The Kansas City Council held a business session on May 25, 2023, featuring approval of prior minutes, two audit presentations (tree management and water service customer support), and a legislative update from the city's lobbying team. The meeting included questioning from councilmembers, departmental responses, and discussion of state budget and policy outcomes.
City Auditor Doug Jones presented the tree management audit (issued March 13, 2023), finding that Parks Department had not fully implemented the 2021 tree preservation administrative regulation (AR57). Key points:
City Auditor Doug Jones presented the audit of Water Services Department customer assistance for unexpected high water use (issued April 24, 2023). Key findings:
Lobbyists Sam Panateri, Nancy Giddens, and Shannon Cooper presented the end‑of‑session report for the Missouri General Assembly. Highlights:
Meeting adjourned until the next legislative session.
Welcome to today's business session. Our first item is approval of minutes for business session of April 13th, 2023. It's their motion. Followed. Second. The moved and seconded. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Follows. The motion passes. Audit presentation. City auditor, you got you got a good pile. I will note that you are holding. We are holding for today the uh third quarter police spending from the community policing and prevention fund audit. That just relates to the availability of command staff who are required training. We will get them rescheduled as uh timely as we possibly can. Proceed, sir. Yes, sir. Good afternoon, Mayor Lucas, members of the City Council, Doug Jones, City Auditor's Office. We issued our tree management audit in on March 13th. Today's presentation, I will give you the audit objective, provide some background, summarizing our findings and recommendations. You should already have copies of the audit report, the highlights page, as well as the presentation slides. The audit team for this project was Kara Jorgensen, Vivian Zee, and Sue Paulis. This audit focused on how city trees are managed. The parks and recreation department's foresters provide technical expertise related to trees, including inspecting tree health and advising whether a city tree can be saved or must be removed. While parks is responsible for management of city trees, other city departments manage projects that sometimes require the removal and or planting of city trees. Successful department coordination of the city tree removal planting impacts the city's ability to support its goals of preserving and expanding the tree canopy. The tree canopy preservation and expansion administrative regulation issued by the city manager in March of 2021 are the policies and procedures all departments are to follow to remove and replace city trees. Development of the tree regulation began in 2018 through the KC Green and a volunteer effort of city departments and employees. Trees provide a significant benefit to residents, but the city's trees are in decline due to age, disease, and weather. Kansas City's tree canopy has been estimated to provide about 28 million dollars worth of services annually to residents. In 2018, the city's estimated tree canopy was 31% of the land area within the city limits. The city's urban forest master plan, approved by the council in 2020, set a goal to increase the canopy to 35%. The city council has also approved the climate protection resiliency plan and the urban forest master plan. Both plans provide policy direction to the city to actively address climate change. Trees are vital to the city strategy in addressing the climate and ecological emergency. One mitigation strategy in the Urban Forest Master Plan is conserving and restoring city trees through proactive management. Because the maximum benefits from trees are not realized until they are mature, it is important to focus on tree preservation and expansion immediately and remain consistent in our efforts. Because the city tree management regulation has not been implemented, city departments' removal and replacement of city trees may not support the goal of an expanded tree canopy. Regulation requires a permit process and tree replacement ratios. The parks department did not create a permit process as required by the regulation to manage other city departments' removal and replacement of city trees. Instead of issuing permits, park staff have a varying practices to receive tree removal requests and communicate decisions. Establishing the permitting process can assist in managing and enforcing city tree removal and replacement. The department needs to enforce the tree replacement rate. The regulation requires departments to replace trees that are removed at a specific rate. The tree replacement rate increases as the size of the city trees removed increases. Enforcing the tree management regulations replacement ratio supports the goal of expanding the tree canopy. Parks department needs to communicate to other departments its authority over all city trees. City department's responsibility to put to get permits from the parks department to remove city trees, and the tree replacement rate as a replacement costs can be significant. City departments need a clear understanding of the process and city tree replacement costs, so these can be included during project planning.