Brian Platt is celebrating his first year as Kansas City's city manager, a role he took on after being business administrator in Jersey City.
Since his arrival, he's successfully dealt with a $70 million budget shortfall, and is working to set Kansas City on a more sustainable and equitable path.
This article is an abridged transcript from The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle’s podcast, Getting to Know Jew.
How has serving as city manager been so far?
It has been an incredible opportunity to make an impact in the lives of so many people. It has been great living here and becoming a new resident of Kansas City, and also a privilege for me to be able to work with our communities and neighbors across the state to drive positive change.
What are some of the highlights of your year, and where do you see opportunities for the future?
The first year has been focusing primarily on the basic city services and operations. Finding ways to improve our fiscal stability, for example, is one of the big ones that we've been working on. When I first got here about a year ago, we were facing a $70 million budget shortfall for the city. Instead of furloughing or laying off employees or cutting essential city services, we found ways to renegotiate contracts.
We're also looking at our operations in general, improving the way we deliver those services. For example, snow removal and snow plowing has been a big focus. We've made some dramatic changes to the way that we approached snow storms, including adding 50 more vehicles, 100 more drivers – a 24-hour-a-day snow removal operation.
We’re being a little more proactive and aggressive with how we deploy and utilize our resources – street resurfacing, potholes, that basic stuff. We're on track to resurface a record 300 lane miles of streets this year in Kansas City. That's almost three times what we were doing in the past. Our streets have been neglected for many years.
We've got a lot of work to do to improve other things, like services for the homeless. Affordable housing has been a big priority for us… We have a goal of 10,000 new affordable housing units in the next five years or so. It's a big, bold and aggressive goal for us. It's crucial that if we're going to make sure that people of the city are not overly burdened by their housing costs, we need to have a large supply of affordable housing ready and available.
The funniest challenge that I've had this entire year has been thinking about the year in review, and how to make the list of priorities and highlights. The list was so long. It was a great problem to have, having done so much and yet feeling like we've got so much more to do.
In college you were president of your Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity chapter at Emory University. Did running a Jewish fraternity help you prepare for the hectic nature of managing a city?
Absolutely. I think it was a really good experience trying to build consensus for things with people - it's a bunch of friends in college - and they may not have an incentive or reason to think about something or be passionate about something. They're just having a good time. But there were plenty of decisions that we had to make about our budget, about events and about things that we were going to get involved in, that people wouldn't otherwise think about or care about. That is an important skill and important lesson to be learned - if you can convince a bunch of 20-somethings in a fraternity to get on board to do philanthropy or to think about things a different way, then it scales up to the next thing. It scales up to be able to build consensus in a neighborhood for a new type of development, or how we can improve the neighborhood. Now, I'm not going to say that running a fraternity is the same as running a city. It's not even close. But there are certainly things that I learned there.
How does your Judaism inspire you and the work that you do? I don’t just mean as a city manager, but also the other work you’ve done, such as being a volunteer firefighter, or teaching with Teach for America. Where does Judaism fit in the picture for you in everything that you do?
That's a great question. It's been an interesting experience moving from a part of the country that is full of Jews - in New Jersey, the Jewish community is large, strong and widespread. It's everywhere, you can't get away from it. There's always some Jewish event going on there.
Moving to a place like Kansas City, where it's [unlike New Jersey], the community here that I've met has been phenomenal and fantastic and involved - just smaller and different. It made us think a lot more closely about what it means to be Jewish in America, and what it means to be involved in the community.
I think it's even more important for me and for us now, being in a smaller Jewish community, to be louder, to be more vocal and to be more involved. We need to make sure our voices are being heard. Antisemitism is not going away. We're seeing even more of it these days, and so we can't afford to be satisfied and be complacent with the way things are, or to be comfortable in our bubble. It is there. There are different experiences everywhere - New Jersey compared to Kansas City compared to wherever it is. We've got to be aware of those and be involved and be thinking about how we can continue to help push things forward.
You were business administrator in Jersey City at the time of the Dec. 10, 2019, shooting at a kosher supermarket. Can you speak to what it was like to be a Jew in local government and have something like that in your city? Do you have any lessons from what happened then that you can apply to your work today?
It was certainly a traumatic experience for us. I'll give some of the insider background. We didn't know exactly what was happening right away. All we knew was that there were multiple reports of active shooters in different parts of the city. We had a massive police presence in response to this event - there were a couple of people with a lot of weapons in a van and a lot of firepower prepared to kill a lot of Jews that day.
We are so thankful and blessed that we had police presence in that neighborhood and across the city, and that it was deployed in a way that there were a couple of cops that were within walking distance of this event as it unfolded. They heard and responded to it immediately. There was a Jewish school in this facility that we think was the target, and it was thankfully saved because of the quick and aggressive action of those police officers. Bullets were being fired in all directions. No one knew what was going on. It was clear pretty much afterwards that this was an antisemitic attack.
What I think was a great feeling for us in all of that was that the city, state and communities around us did rally to support the Jewish community. They reached out and made sure that we had everything we needed, and that the school and that community had everything that they needed to get back on their feet.
Your daughter goes to the JCC’s Child Development Center. What has it been like getting childcare services from the Jewish community, and how has it helped you and your family settle into the Kansas City Jewish community?
It's been an amazing experience for us. One of our big concerns coming here was making sure that our daughter had positive Jewish influences and exposure to culture and religion like in the community that we had back in New Jersey. The JCC immediately was that place. It has been such a positive experience for her and for us. She's learning so much - she's three and a half years old. She comes home from school singing songs and prayers that we know, of course, but had no idea she knows. She not only knows them at that young age, but she is excited about them, and she loves them. She loves to be a part of it. It's good to have a place for her to go that has positive experiences about being Jewish. At the end of the day, that's what we're here for - to make sure that our experiences are positive, and that we're growing that community.
What’s your favorite part of being in the Kansas City Jewish community?
Honestly, the JCC has been the best part by far… We love the JCC because of the impact it's having on our daughter. She is so comfortable in this community right off the bat because she's learning about it and she feels a part of it. She knows so much more than I feel like I even did at that age - about being Jewish and about positive experiences about holidays.
We went through Hanukkah this year, and she sang all the songs and and all the prayers by herself. We were prepared to teach her in that moment, but she already knew it. Little things like that just are so heartwarming and so special for us. That's not something you're going to get everywhere, even in a place like New Jersey, where the Jewish community is so large. It's been so amazing for us to be a part of that.
