Brian Platt is the young, energetic city manager of Kansas City. Though the New Jersey native didn’t grow up in the region, his dedication to sustainability and background in innovation are helping to shape the job he’s been doing in Kansas City’s government since December 2020. Brian started his career on the East Coast — he was once a teacher for Teach for America, and later city manager for Jersey City — but has become passionate about his new Midwestern hometown and the people who live here. He loves taking basic governmental problems, such as snow removal or energy use, and applying simple but innovative steps to overhaul and improve them. Brian truly believes in investing in his community, and we talked with him about how he’s doing that as a government leader of our city.
Q: What are some things you love about our city as someone who didn’t grow up in the area?
A: I love Kansas City for so many reasons. The people of Kansas City are the best thing about this place — everyone has been so nice and warm and welcoming and supportive, but more importantly, people here really love everything about this city and have so much pride for the home team (not just the Chiefs). The city has so much to offer — amazing restaurants, museums, sporting events, and so much more.
Q: How do you see the Northland’s role in Kansas City?
A: The Northland is the future of growth potential in Kansas City. We have so much undeveloped land and so much we still need — more restaurants, more jobs, more entertainment, and more of the things that any neighborhood would want. The Northland communities will lead Kansas City's future.
Q: Sustainability is an important issue to you. Why?
A: Our purpose as city leaders is to make life better for people, and protecting and improving environmental conditions is the foundation of how we do this. For example, we are working on building one of the largest solar arrays in the United States here in the Northland at the Kansas City Airport. In Missouri, 70% of electricity is produced from carbon-based sources. Imagine the tremendous improvement in air quality and, as a result, the health of Kansas Citians from a project like this.
Q: What project are you most proud of since coming to Kansas City?
A: I'm so proud of so many things we've managed to accomplish and achieve here but one project I like to talk about the most is how we've dramatically improved our snow removal plan.
We've made so many important changes to how we address snow and ice storms, including shifting to a 24-hour-a-day operation, plowing, and treating all roads curb to curb (instead of prioritizing certain roads and just doing a quick pass down the middle), aggressively pre-treating roads with salt before storms, adding 50 trucks and 100 drivers to the rotation using existing resources and staff (simply adding plow blades to trucks we already owned and shifting employees from other duties to snow removal during storms) and investing in new technology. Every plow has a tablet with a digital route map that tracks exactly which streets have been cleared.
To me, this is a great example of good government: taking concrete and specific steps to improve a crucial basic service. A lot of what we do is not flashy, and this demonstrates our commitment to the basics.
Q: How do you make an impact in a large city like Kansas City?
A: The size and scale of this city and all our communities allow our impact to be exponentially large. For example, changing your standard light bulbs to LEDs can save a few dollars on your home electricity bill every month.
We are converting all our 90,000+ streetlights to LEDs to save $5 million a year on energy and maintenance costs for our streetlights, AND we will be using so much less energy it is the same as taking 6,000 cars off the road every day from reduced carbon emissions just from the energy used to power our streetlights.
Q: What are you most excited about for the future of Kansas City?
A: Kansas City is on a rocket ship right now. We are the hottest city in the United States. We are coming off two Superbowl victories, we just hosted the NFL draft, we've been ranked nationally and internationally as a city to visit, we just opened what is now one of the top-ranked airports in the country, and we are one of 11 cities in the United States hosting the World Cup.
The next 2.5 years leading up to the World Cup are going to be super exciting and filled with activity. We have about a dozen new buildings and major infrastructure projects that will break ground in the next year or so, including a few high-rise residential towers downtown, new housing projects in 18th and Vine, an all-new destination park over the top of Highway 670, the solar array at the airport, and so much more. All these projects have been years in the making and we are all so excited to see dirt moving!
