Kansas City will continue to fund its rideshare program, IRIS, despite the service nearly ending earlier this week due to a lack of funding.

A new ordinance would give the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority $3.25 million to make sure frequency stays the same on bus routes, including $500,000 to keep IRIS afloat for a month while the city continues to work out a long-term solution. It will be considered on May 6 by a council committee.

The city nearly ended the program Wednesday after a different council committee voted down a plan that would have directed funding for IRIS and ordered the city to negotiate a 60-day extension of the program.

City staff recommended gutting IRIS so that it wouldn’t cut into money for bus routes under the KCATA, which itself still faces a funding shortfall. But late Wednesday, the city continued funding despite the committee’s failure to move the previous ordinance to a full council vote.

Mayor Quinton Lucas introduced the extension ordinance to maintain service and consider whether to bring some transportation services under the city’s control. But the ordinance would take money from the city’s other transportation initiatives to help pedestrians and make streets safer.

“It gives us the opportunity to have a real conversation about transit that isn't just what I have seen for the last six months, which is these sorts of ‘the sky is falling unless you do this tomorrow, then these services end,’” Lucas said. “That to me has been a source of frustration. I hope this does buy us time to use real logic and be judicious in terms of what the next step is.”

Representatives for KCATA got an email from the city’s public works department late Wednesday, saying the city will maintain IRIS at $500,000 per month "while council finalizes transit funding conversations.”

Tyler Means, the chief strategy officer for KCATA, said the agency began the process of shutting the rideshare program down before getting the email. Gladstone, Riverside and Liberty also planned to end their participation in IRIS if Kansas City pulled out.

“IRIS has been a great addition to the fleet,” Means said. “There are places where it's just really difficult to take a bus or very expensive to take a bus, and putting up more nimble cars allows us to access those areas and provide transportation to those parts of the community.”

According to zTrip, the company that operates IRIS, more than 350 people use the service each day to get to work. The new funding means they can continue to get to work and more than 100 IRIS drivers narrowly avoided losing their jobs overnight.

Because they are considered independent contractors by zTrip, drivers are not eligible for unemployment benefits or severance pay.

Bakar Mohamed is one of those drivers. He’s been speaking up at city council meetings in support of IRIS alongside members of Stand Up KC, a low-wage workers organization that’s been trying to unionize the drivers . He believes their presence has helped council members understand the “human impact” of the decisions they make regarding IRIS.

“I’m relieved that city council won’t be pulling the rug out from under me, the 100 other IRIS drivers and our families, and the thousands of KC residents who depend on this program to make a living and stay healthy,” Mohamed said. “I can go home today knowing I can keep the lights on and food on the table for my wife and two children.”

More money is still needed for bus service

The funding adds to the more than $46 million city council appropriated for KCATA to preserve operations through October. But it will face a fiscal cliff once again at that time.

Means said $2.75 million of the overall $3.25 million allocated in the ordinance will help KCATA continue to offer the service it currently provides. But the bus agency will need millions more dollars to make the transit system better in the coming years.

“The money doesn't change the current level of service that's been out there this past year,” Means said. “With additional money, sure, we can increase service levels, we love it, but it doesn't really affect what people have come to expect from us in the past year.”

If no more money is appropriated for bus service, KCATA will receive the rest of the money the city budgeted for the agency after October. That’s more than $31 million for the rest of the fiscal year, but Means said that’s not enough to prevent bus cuts.

Even with the extra $2.75 million, KCATA said it still has a gap of $17.75 million this fiscal year. Without it, Means said the KCATA would likely have to cut all but its essential routes and lay off a “pretty sizable” number of staff.

“There would be very little service out there to support what we're serving the community today,” Means said.

But the extra transit funding has strings attached. Under the ordinance, the city manager will explore ways to bring services currently provided by KCATA under city control in the next year and a half.

That includes evaluating the potential of a city-operated transit department, instead of the regional model that KCATA currently runs. It would also investigate bringing microtransit services like IRIS under city management and having the city operate some high-demand bus routes instead of KCATA.

Kansas City leaders have complained for years about the confusion relating to KCATA’s funding needs and a lack of clarity about how the service is provided. The city currently provides most of the agency’s funding, which includes about $19 million in administrative costs.

Lucas said he believes council is interested in finally resolving the long-standing issues with KCATA, “not just doing this whole discussion every month.” Lucas said he wants to consider which option would be more cost-effective for service and reliability.

“What it says to me is that there isn't that broader discussion, really at the KCATA board level, about how they can better provide these types of services, and instead it's just looking to Kansas City Council to bridge whatever funding gaps or divides seem to exist,” Lucas said.

“That is fundamentally not sustainable. That's not just a this-year budget issue; that is a long-term issue. In a metropolitan area of more than 2.5 million people that the KCATA can serve in terms of the area, you can't just rely on 510,000 taxpayers to fundamentally handle the entire system.”

Means said KCATA expects the city to reduce its funding to the agency if it brings transportation services under its control. But he warned that starting up its program would cost the city millions of dollars.

“This isn't the first time the city has toyed with the idea of purchasing buses and providing bus service,” Means said. “Our administrators would have to focus more on regional levels on services where we aren't currently providing today and could potentially provide to create a solution that pulls the communities and begins to knit them better together.”

The new funding means changes to other transportation services

Lucas’ ordinance would take money from the city’s Vision Zero program, which aims to end traffic fatalities and bicycle-pedestrian coordination.

If the ordinance goes through, the bicycle-pedestrian coordination program would lose $500,000. That money helps fund the city’s RideKC bikeshare program.

Michael Kelley is the policy director for the transit advocacy group BikeWalkKC. He said they’re concerned that without that money, the bikeshare program may end.

“It's mind-boggling to us that we would potentially eliminate an entire service to try to preserve something for a month,” Kelley said. “The same thing goes for bus service. We might get the funding we need to pay for the buses to retain their frequency through the end of 2025, but then we're going to have the same question and debate pop up during the budget cycle again in 2026.”

In all, the Vision Zero program would lose about $2.75 million if the ordinance passes. Kelley said the program has already lost about $2.1 million of its proposed $8 million during the city’s budget process earlier this year.

With the additional decrease in its budget to benefit KCATA, Vision Zero would have less money than it did last fiscal year. During that time, the city completed more than 250 projects to add things like speed humps and curb bump outs to neighborhood streets, or to completely redesign entire corridors to make them safer for pedestrians.

Lucas said he doesn’t expect the cuts to result in a loss of services. He believes the city’s public works department can still complete Vision Zero projects through other funding sources. He wants to see KCATA making similar sacrifices to right-size the agency.

“City council and the public works department and the Kansas City government are going through the work to say, ‘Where do we make our tradeoffs, what needs to be cut, what needs to be added, what do you do?’” Lucas said. “I need KCATA to do the same thing.”

Kelley said cutting money from the Vision Zero budget sends the message that “traffic violence is an acceptable cost of doing business on our streets.” He believes that for the city to have a complete transit program, it needs safe streets and a functioning bikeshare program just as much as it needs buses and IRIS.

“I think it's important for people to understand that transportation in our city does not exist in silos,” Kelley said. “When we cut back from one of those elements, even if we're doing it under the guise of potentially trying to save another element, we end up creating a weaker transportation system.”