What is Kansas City’s master plan for the next 20 years – for guiding growth, for building up infrastructure, for keeping up with technological and environmental changes? 

The city is in the process of updating its comprehensive plan, the KC Spirit Playbook, setting priorities and drawing up or reinforcing policies and practices for the coming decades. There’s no more important resource for managing Kansas City’s physical development. 

The city’s three principal planning officers, Jeffrey Williams, Diane Binckley, and Kyle Elliott, join Cookingham-Noll City Management Fellow Jessica Oliphant in discussing this critical effort in the latest installment of the Library’s Making a Great City series. The online presentation assesses the effectiveness of the existing comprehensive plan, adopted in 1997. And it looks at how a new plan must address both growth and maintenance, encourage affordability, and balance the needs and aspirations of some 240 neighborhoods in Kansas City.  

Elliott offers a progress report on the KC Spirit Playbook, which is scheduled to be finalized in April or May 2022. 

Williams is Kansas City’s director of city planning and development, Binckley is deputy director, and Elliott is the division manager for long-range planning and preservation. Oliphant, who holds a master’s degree in public administration from New York University, is in her first year of the city of Kansas City’s two-year Cookingham-Noll municipal management program.