Reject Amendment 4. Kansas City can decide for itself whether to boost police funding

In the Nov. 8 general election, control of how much tax money Kansas City spends on its police department will go before a statewide vote. Missourians should vote no on Amendment 4 and reject any attempt by the legislature to further dictate to the residents of Kansas City how it should spend their tax dollars.

We’re unequivocally opposed to any measure that would allow the General Assembly to mandate a minimum level of funding for the Kansas City Police Department. The new law, if passed, would require Kansas City to spend 25% of its general revenue on the KCPD.

Empowering the state to impose financial mandates on a local entity is a terrible idea at odds with basic tenets of democracy. Remember the Boston Tea Party protest over taxation without representation?

If Kansas City wants to spend more on its police, then the City Council and the mayor should do so. If local voters don’t like decisions they make, they can quickly make changes at the ballot box. That’s Democracy 101, folks.

But if voters approve this misguided initiative, state control of how Kansas City spends its tax dollars would be enshrined in the Missouri Constitution for the next three years. While the ballot initiative only affects the Kansas City Police Department’s budget, a dangerous precedent of state overreach would be set.

If approved, politicians could use the same approach to control how other cities, school districts and taxing jurisdictions around the state spend their local taxpayers’ dollars. Doesn’t seem right, does it? No, it doesn’t.

Last we checked, the Kansas City Police Department was not scraping by for funds. This fiscal year, the department’s $269 million budget is a 5% increase from the previous year.

Upping the minimum spending level by 5% would cost Kansas City almost $39 million, city officials said. Under Missouri’s Hancock Amendment, unfunded mandates violate the state’s constitution. But this amendment would make an exception for police funding.

Amendment 4 is fundamentally a power grab by the state — a shakedown, if you will — of Kansas City taxpayers who already foot the steep bill for the police department’s annual budget. Adding insult to injury, they do so without a say in how the department operates. A five-member Board of Police Commissioners oversees the department. Four commissioners are appointed by the governor. Only Mayor Quinton Lucas, the fifth member, is accountable to the public.

Across the country, no other police department in a city the size of Kansas City is controlled by a state board. Again, we ask, is this setup just?

Under state law, the city is already required to spend 20% of its total revenue on police, an obligation the City Council has willingly met and gone beyond in recent years. In this past budget year, the council allocated 24.3% of its total revenue to the police force, according to city officials.

Those figures put the lie to proponents of Amendment 4 who claim the Kansas City Police Department has been defunded. The legislature overreacted when Lucas sought early last year to require the police department to spend some of its funds in excess of the 20% minimum on social services and other community programs. It was an unwise move given that the budget had already been approved. A judge ruled no do-overs and stopped the mayor’s efforts to reassign some of the police funds.

But city attorneys were right when they argued in court that Kansas City wasn’t taking funds away from the police department. The City Council only wanted to add accountability measures to a police department that doesn’t answer to the public.

That’s a decision this city — or any city — should be free to make. But Amendment 4 would only write into the state constitution more restrictions on how the city can spend the tax dollars its own residents pay.

Voters should know: The Kansas City Police Department has been fully funded for years. We don’t need lawmakers hundreds of miles from Kansas City telling us how to spend our hard-earned tax dollars. (How would the residents of Poplar Bluff, 350 miles southeast of Kansas City, like it if our lawmakers had a say in how they spend their local revenue?)

On this, Missourians across the state should agree: Vote no on Amendment 4.