Blue River Road: City officials shift gears on trail conversion

Plans to convert a long-closed portion of Blue River Road into a trail will come to a halt after City Council passed a resolution that seeks to reopen the historic route to traffic. The trail conversion, which was set to begin construction this fall, is on a 60-day pause as city staff explore plans and funding to restore and reopen Blue River Road between Bannister Road and Chestnut Drive.

Resolution 260887 declares the Council’s intent to preserve Blue River Road as a “historic automobile roadway.” It also directs the city manager to include Blue River Road in Kansas City’s Transportation Improvement Program to be submitted to the Mid-America Regional Council. Finally, the resolution initiates a 60-day pause on the PIAC-funded plan to convert the portion of Blue River Road into a trail.

The resolution, sponsored by Fifth District At-Large Councilman Darrell Curls, was passed by the City Council on Thursday, Oct. 22. The Council vote followed lengthy discussion at a Tuesday, Oct. 20 meeting between the Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee and Transportation, Infrastructure and Operations Committee.

Blue River Road has been closed between Bannister Road and Chestnut Avenue for 16 years following catastrophic floods in the spring of 2010. The city chose to keep the road closed and convert it into a trail after an October 2025 public engagement meeting. At that meeting, city staff revealed that construction to reopen Blue River Road to traffic would be expensive. Potential plans prepared by city staff showed the required work to improve road stability could cost between $20 million and $50 million.

The new resolution was subject to lengthy discussion at the joint committee meeting on Oct. 20, which came down to priorities for Fifth District At-Large Councilman Darrell Curls and Sixth District Councilman Johnathan Duncan. Blue River Road runs through both the Fifth and Sixth Council Districts.

Councilman Curls’ priority is to reopen Blue River Road to traffic without wasting taxpayer dollars — not necessarily to build a trail. (New reports suggest the cost of a road similar to the one in use would cost only $18 million for its full replacement.) At the meeting, Curls committed to identifying $1 million in 5th District funds toward reopening the road.

Sixth District Councilman Johnathan Duncan is also in favor of reopening the road. However, he is also in favor of the trail conversion plan: “This doesn’t have to be a trail or a roadway,” Duncan said at the committee meeting. “We can have both.”

Discussion also came down to the resolution’s language. As originally written, the resolution would have prevented any alteration from occurring on Blue River Road until a reopening plan was identified. Instead, officials settled on a 60-day delay for officials to work on a reopening plan before the trail conversion project begins. Councilman Duncan added that going forward with the trail conversion now would not necessarily prevent a future project to restore the road. He also added the planned pedestrian trail, when completed, could be used in the meantime as the city identifies funding for the restoration.

But that would be redundant, according to Councilman Curls, costing taxpayers $600,000 to build and then $350,000 to demolish in the event of a road restoration project, he said. “I believe that if you install a trail on any portion of this road at this particular time, then you go back and put a road in, there is a waste of taxpayer dollars,” Curls said.

Also in attendance were several representatives from Save Blue River Road. That included civil engineer Steve Ashton, who told the City Council that the true cost of fixing the road and reopening it would be far less than the proposed $20 million to $50 million price tag. Ashton said that on this closed portion of Blue River Road, only an 800-foot stretch near the river needs stabilization — not the entire portion between Bannister Road and Chestnut Avenue. The more expensive estimates from 2025 accounted for stabilization of a much larger area, according to Ashton.

Ashton, who is an engineering manager at BlueScope Conventional Steel Services in Kansas City, recommends a drill shaft wall to stabilize the 800-foot stretch. He predicts it would cost about $6.5 million or less. He also echoed prior concerns that the trail conversion project would be redundant. Ashton pointed to an existing trail map, reporting that the Blue River Parkway already has around 260 miles of bike trails. “The next page, page five, shows the ridiculousness of making it into a bike trail,” Ashton said as he flipped through a handout. “There are already many bike trails around there.”

John Conover, another supporter of Save Blue River Road at the meeting, also expressed safety concerns about replacing Blue River Road with a pedestrian trail. In the event of an emergency on the trail, he wonders how an ambulance could access the area.