KC names park planned to cap downtown freeway. When could construction start?
Kansas City’s long-planned project to put a park over a downtown interstate officially has a name.
Officials announced Friday that the park formerly known as the South Loop Project is now called Roy Blunt Luminary Park, after former U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, who represented Missouri in the Senate from 2011 to 2023 and helped secure nearly $30 million in federal funding for construction.
Roy Blunt Luminary Park will turn a portion of Interstate 670 through downtown Kansas City into a tunnel and place a 5.5-acre park on top, reconnecting downtown to the Crossroads and beyond after it was cut off by highway construction decades ago.
“The determination of Kansas City, Downtown Council, and Port KC to create an extraordinary public space in the middle of downtown is something that I’ve been pleased to be a part of,” Blunt said in a statement. “I was lucky to get to represent Missouri and Kansas City in the U.S. Senate and as Missouri’s Secretary of State. This park will reconnect communities and be another place that helps define Kansas City as one of America’s great cities.”
Blunt said it’s an honor to be associated with the park and his family joins the appreciation.
The South Loop park project has been in the works for years. The exact timeline to begin construction remains unclear, but officials say it will begin by the end of the year.
Meredith Hoenes, director of communications for Port KC, said Friday that work to design and engineer the project continues behind the scenes. The city contracted with JE Dunn and Clarkson Construction in December to begin pre-construction planning.
She said the project team is still waiting on a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency that the project would have no significant environmental impact. A lengthy environmental review process has been ongoing.
“There’s still a lot of work happening. I promise you, it’s not just sitting back and waiting for that approval,” Hoenes said. “When we get that approval, we will hit the ground running.”
The team had hoped to have the park’s deck done by the FIFA World Cup in summer 2026, but that’s likely off the table as the project has fallen behind schedule. Officials will pay close attention to handling traffic and construction during the event when the time comes, Hoenes said.
The Roy Blunt Luminary Park, estimated to cost roughly $217 million, will be funded through a mix of federal, state, local and private dollars. By December, local leaders had raised at least $141 million for the project.
The city’s application for a $65 million loan from the federal government through a financing program for transportation infrastructure projects remains pending.
According to federal records dated April 1, the city is listed as an applicant with a completed letter of interest for a loan for the South Loop project, and the application has a projected “financial close” in the last three months of 2025.
Further information about the status of the city’s application for the federal loan was not immediately available.