Kansas City celebrates $174M streetcar grant. Construction may start this year
A long-awaited funding agreement to extend Kansas City’s streetcar south along Main Street is now official, signed by local and federal officials on Friday.
That secures $174 million to extend the streetcar line from its current endpoint at Union Station south along Main past the Country Club Plaza to the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Kansas City has been planning for the extension for years. This fall, the Federal Transit Administration pledged $50 million to keep the project moving and quickly committed to the full $174 million Kansas City requested, kick-starting a project that will nearly triple the length of the streetcar line.
“Today is a great day for Kansas City,” Tom Gerend, executive director of the Kansas City Streetcar Authority, said at a Friday morning news conference. He said the agreement represented the largest transit grant in the region’s history.
Gerend, Mayor Quinton Lucas and other officials celebrated the news and thanked the congressional delegations from Kansas and Missouri who pushed to make it happen.
Lucas said that when he was growing up, people would talk about having fixed-rail public transit in Kansas City. People in the 1990s and 2000s said “it couldn’t be done,” Lucas said.
“But we see now that it’s come to realization and that we can do so much more from here,” Lucas said.
With the funding agreement in place, construction is expected to begin late this year or in early 2022, according to a release from the Kansas City Streetcar Authority. In all, the project is projected to cost $351 million. The federal grant amounts to about half of the project budget.
The other half will come from taxes generated by a Transportation Development District along Main through Midtown, where a special sales and property tax will be levied.
The owner of a home valued by the county at $200,000 will pay an additional $266 per year, streetcar officials have said. The owner of a commercial property with a market value of $1 million will pay $1,536 more per year.
Right now, Kansas City’s streetcar begins near City Market and runs the two miles south along Main to Union Station. The southern extension will run another 3.5 miles, ending at 51st Street and Brookside Boulevard in front of UMKC.
Already, developers and civic leaders say there’s excitement to transform old buildings and bring new businesses to Midtown as the extension transforms the already-popular streetcar into a more robust commuter system.
Federal officials have also pledged funds to extend the streetcar north from City Market to the riverfront, connecting apartments, the Bar K dog park and future hotel and housing developments to the rest of downtown.
The first streetcar is expected to run to UMKC in 2025. The timing of the northern extension hasn’t been determined yet.
