will also receive an overview of the submitted document from the Budget Office. All attendees will have the opportunity to speak directly to the Council and the general public too.
Tuesday, March 2, 10 am to 1 pm (VIRTUAL)
- Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88454199866
- If you can’t attend the hearings, you can also email your feedback to us at publictestimony@kcmo.org. Please put “proposed budget” in the subject line.
Sample Testimony
Up to 10% of the Federal Rental Assistance funds may be used for housing stability services, including case management and other services intended to keep households stably housed. The city should use these funds to help tenants who will have a hard time securing housing due to their history of eviction or other hurdles.
Fund the HIgh-Risk Rental Guarantee Program
The KC Regional Housing Alliance has created and proposed the KCMO High-Risk Rental Guarantee Program (in your email boxes today from KCRHA), a cost-effective proposal to directly assist high-risk renters in obtaining housing.
a. These federal funds provide a unique opportunity for the city to explore ways in which they can directly help these tenants secure housing.
b. With $1 Million, the city could back up to 277 renter households by providing a guarantee of up to $3,600 to encourage housing providers to accept/lease to high-risk renter households.
c. These funds would only be used in the event that the household is unable to meet their housing payment obligations.
d. Unused funds could be reallocated to help new households over time.
Office of the Tenant Advocate
We’ve heard demands to send $1.2 Million worth of unrequested funds to the office of the tenant advocate. It’s been said that this money would use $934,000 to fund 8 Employees and up to 15 Contract Employees, and over $200,000 to be used for travel, meeting, and printing expenses.
a. The office of the tenant advocate is only 1 year old and we’ve seen no statistics of how they’ve helped.
b. If the city uses all of their money in administration and travel expenses there will be no money left to create any type of program to administer.
c. How will these 23 new positions be funded next year or will we be laying these new hires off when we realize that we aren’t getting more stimulus funds in 2022?
d. You can’t create affordable housing by hiring government employees and starting new departments.
We Need the Police Department Staffed
We need community police officers in our communities to continue to support residents and safe neighborhoods. We need to keep our neighborhoods safe. Kansas City had 3 murders in 6 hours on Sunday alone.
a. Police academy is being slashed for the 2 nd class in a row.
b. We must invest in public safety by funding the police academy.
c. Funding the police academy brings the opportunity to introduce officers with today’s training standards into the police force.
d. We need to continue to create a pipeline of officers coming in during a time when we have had record high crime rates in our city.
e. People judge us by our high crime rate – businesses and potential residences are looking for safe cities. We are on the list as one of the most dangerous cities in the country. And we are at one of the lowest levels of police officers. There is a connection.
Good stuff!