Rough ride? Utility companies are violating Kansas City street repair rules, audit finds
Reality Check is a Star series holding those in power to account and shining a light on their decisions. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@kcstar.com.
Kansas City motorists have complained for years about roads left rough after utility companies did only minimal restoration to streets they had cut open.
Most annoying of all were the scars left in freshly paved streets, when with better coordination that utility work could have been done before the new street was put in.
So in 2021, the Kansas City Council set stricter standards on street cuts from companies like Spire or Evergy.
Utility companies that need to open up streets to work on lines beneath the pavement are required to get an excavation permit and then restore the street to meet city standards after the work is done.
But a new audit shows that some utilities are not following those new rules, and city inspectors are letting them get away with it because of what Public Works Director Michael Shaw called “process-related issues” in testimony at a council committee meeting on Wednesday.
“It is going to require us to get new software or software that actually helps us do what we need it to do, versus having software that we’re trying to change our process to fit the software,” he said.
City Auditor Doug Jones and his staff performed the audit last year to see whether the new ordinance was making a positive difference. At random, they followed up on 22 instances where street excavation permits were granted for work done between March 2022 and July 2023.
And what they found, according to the audit, was that “some street cut restorations in our sample did not meet the revised standards.”
Auditors found that in 5 out of 13 recently repaved streets, the restorations did not meet those standards. On 9 older streets, 2 failed to meet the standards.
The report said that the city’s data systems to monitor street-cut repairs are faulty and that inspector are incorrectly calculating the degradation fees that utilities are charged. Moreover, the fee schedule is out of date. It was last revised 24 years ago.
Before the current standard took effect in September 2021, utilities were required to only patch that part of older streets that they’d cut into. Now they must resurface a 10 feet-wide rectangle that extends across the full lane.
For streets that are fewer than 5 years old or that have been resurfaced within 5 years, utilities must replace much more pavement to ensure motorists get a smooth ride: a width of 250 feet across both lanes. Before it was 4 feet wide and a single lane.
In response to the audit, Shaw said inspectors are being retrained and that he will look for software fixes that will make it easier for the city to keep track of whether utility companies are doing restorations properly. The fees structure will also be re-evaluated.
This story was originally published January 24, 2024 at 1:32 PM.
