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The Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas has a crucial decision to make at Thursday’s commission meeting about the revenue neutral rate, and the Chief Financial Officer offer says it comes down to an equation that can’t be balanced.
“We have limited resources and we have growing needs,” said Dr. Shelley Kneuvean, the Chief Financial Officer for the Unified Government since 2024.
State requirements
The state of Kansas requires local governments who want to exceed the revenue neutral rate to have a public hearing.
Exceeding revenue neutral means a local government will collect a higher property tax revenue than the year prior in order to address the necessary expenses in its budget.
“Timing is not optimal for us,” Kneuvean said.
The commission has until July 20 to notify the UG clerk of its intent to exceed the revenue neutral rate and to provide the proposed tax rate, or the mill levy, which could change depending on the assessed valuation of homes, which is not up to the UG.
Misconceptions
Kenuvean doesn’t want residents to be confused about what Thursday’s vote is about — it’s about preserving options, not officially deciding about going revenue neutral or not.
“This isn’t the final decision,” she said. “Our recommendation in early August [is], we do hope that the commission will preserve some options tomorrow night.”
Thursday, staff will present information to the commission about budgetary impacts.
“We’re kind of just being neutral in the middle of saying, ‘Okay, here are the needs and financials if you were to go revenue neutral, or we’re presenting an option if you were to keep the mill levy flat,’” Kneuvean said.
The County Administrator will then present a budget proposal August 7, and the commission will officially adopt the 2026 budget at the end of August.
Impacts
Last June, the UG commission opted for a revenue neutral budget for 2025, meaning that they could not spend more property tax revenue than the year prior.
They did this after increased public demand for lower property taxes.
“It's a legal option, but it would have very significant consequences, and it would have deep cuts that would happen in our core services,” Kneuvean said, particularly in reference to the city and county general funds, which are most flexible.
Those core services include police, fire and public safety, and that doesn’t include long range master plan projects, like improvements to ‘deplorable’ stations the fire department has been proposing for years.
Services like transit routes and money for road improvement projects have already been cut in the last year.
Funding for roads went from $8 million to $4 million in the last year, she said.
In total, the UG missed out on $14 million worth of property tax revenue after last year’s vote, and that’s in addition to the millions of dollars worth of cuts made to pay for things like contractual increases or pay increases for union contracts.
The mayor and commission were adamant about not making personnel cuts to public safety this year, but Kneuvean said if there’s another revenue neutral vote, that’s not a guarantee.
“We would have to look very seriously, not just at programs like we did, or things like transit, but we would have to look at operations and positions and so forth,” Kenuvean said.
On the flip side, Kneuvean says sales tax revenue is up and exceeded property tax revenue on the city side 'for the first time in a long time' this year, partially thanks to new jobs coming to the area.
“That means people are coming and they’re visiting our community, and thankfully, we’ve moved past COVID and people are back out shopping and going to places,” she said.
A resident's perspective
Public safety impacts like these matter to residents, but some are prioritizing the immediate threat of losing their homes, like Beatrice Huskey, a longtime Wyandotte County resident.
“What good of a benefit is it to me if I can't afford to pay my taxes,” Huskey said. “I lose my home.”
Huskey has lived on the city’s northeast end for 60 years and has lived in the same home all that time.
“I worked too hard for it, trying to get this home,” Huskey said. “Nobody gave it to me, I had to work for it.”
It’s one of the only things she feels has stayed the same over the years.
The property taxes, on the other hand, have skyrocketed in her opinion.
“Just outrageous,” Huskey said.
At the same time, she says she’s called the UG several times about overgrown grass across the street from her home.
The lack of response and visible services in her neighborhood makes her feel neglected.
“It don’t feel too good, but what can I do about it,” Huskey said. “I can’t do nothin’ about it by myself.”
Realistic options
UG officials like Kneuvean assure residents they hear their concerns and suggestions, like cutting grant-funded programs.
“Most of those kinds of programs that people are like, ‘Well you could cut that,’ well, we could, but it doesn’t free up any revenue. It doesn’t help us then build a road because that was all just federal grant money that was restricted.”
She says the commission can either lower property taxes and cut services, or raise property taxes and maintain services.
“It all comes down to: what are the citizens willing to pay for,” Kenuvean said. "We also don’t want to mislead them. We don’t want to say, ‘Oh yeah, we can afford to do this,’ and we do drastic cuts, and they are like, ‘Well, I didn’t know about that. I didn’t want to support that.’ But that’s the reality, there’s not a lot of what I would call ‘extras’ in our budget."
In other words, they won’t be able to address everything.
“There is no right answer,” Kneuvean said. “It's a balance.”
The county general fund is extremely dependent on property taxes, and that’s been the case for a while.
But how did we get here?
A complicated history
“There’s a variety of things, you can’t point to one thing,” Kneuvean says.
To start, Wyandotte County's residential base has grown very little. On top of a tax base that's not growing, Wyandotte County has household incomes slightly below the state of Kansas' average, according to Kneuvean.
Additionally, previous boards of commissioners had years of adopting structurally imbalanced budgets, meaning they knew they were going to exceed revenue to fund operations.
Kneuvean says last year was the first year in six years straight that they had a balanced budget — by a few thousand dollars.
“It was being financially and fiscally responsible,” she said.
Other approaches Kneuvean says weren’t good fiscal practices included aggressively issuing debt and exceeding personnel expenses by overhearing.
Regardless of the outcome of the revenue neutral vote, she says the UG is actively working on reducing waste inefficiencies.
Debt takes 44 percent of the city general fund’s property tax revenue just to pay annual bond and interest funds, a decision that’s compounded over decades and something the UG is working to address.
“It’s been a long time in the making, and it’s just to the point where we can’t continue to do what we’ve been doing,” Kneuvean said. “We’re at that juncture, and so we have to make some really hard decisions.”
The legal reality
There’s some things they simply can and cannot do by law.
Statutory requirements on the county side include funding the district attorney’s office, court system, jail for adults and juveniles and the tax collection system.
“Is it possible they could go revenue neutral? Yes,” Kneuvean said. “But that would mean that we would be reducing significant expenses in those areas that are core to our mission and statutorily required. We don’t have a choice not to have a jail, but we may have a situation where we can only afford to house so many people, and if that’s the situation that we find ourselves in, that means unfortunately, then more people are out of jail that maybe should be held in jail until their trial.”
KC-area comparisons
In the context of the Kansas City metropolitan area, Wyandotte County is in a unique position.
“We have talked with our peer cities just to see, ‘What is everybody else doing?’ and we are not hearing that communities are going revenue neutral throughout the entire area,” Kneuvean said. “In fact, we were one of the few cities last year — and communities because we’re also a county — that went revenue neutral. We’re trying to keep track of that. We don’t want to have any kind of tax rates that put us at a disadvantage when people are comparing communities and where to live. But, we also have to have enough money to run our government, so it’s a challenge.”
Next steps
When it all comes down to it, there’s not a clear win-win situation, that’s what Kneuvean wants people to realize.
“It’s a hard decision for our electeds to make,” she said. “We understand the commission is trying to be respectful and balance all the different input that they’re hearing.”
Staff has already begun meeting with commissioners to prepare them ahead of the public vote.
“You only have so many dollars, so do you cut back on public safety to do more roads,” Kneuvean said. “Do you reduce your property taxes to address property tax fatigue? What can you not do? That’s all the dialogue that we’re going through.”
The public hearing on the revenue neutral rate will take place on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the commission chambers at city hall at 701 North 7th Street Trafficway.
Click here to see the full agenda.
