‘Keeping me up at night’: Amid budget woes, Lee’s Summit eyes staff, program cuts
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- One plan under consideration would cut around 72 full-time equivalent positions.
- Under that proposal, a hiring freeze and job cuts would save the city around $7.6 million.
- The city is also eyeing around $4.6 million in service cuts to programs.
Lee’s Summit city officials are considering an array of significant cuts to staff and programs as they prepare the city’s new budget, which will go into effect in July.
In a presentation about budgets for the city’s general fund and public safety sales tax to the City Council’s Finance and Budget Committee last week, City Manager Mark Dunning floated a plan to council members that he said would scale back the city’s fiscal year 2027 budgets to 2025 levels.
Under that proposal, the city would cut around $4.6 million in services and implement a hiring freeze and job cuts to save around $7.6 million. Around 72 full-time equivalent positions would be cut under that plan. Some of those cuts would be to vacant positions, Dunning said.
The city has around 600 full-time equivalent positions funded under the general fund in the fiscal year 2026 budget.
“I will tell you that preparing this budget is keeping me up at night, not only me, but I’m sure you all, as our governing body, every staff member as part of this organization, certainly our management team,” Dunning said at the April 20 meeting. “It’s a tough budget to put together, I’m just going to say it right up front.”
Dunning said city staff had been notified that the new budget would be “challenging.”
“There would be visible reductions across the organization,” he said. “We’re asking every department to basically go backwards, which is against our grain. We’re wired to do better every year.”
Cutting back to “core services”
As city officials created a starting budget for the new fiscal year with projections and requests from each city department, they estimated a roughly $13.4 million funding gap, he said. That gap includes $7 million in commitments the city has made to firefighters, police and public works employees under new labor contracts, as well as $2 million that city officials are budgeting to boost wages for other city employees, Dunning said.
City officials then scaled back the budget further before arriving at the proposal in line with 2025 numbers. Even under that plan, city officials would still need to fill a funding gap of around $660,000.
Dunning did not detail specific proposed cuts but gave examples of trimming programs in the cultural arts, right-of-way maintenance and mowing, facilities maintenance and non-essential public safety duties.
“I think back to, what is our core services, what is mission-critical that it’s non-negotiable?” he said. “Think of those non-negotiable types of items. We will do this. We must do this.”
Additional options the city could implement include a voluntary retirement incentive program, furloughs, reducing or eliminating pay increases for staff and increasing sales or property taxes, he said.
The city is projecting the general fund to have around $102 million in revenue and for the public safety sales tax to bring in around $14.8 million during the new fiscal year. Funds from the half-percent public safety sales tax go toward the city’s fire and police departments.
Dunning pointed to a handful of reasons for the funding gap, including uncertainty around Jackson County’s property assessments, a “marginal” growth in tax revenues, increased healthcare costs. In addition, the city has a larger commitment to the Missouri Local Government Employees Retirement System and the new collective bargaining agreements with city employees. The city is also working through a pay study and is budgeting money to boost compensation for other staff.
The city is also adding operational expenses for new facilities, the Green Street Market, the Joint Operations Facility — which will have space for fire department officials, emergency operations and police and fire dispatching — and the police department’s south substation, Dunning noted.
City Council discussion
Then-mayor pro tem Beto Lopez, who has since assumed office as mayor, acknowledged the discussions were “uncomfortable.”
“I think (the 2025 proposal) is probably where we need to start, worst-case scenario, in my opinion,” he said.
Council member Hillary Shields, who has since been appointed as mayor pro tem, said she didn’t want to see irreversible cuts or getting rid of staff whose positions would be difficult to fill later and advocated for a hiring freeze before cuts.
“I just want to make sure that we’re being measured and not pulling every single lever before we know exactly what’s going to come down from the county, from sales tax, from everything else,” she said. “Let’s be kind of phased, incremental, ready to make adjustments.”
John Lovell, whose term on City Council has since ended, lamented the city’s budgeting process and pointed to the new contracts with represented employees.
“Shame on me,” he said. “In those negotiations or whenever we’re doing that, probably should have been thinking about our budget more. I’m not saying we didn’t, but we’re making decisions, and then I guess we’ll kind of go figure out how to do it.”
City Council members are expected to consider the new budget further in May.
