Every city street has a condition score, and the score decides what kind of work it gets. Here is how that system works, where the money comes from, how to check whether your street is on this year's list, and why some streets get patched for years before they're repaved.
Filling a pothole and repaving a street are handled by the same department, Kansas City, Missouri's Public Works, but they are run as two separate jobs.
Patching is the fast response. It largely runs on reports: someone calls 311 or uses the myKCMO app, and a city crew comes out to fill the hole. Patching keeps a street drivable, but it doesn't change the condition of the pavement around the hole. Why patches fail, and why late winter is the worst time of year for them, is covered in why Kansas City has so many potholes. How long the city takes to close those reports is in pothole repair times.
Resurfacing is the planned work. The city's Street Preservation Program picks streets in advance, puts them in annual contracts, and works through them each year from late spring to late fall. The city describes the program's goal as reducing the number of future potholes. Resurfacing doesn't run on 311 reports. It runs on a citywide survey of pavement condition, and that survey is where most of the answers to "why not my street?" come from.
Every two years, Public Works sends an ARAN (automatic road analyzer) vehicle down the city's streets. It is a survey van equipped to record pavement damage: several kinds of cracking, raveling and weathering, bumps, dips and sags, rutting, potholes, and how rough the ride is. From that data, each street segment gets an Overall Condition Index, or OCI, on a scale from 0 to 100. The city says it rates about 32,000 segments covering roughly 6,000 lane miles. (A lane mile is one lane, one mile long.)
The scores go into the city's asset management software, Cartegraph, where engineers run scenarios to decide what to do where. The city publishes a chart that ties each score range to a treatment:
| OCI score | Rating | Suggested treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Over 90 | Excellent | No treatment |
| 80–90 | Excellent / very good | Crack seal |
| 65–80 | Very good / good | Microsurfacing |
| 40–65 | Good / fair | Resurfacing: 2-inch mill and overlay, with subgrade repairs as needed |
| 20–40 | Poor / very poor | Inlay reconstruction |
| Under 20 | Very poor / failed | Full reconstruction |
Source: Kansas City Public Works, Street Condition Rating System chart on the Street Preservation Program page. The city's rating bands are Excellent (85–100), Very Good (70–85), Good (55–70), Fair (40–55), Poor (25–40), Very Poor (10–25) and Failed (0–10).
A few terms, in plain language. Crack sealing fills cracks before water can get under the pavement. Microsurfacing is a thin new wearing layer spread over a street that is still structurally sound. Mill and overlay is what most people mean by repaving: the top of the old asphalt is ground off (two inches, in the city's chart) and a new layer is laid in its place. Below a score of 40, the chart calls for reconstruction, which means rebuilding deeper into the street rather than replacing its surface.
The logic, in the city's own words, is to use "the right tool (in this case, the right maintenance activity) at the right time": spend on cheaper treatments while a street is still in decent shape, before it deteriorates into needing costlier reconstruction, and so stretch the money over more streets.
The condition data produces a candidate list, not the final one. The city says inspections, engineering judgment, utility coordination, coordination with other projects, and "administration direction" all go into the final selection of streets for each year's contracts. Planned bikeway projects and road diet candidates are coordinated too. When KSHB reported on the city's record year in 2024, it described the prioritization as combining public feedback with data-driven scoring that includes the number of potholes and the street's overall condition rating.
What the city stresses is that reports alone don't put a street on the list. Its April 2025 announcement put it directly: "Kansas City doesn't simply go by potholes or complaints." A street that draws dozens of 311 reports in a hard winter may still not be the next one resurfaced, and a quiet street with a lower score may go first.
Two other points from the city explain patterns residents often notice. First, "not all streets in a given area are resurfaced at the same time because they are not rated the same," so a crew can repave one block and skip the next. Second, the program tries to address needs in all six council districts, "although not all needs in each district," and the number of streets resurfaced each year depends on the budget.
If your street gets patched every spring and never repaved, the city's own process points to a few likely reasons.
Patching isn't on the rating chart. Filling potholes is safety work, not one of the treatments in the city's resurfacing plan. A street can be patched many times while it waits for its turn on that plan.
The worst streets need the most expensive fix. Under the chart, a street scoring below 40 doesn't qualify for a simple mill and overlay; it calls for inlay or full reconstruction. The city's stated strategy is to treat streets before they get to that point, because that stretches the money further. The result is that a street already past the point of a simple mill and overlay needs a larger, costlier project.
Utility work comes first. Water, gas, electric and telecom lines run under city streets, and digging them up damages new pavement. Public Works Director Michael Shaw told KCTV5 in April 2025 that the city gives utilities a three- to five-year plan of the roads it intends to resurface. In 2024, city press secretary Sherae Honeycutt told the station that even when the city knows which street needs work more, "there may be instances where there's utility work that needs to be done." A street with a water main replacement coming may wait until the digging is done.
The cycle is long. Shaw told KCTV5 that before the city created its Asset Management Master Plan in 2022, it was on about a 40-year cycle to repave roads, and that it can now get there in 12 to 15 years. Even at that pace, the average street waits more than a decade between repavings. Patching fills the gap in between.
The city tightened its rules on digging up freshly paved streets in 2021. Ordinance 210692, effective September 13, 2021, revised the standard for restoring utility street cuts, a standard drawing known as SR-1.
According to the City Auditor's January 2024 audit of those rules, a utility that cuts into a street built or resurfaced within the last five years now has to repave two full lane widths, extending to the end of the block or up to 250 feet. On older streets, it has to repave the full width of the lane for at least 10 feet. Utilities also owe the city a three-year warranty on their street cut repairs. The city's April 2025 announcement restated the core rule: contractors must resurface an area if they cut into recently paved streets.
Enforcement hasn't been perfect. In the auditor's sample, 5 of 13 street cut restorations on recently paved streets and 2 of 9 on older streets didn't meet the revised standards, even though city inspectors had approved them. The auditor also found the city wasn't doing systematic warranty inspections. If a utility patch on your recently repaved street is sinking or crumbling, a 311 report puts it on the record.
The Street Preservation Program publishes its yearly totals, counted from May through April:
| Season (May–April) | Lane miles resurfaced |
|---|---|
| 2016–17 | 159 |
| 2017–18 | 156 |
| 2018–19 | 162 |
| 2019–20 | 112 |
| 2020–21 | 115 |
| 2021–22 | 245 |
| 2022–23 | 469 |
| 2023–24 | 519 |
| 2024–25 | 360 |
| 2025–26 | 358 |
Source: KCMO Street Preservation Program, as of October 2026.
The jump after 2021 is easy to see. The city reported passing 1,500 lane miles resurfaced since fiscal 2021–22 in November 2024, and says that during the 2024–25 season it passed the mark of 25% of all city roadways resurfaced. Goals and results don't always match: the city's April 2025 announcement aimed for 400 lane miles in the coming year, and the program's own table records 358 for May 2025 through April 2026. For the current 2026–27 fiscal year the city anticipates about 300 lane miles, and says it is on track to be more than 40% resurfaced by April 2027.
The city budget. Resurfacing is paid for mostly through the city's annual budget, and the amount has grown a lot. The budget for fiscal 2019–20 raised resurfacing by 70%, from $10 million to $17 million, according to KBIA. For 2021–22, the city proposed $39 million, up from $17 million the year before, according to KSHB.
The most recent figures: the city says about $34.8 million went to street resurfacing and street infrastructure work in the 2025–26 season. For 2026–27, which began May 1, 2026, the City Council's adopted $2.6 billion budget includes $39.4 million for citywide street resurfacing, including $8.5 million added by amendment. The proposed budget had $30.9 million. KCTV5 reported that tax increment financing (TIF) money would help pay for the increase, and that not every finance committee member supported the change.
A large share of the general fund comes from the city's earnings tax. KCUR reported in March 2026 that it brings in nearly half of the general fund (44% of its revenue) and helps pay for services including street resurfacing. Voters renewed the tax in April 2026.
GO KC bonds. On April 4, 2017, Kansas City voters approved $800 million in general obligation bonds, known as GO KC, to be issued at about $40 million a year over 20 years. The largest of the three ballot questions was $600 million for streets, bridges and sidewalks, including trails; $150 million of that was dedicated to a city-funded sidewalk repair program. The city says GO KC projects can include the reconstruction of streets. The bonds are a separate pot from the annual resurfacing budget: when the city cited "a little over $40 million" for resurfacing in April 2024, its spokesperson added that the figure "doesn't include some GO bond projects as well."
State road money. Missouri shares part of its highway revenue with cities, divided by population. MoDOT says cities and counties together receive about 28% of the state fuel tax (6.81 cents of the 24.5-cent-per-gallon rate). In fiscal 2025, Kansas City's share of state highway user revenue was about $28.6 million: $20.5 million from the motor fuel tax, $5.8 million from the motor vehicle sales tax, and $2.3 million from vehicle fees, according to MoDOT's distribution report. That money goes to the city's road needs generally, not to resurfacing specifically.
State highways inside the city are a different matter: interstates and state routes are maintained by MoDOT, not the city. If the road you're wondering about is one of those, see who maintains Kansas City's roads.
The city publishes its plans as interactive maps, linked from KCMO.gov/streets:
Kansas City Street Preservation Map shows the current fiscal year's candidate streets, with layers for overlays planned, overlays completed, and crack sealing planned.
SR-1: Street Restoration Coordination map looks further ahead. It shows this year's planned and completed overlays, next year's planned overlays, and streets resurfaced or microsurfaced within the last five years. That last layer is the one that tells you whether the stricter utility-cut rules apply to your street.
Search your address on either map. Keep in mind that the city calls the final list subject to change as crews respond to changing road conditions, so a street shown as planned isn't guaranteed to be paved this season. Questions about the program go to Public Works at pubworks@kcmo.org or through 311.
Keep reporting potholes. Resurfacing is planned years out, but patching still depends on reports, and a pothole on a street that's two seasons away from repaving still needs filling. How to report a pothole covers what makes a report easy for crews to act on.
Check the maps before you assume you've been skipped. A street that isn't on this year's list may be on next year's, or may have been held back for utility work.
Watch new pavement. For five years after a street is resurfaced, utilities that cut into it face the stricter restoration rule. If a cut on a new street is patched with a small square of asphalt, it is worth reporting.
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