Kansas City officials explain process behind road paving for 2024-25

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - There are big plans to keep paving and resurfacing roads across Kansas City.

For example, the stretch of Prospect Ave between Guinotte and Nicholson Ave. was just completed Tuesday afternoon. While Hardesty Ave. from St. John to Gladstone Blvd. was fully resurfaced on Monday. But one block over, potholes and cracks keep spreading on Drury Ave. as residents wonder when they’ll be next.

For Dominic Tiger, the drive to work and back home just got a lot smoother when he turns on his home street of Prospect Ave.

“It looks like I can drive a little bit faster,” Tiger said. “I don’t have to zig-zag anymore. I can go straight down the road now.”

This is all part of Kansas City’s Street Preservation Program which has resurfaced 500 miles of roads from May of 2023 through April 2024. That’s more than double what was done two years ago. Over the last few years, funding in the city’s annual budget has remained steady for road repairs. In the next fiscal year, Kansas City expects to pave and resurface at least 400 more miles of streets.

“Overall, we have a little over $40 million going into street resurfacing and that doesn’t include some GO bond projects as well,” Kansas City Press Secretary Sherae Honeycutt explained. “Our goal is to get the roads resurfaced and overall, we will have less potholes.”

But none of the progress has reached Alex Anderson’s Street in the Historic Northeast neighborhood. There, two potholes have been forming outside his home. He says the cracks and potholes on his stretch of Drury Ave. are getting bigger. Yet both neighboring streets were resurfaced this year.

“It’s ugly. They skipped us, and I don’t know why,” Anderson said.

“It upsets you because it tears your tires up when you’re driving down the road,” Anderson’s niece Felicia Madrigal added. “They should’ve went here first instead of the next block over.”

Because of a cap on annual funding, not all streets can be resurfaced in the same year. To figure out which ones need work the most, Kansas City uses an Automatic Road Analyzer.

That’s a vehicle equipped with software able to perform roadway data collection tasks, such as identifying street distress and providing staff with an overall condition index (OCI) for each of our maintained street segments. OCIs are then loaded into the asset management system where staff perform analysis and run scenarios to address the maintenance needs of Kansas City streets.

“There’s a lot of coordination that goes into it. So, we can say what street may need it more, but there may be instances where there’s utility work that needs to be done,” Honeycutt said. “We know there’s a project coming up on the street. We work with those utilities what works best for the time so we can get those done or sometimes we have to wait.”

In the long run, Kansas City wants to have every street in need of repairs completely resurfaced within 12-15 years. But in the meantime, you can the myKCMO app or call 3-1-1 to get potholes and cracks patched up.

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