SKCA December 2024 General Meeting

Please join us for our monthly public meeting at 6 p.m. Monday, January 9, in the community room in the front building of the South Patrol Police Campus, 9701 Marion Park Dr., to hear the latest plans for KCMO to finally build a city jail and its anticipated impact on improving public safety and the top priorities of area state legislators for the upcoming 2025 session of the Missouri General Assembly.

KCMO City Councilman Crispin Rea, a leader in the lengthy but successful effort to forge an agreement between KCMO and Jackson County for the city to purchase land adjacent to the county’s under-construction detention facility expected to open in 2026 for construction of a separate city facility for city inmates who are now housed in county jails in Vernon & Johnson Counties in Missouri due to the city not having its own detention facility will give the latest update on this important project.

There have been numerous complaints that KCMO police now sometimes have to just give suspects tickets and immediately release them even for serious city offenses involving harm or threats of harm to persons due to lack of space in the detention facilities in other counties.

Missouri State Senator-Elect Patty Lewis (a current Missouri state representative), State Representative Anthony Ealy Jr. and State Representative Mark Sharp who all represent significant portions of the south Kansas City area will explain their top priorities for the upcoming legislative session starting in January and other important issues the legislature is expected to debate that could have a major impact on our area and the state.

All three have served on extremely influential legislative committees during their service in the Missouri House of Representatives.

Senator-Elect Lewis was elected as a state representative in 2020 and 2022 and elected as a state senator in 2024.  Representative Ealy was elected in 2022 and reelected in 2024, and Representative Sharp was elected in a special election in 2019, and reelected in 2020, 2022 and 2024.

SKCA Codes Advocate Andrew Gill will give a brief summary of his efforts to get prompt compliance with the city’s property maintenance codes to remedy neighborhood blight.