Council - Regular Meeting

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Good evening. It is now 6.01, and we'll call this meeting of the City Council to order. Roll call, please.

Council Member Saper?

Here.

Council Member Bailey?

Here.

Council Member McGrone? Here. Council Member Cain? Here. Council Member Alvarez? Here. Council Member Wells? Here. Council Member Larson? Here. Council Member Click? Here.

Very good. Now we're going to do the Pledge of Allegiance. We have some special guests in the house. We have Scout Troop 1354, who will lead the Pledge of Allegiance, along with Councilmember Saber.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for

Thank you very much, troop. All right, item four, approval of the agenda. Do we have a motion? So moved.

Second.

All in favor? Yes. Any opposed? Motion passes. Item five, comments from the public. If you are a member of the public wishing to speak, please approach the microphone, state your name, and please limit your comment to five minutes. Good evening. How are you guys this evening?

My name's Adam Gray. I serve as the president of Quality Plumbing and Mechanical here in North Kansas City. Not often a plumber gets an open mic, so you guys are kind of dangerous here in this situation. So thank you guys for your time. Just wanted to give you guys a little history of Quality Plumbing and kind of where we came from and what's led us to actually stay in North Kansas City. So Quality Plumbing was established in 1983 as a construction company here in North Kansas City. Back in the 90s, it actually converted to a service company. My family didn't take over quality plumbing until 10 years ago. So it's been established here, though, since the 80s. When my family took over quality, it was six people here in the city. So today, we're about 110 employees. So just right across the street from the fire station. During that time, we launched a mechanical division that does all HVAC as well. During that, We launched that right in the middle of COVID, actually. So I don't think that you guys realize the support of the city. And I think the impact that you guys have on businesses here and the common sense that you guys bring to the city, which makes it such a great place to run a company. So thank you guys for that. So we've been actually searching for a building for almost seven years. So thankfully, I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people in this room trying to find a place within North Kansas City because that's how much it means to us that we would be here. We found a spot right across on 110 West 10th Street, actually. So we'll be remaining a tenant in North Kansas City for years to come. Full service residential and HVAC. So when you think of plumbing or HVAC, we handle it from anywhere from a residential person here all the way to KU Hospital and everything in between, from a no-heat to chillers, coolers, boilers, and providing cranes all the way downtown. So we completely serviced the whole 435 loop, and we actually started a branch in the Ozarks this year as well. But truly, we are proud to call North Kansas City our home. because of the leadership that you guys bring to this and how friendly it can be to businesses like ours. We do a lot of work for you guys, actually, from those types of services. Or last year when you guys had the big break in Mackin Park, we were one of the companies that had the privilege of serving and getting water restored. So again, thank you guys. Thank you for your leadership of this city. Thank you for the common sense that you guys bring to this. makes it a pleasure to do work here. Your decisions that you guys make truly do matter for businesses like us. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I can say from the city standpoint, you've done phenomenal work and a couple jobs that I've hired you personally. I've also been very pleased and we're happy to have you in North Kansas City for the long haul. Further public comments? Good evening. Good evening.

Hi, I'm Bess Bailey, back again from the Community Enrichment Advisory Committee. Just to give you a couple updates about our committee, we have decided to participate in Casey's Pride Parade and would love to give you a little information about that. In our planning, we're meeting for a work session soon to plan out what we'd like to do to update our floats. And then the week before, we'll be assembling our float. And if you know anyone who would like to be a part of the parade or assembling, we'd like for you to email Mike Nichols at mnichols at nkc.org. If any of you want to sign up for that, we'd love to have you walk with us. And if you know anyone who would like to walk with us, please have them shoot us an email. The parade is June 6th. You need to be there pretty early if you'd like to park somewhere reasonable. and we'll have more details for you as we get closer to the event. Thank you.

Thank you. Further public comments? Going once? Victoria, public comment? All right. Moving on to the consent agenda. Do we have a motion on the consent agenda?

So moved.

Second.

All in favor? Yes. Any opposed? Motion passes. Moving on to item 10.

Consideration of an ordinance approving a contract for police services, City of Riverside, bill number 7984, ordinance number 9781.

All right. I'll just kind of briefly go over this, and if we have comments from our police in-house or we have a police officer from Riverside here, that can help us understand anything we might need clarified. So this is basically a co-op agreement to allow our officers to serve voluntarily as off-duty security guards for the Morton Amphitheater. That would come along with an overtime rate, I believe it's 1.5x, and then 16% to cover admin costs and other things. And this would just be, we need to pass this to allow them to have, I believe it's arresting authority. Is that the crux of it?

That's correct.

Okay. Do we have any questions on the matter? Yes, sir. I think we need to make clear that the city will not bear any cost for this.

That's correct. It'll be paid by eventually through pass-through from Riverside and then the people who run the venue themselves will be paying for it.

Yep. And this is, again, it's a voluntary opportunity for our officers to serve as security there.

Any other questions?

Okay. We'll take a motion.

Motion to approve.

We need a first reading.

Second.

All in favor? Yes. Any opposed? Motion passes.

An ordinance adopting and approving an intergovernmental agreement for provision of police services by and between Riverside, Missouri and the City of North Kansas City, Missouri for certain police assistance related to the Morton Amphitheater in Riverside.

I move that bill number 7984 be placed under second and final reading and approved as ordinance number 9781. Second.

Call the roll.

Council Member Saper? Yes. Council Member Bailey? Yes. Council Member McGrone? Yes. Council Member Kane? Yes. Council Member Alvarez? Yes. Council Member Wells? Yes. Council Member Larson? Yes. Council Member Click? Yes. An ordinance approving, well, an ordinance adopting and improving an intergovernmental agreement for provision of police services by and between Riverside, Missouri, and the City of North Kansas City, Missouri, for certain police assistance related to the Morton Amphitheater in Riverside.

All right. And thank you for coming out. Sorry we didn't have any questions for you. Appreciate your help. Hey, you are dismissed. Tell Kathy we said hello. All right. Item 11.

Consideration of an ordinance adopting a sub-award agreement for heat study with Texas A&M University. Bill number 7985, ordinance number 9782. I believe this is you.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. We're very excited to present this sub-awarder agreement in front of you. This is a historic project that we have been monitoring for a while, since 2024. That's when we last applied and were awarded for this NASA grant, and there was reconstruction of the funding structure itself over 2025. And then finally, there was a kickoff at the end of 2025 by the primary investigator who was the lead in this project. That's the Texas A&M University. So the city will entering, I would recommend the city council to consider allowing the city to enter into a sub-award agreement with the Texas A&M University. So there is zero cost from the city's perspective and entering this sub-award agreement will allow staff to recruit laborers and the labor costs will be fully covered by this grant and related equipment and particularly travel as well. This will be a three year project and the funding will be released upon the beginning of each year. At this point we do know that the first year the funding was fully released and the future years are pending but we're We're hopeful to see that coming down very soon.

Excellent.

I will repeat, zero cost to the city, and this is something that we've kicked around a long time, been kind of waiting for it to come to fruition. Studying the heat island stuff is really important, like just getting some knowledge about what can be done about all this. Any questions, thoughts? All right.

Yeah, Council Member Saber. One thing, it's a very important issue, the heat island study, and We were somewhat fortunate here in that we do have a lot of trees to help reduce that effect. But you've noticed in our industrial area, there aren't any. So I'm hoping that'll come up with some data that'll encourage us to extend our tree canopy.

Further thoughts or questions? We'll take a motion.

First reading. Second.

All in favor? Yes. Any opposed? Motion passes.

An ordinance adopting and approving a subaward agreement number M2504447 by and between the City of North Kansas City, Missouri and Texas A&M University related to certain sponsored research services with the prime sponsor being NASA Shared Services Center.

I move that bill number 7985 be placed under second and final reading and adopted as ordinance number 9782. Second. Call the roll.

Council Member Saper? Yes. Council Member Bailey? Yes. Council Member McGrone? Yes. Council Member Cain? Yes. Council Member Alvarez? Yes. Council Member Wells? Yes. Council Member Larson? Yes. Council Member Click?

Yes.

An ordinance adopting and approving a sub-award agreement number M2504447 by and between the City of North Kansas City, Missouri and Texas A&M University related to certain sponsored research services with the prime sponsor being NASA's Shared Services Center.

Item 12.

Consideration of an ordinance approving accounts due and payable by the city through May 15, 2026. Bill number 7986, ordinance number 9783.

First reading.

Second.

All in favor? Yes. Any opposed? Motion passes.

An ordinance authorizing payment for certain accounts due and payable by the city through May 15, 2026.

I move that bill number 7986 be placed under second and final reading and adopted as ordinance number 9783. Second. Call the roll.

Council member safer. Yes. Council member Bailey. Yes. Council member McGrone. Yes. Council member Kane. Yes. Council member Alvarez. Yes. Council member Wells. Yes. Council member Larson. Yes. Council member click. Yes. And ordinance authorizing payment for certain accounts to impale by the city through May 15th, 2026. All right.

Staff comments.

Wow.

Right. I know.

Now let's slow it down. Here we go. Usually still writing public comments at this point. Um, All right, tonight we have the monthly department reports. Then additional from that, I believe Kim has a staff comment, and Stephen will come out from behind in the back and has a comment for everybody. And maybe, Stephen, do you want to go first? It might be easier if you go first.

All right. This is the shortest one I've been to in a long time. If you guys remember, we've been working on launching an app for the city, sort of a citizen engagement thing. We've been working with GoGov, and we're pretty much ready to launch it. We're going to kind of call this a soft launch, but it's available to download. It is, of course, free. If you search for Northtown Now, that's our branding on the app, either in the Google Play Store or the Android thing. I don't ever get into the Android side, so I don't know what it's called. So starting tomorrow, we're going to turn on the citizen request feature, so you can start using that to contact the city about things that you see or that you want taken care of. The notification part will be turned on as well, so you can start signing up for notifications. This is, like I said, kind of a soft launch, so we're going to run it for about a week with both systems in place while we work out the kinks to make sure we get everything good. But I think we're ready to go, and we're all excited to get it started.

All right, and thank you for your work on this. I don't know if anybody wants the gory details. We've been at this for, what, a year now or so, trying to workshop and sandboxing and all the different testing and functionality. This is a really cool thing, and thank you for spearheading this, for working on it so hard. My understanding is that, for example, a resident notices a pothole, they can take a picture, ship it in, that will go to the appropriate staff position to check that out, and if Two or three people see the same pothole, those will be aggregated, and they won't continue to ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. And then staff can, as they're working through the process, put updates in the system to let people know, hey, thank you for sending it in. We're working on it, that kind of thing, which would be great. And then there's some options to get different types of notifications from the city, and we'll build those out as we go. Yep. Awesome. Very excited for this. Any questions for Stephen on this one? Linda?

What was it called again? I'm sorry, North Town.

North Town Now. North Town Now.

Okay.

And Kim is going to communicate the heck out of this thing with the various newsletters and things that she does, so we're coinciding with all that, so.

I was going to ask in relation to it being a soft rollout, do you want us to encourage everybody who's watching and at home to go ahead and sign up, or do you want to wait?

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so everybody sign up.

As soft launch meetings, we're duplicating systems at this point. There's some overlap, but launch it. Let's go. Awesome.

Love it. Go for it. Very exciting.

All right. Thank you for that.

We'll follow. There'll be a learning curve on this with us, so... I say be patient. I don't mean it will take forever, but we're getting to know it too. But staff have already been working with it and testing each other out and all that, so it should go pretty smooth.

Yep. And so staff understands the expectation is not to change what you do. This is just a way that we can have two-way communication. So for any staff member watching this meeting, do not stress about this. This is supposed to be helpful to the workflows. There will not be extra burden on staff. All right, who else has got stuff?

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Mike's judging my list. I said I would keep it to 45 minutes. Each item, yes. We're going to go back to 1912 when the city was founded. Just real quick, we had mentioned this several meetings ago, actually, when Council Member Bailey had discussed the opportunity of looking at our riverfront property, perhaps in a different light. I had mentioned that there's some grant opportunities for planning purposes. That window has opened. So we have about a month, should the city council wish to put in for what's called the Planning Sustainable Places Grant, The city has been fortunate to be awarded several of those. It is an 80-20 grant, meaning that 80% of the cost is offset from our federal friends, and we pay about 20% of the remaining. There has been a lot of conversations about what the riverfront could look like, both in the metro and here in North Town specifically. And again, what it would do is kind of a feasibility study to get an understanding. We would work in conjunction with the Levee District to get an understanding of what could be possible within the city-owned land and along the shores of the Missouri River as it touches North Kansas City.

Okay, it works. Excellent. Thank you for that. And I also will note that I went down, I think I mentioned this last time, went down with a contingent with the Levee District, City of Kansas City, and Port KC representatives to ride the top of the levee and talk about what could be accomplished if we work together. With this in play as well, things like clearing the underbrush along the foreshore to see what land even exists that we can start planting these sustainable places around. There were whispers of the fact that Parkville has a park on the wet side of their levee, so it's possible. I'm not trying to freak Victoria out yet. That comes later. But it is a very cross-jurisdictional area, and I do think there's excitement on both sides of the city line on working on something like that. So I would love to see this advanced. Is council generally supportive of moving forward the planning sustainable places grant? Head nods. Head nods. Okay, I see eyebrow nods. Okay. Okay.

Two more quick things. I'd like to thank everybody who came out for the Civic Canvas Art Dedication and Art Walk this last weekend. Those pieces are in place. There are eight of them throughout the metro, and we got to hear from the youth artists this last weekend. Speaking of youth, next week we will be taking applications for our Youth North Kansas City Academy. So this is patterned off of the Citizens Academy. It will be kind of a summer camp. Week one will be for That cohort will be for 8-year-olds to 12-year-olds, and then the second week will be 13- to 17-year-olds. More information will be available on our website, but just so you know, we will be opening up that particular program for registration next week. And then just making sure everybody knows that the River Forest Park ribbon cutting is coming up. It is June 18th, 4 p.m. More information coming out.

Who's next? We've got the department reports. We'll just start with Major Kimmel and work down the table. I'm going first. No, no, no. It's Major Kimmel.

Major Kimmel first.

All right.

I'm going first. All right. I got it. Let's point out just one thing on the first part on the report is under training and special events, there's something listed there called live fire combat training. And there were four individuals. There's a picture right to the right of it. There were four individuals that went to this. At the same time, I was at a conference for fire department. It's the largest fire department conference in the world in Indianapolis. And this is just south of Indianapolis. So I didn't have any meetings that first morning, so I went down to take a look at what these guys are doing down there. And I want to thank you guys for giving us the opportunity to do this kind of training because it was the best training I've ever seen. And it's actually like live combat. I mean, they worked these guys to death down there, and they put them through a lot of really hot structures and a lot of real-life stuff that they may see or may never see, but we appreciate you giving us that time and money to do that with these guys because they don't get that opportunity very often. Secondly, along the lines of what Kim was talking about, The federal government released a lot of grants just today, and there's a very quick turnaround time on these. The other one that was released was the SAFER grant, which last year we applied for it, and what it does, it's staffing for adequate resources. response from firefighters, and I applied for it last year. We did not receive it. You guys were on board for it. I would like to ask with a head nod if you would like for me to do the same thing again. Okay, appreciate it.

Good evening, everyone. In our transparency report, I'd like to highlight just a couple of things to you. We hosted a coffee with a cop event and we held our Citizens Academy. We just continue to remain engaged with our community, enjoy interacting with them and meeting them. We also had a couple cases that came to fruition. We had some people held accountable for things they had done in our city, which we remain committed to. And then down on the crime report comparison, I'd like to point out the stealing, auto theft, and property damage between April 25 and April 26. So this time last year, we were dealing with some significant losses from employees. We had several retirements. We had several injured at the time. We had lots of babies, people on maternity leave and paternity leave. So we were short-staffed a lot of the time. This year, we're back to almost full strength. So I just want to point out that having those officers on the street doing their job really does make a difference. And so we just appreciate you guys keeping us trained, letting us hire more people, and remaining engaged with us.

Who's next?

I'll go next. I see no opposition. I have a couple items over here. One is that we did have a Citizen Academy last Thursday as well, and I want to give a shout out to the cohort. That is a great group. There were a lot of good questions and very engaged. So thank you all for your time who participated in the Citizen Academy and all the ones that graduated from it. I find it's very inspiring itself. And then the second part is that we did have a visioning workshop that was held last Monday at the YMCA. We had near 30 steering committee members attended it. And it was like a two hour long session. It was a hot day and the air conditioner was broken. extra thank you for what the input we have obtained and moving forward we're going to have a visioning workshop for city council and the planning commission at a joint session on june the second um ideally i believe we're going to have that at the beginning of our meeting so it will start at about six o'clock we assume it will be about 90 minutes so an hour and a half there will be snacks in the waters and i guarantee you there will be air conditioner if it is hot Yep, I just put it out there. I'm confident of our crew.

Good job, Anthony.

And then at the end, I wanted to kind of mention about the Safe Streets for All. That last meeting I kind of gave everybody an update that there is a demonstration grant that is open right now. So this past Monday, I actually got an update for the estimated cost. They broke down into details. I wanted to share with you and make sure we're still following the direction. So they are breaking down to three big categories. One is the improvements for all the crosswalks along 32nd and House Street. There are about total 10 of them. They include the speed humps, the beacon flashing lights, and all the bump out or delineators we need to create. And then so all of that probably totals up close to I believe 325,000 for all of those. And then There is a component for the pedestrian plaza that is on Howe Street by the high school that we are proposing some demonstration foldable bollards so they're removable to not change the current school operation character, but to allow the pedestrian plaza to be created as well. That is, we got the estimate cost to be about $95,000. So these two go hand in hand and together they're close to 420,000. And then there will be a third component that was the striped bike line that we're exploring and see if we can demonstrate that. That is particularly going from Clark Ferguson and all the way to Armor and giving all the civic uses we currently have and all the regional impact our civic uses currently have for the Mackin Park and the library, we would like to bring people and the attraction down to Armour Road to our business area. So this is something I think will be beneficial overall. And that itself will be about $195,000. So all of these costs add together about $620,000. And the grant will cover 80% of it. And the city will pay 20%, so up to about $120,000, I would say. And that includes all the total construction costs, the engineering costs, data collection, before and after. That is a planning component. and then the community engagement and a 20% contingency, all included in this estimation. So if city council could give me a nod head or shake head, and that can provide some clearance for staff to pursue this grant, and we're hoping to submit the application this Friday.

I see a lot of head nods. Thank you for that.

All right. Thank you all.

Also wanted to note, thank you for code enforcement getting the yard signs out if the grass is long. Starting to know, hey, look, they're seeing this. They're putting the big fluorescent signs in, staying on top of things.

Absolutely. You're the only one I heard so far thank us for doing that.

There you go. Yeah. Good. Good.

All right.

Anthony?

I'll keep mine brief tonight. The monthly numbers for Public Works and project updates are in the report. And all I'd ask is just everyone have patience while we get around to all the neighborhoods and areas from the storm last night. We had a lot of tree damage. There was a lot to clean up. We had a lot of infrastructure damage as well. So it's just going to take us a little while to get around to everything.

Excellent. And thank you to the crews and everyone out there making the trees disappear as they fall. I've heard from a number of folks in the neighborhoods, a couple questions. If they see a tree that's touching a power line, do they call us or do they call Evergy? Either way. Or the fire department, I guess.

Or the fire department. Yeah, they should not go near that and call us immediately or Evergy.

Okay. And then the other one is, are we cleaning up all limb debris in the public view or not? Are we doing anything with people who have limbs fall in their backyard? What is our purview on this?

We will not leave the right-of-way. Our crews cannot leave the right-of-way to go into private property. If there's limbs in the front, then we will normally collect them. Again, if people are bringing a large amount to the front from the back, that's very difficult for us. Not exactly what we're geared for, but the goal right now is everything that's in the front right-of-way easements we would be collecting. Very good.

Further staff reports? Nicholas?

Good evening. Just a couple quick updates. One, we have promoted Lisa Larkins to our accountant position to fill in for Brad, who's retiring in about a month. So we will be interviewing for her current position in the next couple of weeks. We have also received about 12 bids for our different software packages that we have in the city, our finance, billing, licensing modules. Looking forward to reviewing that over the next couple of days and then getting some demos set up and hopefully some good key upgrades to those services. And then finally, I will be out and have been out this week issuing license citations. So we've got about 45 on that list. Some are just straight up expired licenses. Some are ones that just need to get documentation that we've been waiting for for a while. So if you see me out there, that is what I am doing.

Thank you. I'm assuming you're going to mention May 30th? Yeah, yeah. All right. That's all for me.

Very cryptic.

All right.

No more staff comments? Casey? Victoria? Steve?

You got anything?

All right. Okay. Councilmember comments, starting with Councilmember Saper.

Had some meetings, public meetings lately, and one of the things that have come out of those public meetings is that people want to move ahead with our new animal control facility. We've got it budgeted. And the question is, what's its status and how fast can we move on this? Another thing that's come to my attention is apparently we have an ordinance in our code, 924.050, fortune telling, et cetera. The carrying on of the practice, trade, or calling a fortune telling Phrenology or palmistry within the city is prohibited. My question is why? And how many of these other ordinances and codes do we have that really don't pass the why test? And I would hope that the enhancement committee would move forward on some of these. And they just don't belong. We need to, you know, give people the chance to do things that I might not want to do. Actually, I don't. But others might. And what harm does it do to me if they do it? That's it.

Council Member Bailey. I want to thank Public Works for the new stop sign. Live close to that. It's much appreciated. I think a lot of people will appreciate that. And then also, congratulations, Lisa Larkin, for the promotion. Council Member McGroun.

I want to take a minute to shout out Public Works, not just for everything that they did during the storm and all the time, but this is Public Works Appreciation Week. And everyone in the Public Works Department is awesome. Not that the rest of you aren't, but this is their week. And if you wouldn't mind, if you are a social media user and you are a part of our North Kansas City Neighbors Facebook page, please go there because our Public Works Department is posting things every day this week, and the information is great. And make sure you tell them why you like them. If you don't or if you have complaints, please save those for next week. All right, thanks.

Council Member Kane.

I want to thank Adam and Bess for giving public comments tonight. And in lieu of some apartment tours lately, I've been meeting with Ward 3 businesses to kind of get to know them a little bit better, learn about their contributions to North Kansas City. So I wanted to thank them tonight. Andy McConnell at McConnell & Associates. I met with him last week. For those that aren't familiar, it's a fourth-generation business in North Kansas City that specializes in pavement services as well as sports construction services. So thank parking lots, driveways, but also pickleball and tennis ball courts, running tracks, that kind of thing. They're located at 12th and Iron and have about 140 full-time employees, and I believe around 200 if you account for seasonal employees. It's also the summertime, and in that spirit, I wanted to meet with the rabbit hole, So I met with Pete Callen, one of the co-founders of the Rabbit Hole near 14th and Knox, for those that have not yet been. The Rabbit Hole is a museum that celebrates children's literature and brings it to life. There are about 20 staff for museum operations and 20 full-time artists that work to build these exhibits and these installations. For those that haven't been, you should. It's incredible. They've got a lot of events coming up, some that are more focused for families, but also once a month, adults-only nights for those 21 plus. So I definitely recommend you all check it out. And finally, my last Ward 3 note, on Saturday, May 23rd, the Splash Park at Dagg Park is open at 10 a.m.

Excellent. Council Member Alvarez.

Yes, sorry, I want to thank Troop, I think it's 1354, is that it, for doing the Pledge of Allegiance for us. Thank you, and I'm glad you're still here, so we can thank you for that. Thank you for Adam Gray that came out with Quality Plumbing. Didn't realize they'd been around that long, so it sounds like they have a really good business going. Also, again, thanks to Bess Bailey for giving us an update on what they're doing, so I appreciate that. so I should have asked I apologize I should have asked this earlier when they were here but for the police department reference to Riverside just a quick question you guys will have arrest powers we still don't really have a place to take prisoners or if someone's arrested is that Riverside's problem or is that something that will be Riverside's problem okay that's all I wanted All right, and then just wish everybody next Monday a happy Memorial Day.

That's it.

Council Member Wells.

Yeah, thanks for everyone who came out and made public comments. Like others, I want to shout out Public Works Department and the rest of the city's emergency staff who went out and handled trees and downed tree limbs and things like that very efficiently last night. It was really inspiring to see. be looking out my front window and wondering if my house was going to fall down and knowing that North Kansas City staff were already out in the streets and taking care of business. So a big shout out for that in Public Works Week. It was nice to hear all the talk tonight about Citizens Academy. I believe that the library, Citizens Academy session is later this week, and the Historical Society put together a little library history display. So if you happen to be in the basement of the public library, please stop by and check that out. Also want to thank both Chief Freeman and Chief Williams for showing us around both the police department facilities and the fire department facilities today. It was great to just learn more about the work that your staffs do and how we can help as a council support your department. So that was really great. And then on that same note, taking part in the fire pumper push-in ceremony last week was amazing. I learned a lot about an archaic sort of fire department ceremony. And as a history guy, if I can just, you know, as much of that kind of stuff as I can participate in, I'm really happy. One other big shout-out to the North KC Neighbors Group. They had a happy hour up north brewery last week, which was very well attended. They challenged everyone in attendance to go out and meet your neighbors, and I tried to accept the challenge this weekend, and on garage sale day, get out and meet some of my Ward 4 neighbors. I did not myself have a garage sale. I'm still holding on to my stuff. I'm in that phase. I'm hoarding and accumulating, and then one day, one day that garage sale will come, but not yet, but I did get to meet some of my neighbors, so... Challenge accepted, and I hope that everyone else out there does the same. And I know I'm going on long, but just one more thing. I want to echo Ken's remarks about the Civic Canvas Ceremony. It was really great to be out on a Saturday morning and walking around the city with a young artist and city staff. And just thanks to everyone who made that possible and the Crummett Beautification Committee for the work that they do.

Thank you.

Excellent. Council Member Larson.

I also want to thank everybody who came out and spoke during public comments. And once again, encourage everybody who's watching at home, please come out and make your voice heard. I have a couple of notes from the Parks Department. You might notice that we got a couple truckloads of mulch over at the Howell Street Playground. My kids appreciate it. Go out and use it. Well, don't use the mulch. Walk on it. Don't take it for your own gardens. And then also, mark your calendars. June 12th and 13th, the Arts in the Park is happening. This is the 10th year, so we're celebrating. I hope to see everybody come out. It's going to be an amazing event. And I also want to thank Public Works and the Fire Department for coming out last night and all your hard work, as always. Also, one small note. Council Member Wells and I met with Amrise, one of the businesses in Ward 4 that I had never heard of before. We met with them last week to learn more about their business, and we also learned that cement and concrete are not the same thing. They specialize in cement, not concrete. Don't make the mistake that I have made. And I just thought this was cool. Their site manager is Kelly Harkness, a woman. Women can do anything. That's all I've got.

Council Member Click.

Amen. I'm really excited about all these grants that are coming through. Just hearing all of the departments making moves is really exciting. A lot of changes for the city. I was really sad to miss the Civic Canvas walk, but have loved walking up and down Armor and just seeing some color. It's nice. And my husband was like, wow, I never noticed those boxes before. And there they are. I'm like, yeah, they're pretty.

There's some color.

It's nice. And then there's, in addition to what Council Member Wells was saying, the library I saw is having a summer reading challenge. is exciting for both kids and adults. I think it was like five books over the summer. You get entered to win a prize. So that's exciting. And we should all be reading more.

So do that.

And the Youth Academy. I wish I'd had something like that when I was growing up. I think I would have. just looked at the city where I lived a lot differently. So really excited for that to get started this summer too. And that's it.

All right. That brings it around to me. A few things out of me. First off, I want to thank everyone who is sending me memes during these meetings. This is fantastic. I've gotten four so far during this meeting. That's a unique experience. So thank you all looking right at you for watching this meeting and sending me Funny memes. So I think I'm going to make a thing out of this. If you're sending memes during the meeting, I'm going to pick my favorite one and maybe give a gift card or something like that. So we'll start that at the next one. The official extension letter to the Flex Bus has been sent. So we're going to kick that forward through 9.30 as we continue to watch guests and their app build out. I'm told it's available soon. And it will be fully functional. Additional note, fairs, we've met with KCATA. They will be returning fairs phase one on June 1st. And they've explained there's a whole ecosystem of fairs and how they're going to roll back out. But you will see fairs start to return June 1st. Flex will continue to be available through September 30th. We also have had a preliminary meeting about North Rail for streetcar and look out for some public meetings coming soon. Details to be shared at that point. But with both of those things in play and a lot of transit stuff kind of in the mix, I do want to get a working group of three council members to become a subcommittee for transit. And so watch for an email coming out here in the next week or so to solicit interest for that. We're going to be meeting with various authorities, the ATA, the Streetcar Authority, KCMO, different stakeholders. So if you have interest in transit, we're going to be looking to kick those off. Beyond that, Northtown Supper 2.0. It's easy to remember because it's 5.30 p.m. on 5.30. 5.30, 5.30. Mackinac Park Festival Shelter. We're going to be serving burgers and hot dogs, courtesy of NKC Health. Thanks to them for setting that up. And come out, we're going to have at least enough for 400 people. So be the first 400 there. We'll also potentially be previewing the screen. We're going to work with Victoria if they're ready for that to roll out. So that'll be very exciting. We're also having some block parties coming out. So 23rd and Swift is going to be our very first apartment to host a block party. And it is, let me get this right too, it is on 23rd Avenue, on the 23rd at 23rd and Swift. Put that on a t-shirt. So if you live at 23rd and Swift and are watching the meeting, congrats. Come and hang out. It'll be right there between Swift and Clay along 23rd Avenue. And then, as Dylan mentioned, Dag Park also opens on the 23rd, 10 a.m. Be there. I will be there. We're going to have a great splashy time. And then the last thing is, so the legislative session in Jefferson City wrapped up, and there's some, I'll just be honest, truly terrible tax policy being put out, and it's really going to be a problem for localities. So keep an eye on this as the language evolves around what the ballot is going to look like, and when it's going to hit a ballot. But there's a proposal to remove income tax. And while all of us probably hate paying taxes, I will challenge you to see what goes away when those taxes stop being paid. And the proposal is to remove the income tax and then raise sales tax. But the part that's not getting communicated is there's now a local offset. So if income tax goes down, sales tax goes up, localities have to drop our taxes to make up for that. And so that's our funding. That's where our services come from. So keep an eye on this as it evolves. This is just a really, really poorly conceived tax policy. That is all from me. Going to item 16.

Consideration of a request to hold in recess into an executive session as requested by the city administrator to be held on this date pursuant to Missouri revised statute section 610.021 to real estate matters for real estate matters.

Do we have a motion? So moved.

Second.

Call the roll.

Council Member Saper? Yes. Council Member Bailey? Yes. Council Member McGrone? Yes. Council Member Kane? Yes. Council Member Alvarez? Yes. Council Member Wells? Yes. Council Member Larson? Yes. Council Member Click? Yes.

All right. At this time, the live stream in Channel 2 will cut off. There will be no further votes or business this evening. Thank you all for tuning in.