Longtime community leader and member of the Overland Park City Council, Jim Kite, will not seek another term.
First elected in 2013, Kite represents Ward 3, the central portion of the city, primarily located between 103rd Street and 119th Street. Over his career on the council, Kite chaired city council focus area committees and has also served as council president.
All of that commitment and time is something he couldn’t have done without the support of his wife Wendy, a retired educator, who he calls the “hardest working citizen of Overland Park.”
“Sometimes you think, ‘Hey, I had a good ride, 12 years is enough,’” Kite told the Post in a recent interview. “It’s somebody else’s turn.”
Kite started out with neighborhood organizing
Before running for office, Kite got involved in civic activity when the Overland Park Regional Medical Center was looking to expand its campus. His neighborhood got involved in the project, seeking to find compromises on those plans that would have less impact on the surrounding homes.
Through that process, Kite says his neighborhood was able to get some concessions in the design, including a walking trail that created a buffer zone between the hospital and residences.
Over the years, he has held that up as an example of how to find common ground between developers and neighbors. He said it shows how “collaboration works better than confrontation.”
“The neighbors accepted the fact that there was going to be an expansion. The hospital did what they could to change their design to protect the neighborhood,” Kite said, “and it was kind of a win-win.”
After that, one of his neighbors got to thinking that someone from that group should run for city council, and they looked to Kite to do it. Eventually, he agreed.
Overland Park has grown, changed in last decade
In 2010, Overland Park had an estimated population of about 173,000. Now, an estimated 202,000 people live in the city, according to U.S. Census data. That growth is behind many of the major changes Kite has seen over the last dozen years he’s served on the council.
At the same time, established areas of the city have seen massive shifts. For instance, Kite pointed to how the years-long effort to revitalize Overland Park’s downtown have started paying off with private investments in new projects and ongoing redevelopment efforts.
“Downtown has been completely transformed,” he said, noting that it happened through public and private partnerships.
Plus, the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens has started to become more of a “destination” as well, Kite said. In the last couple of years, the arboretum’s LongHouse — a visitor center funded primarily through private donations — opened its doors. That’s something Kite is particularly proud of.
Additionally, the physical footprint of the city has grown, and development in southern Overland Park has started to boom. He nodded to the Bluhawk mixed-use project featuring shopping, dining and a youth sports center.
All of these developments have helped turn Overland Park into “a city in its own right,” Kite said, “with its own job forces.”
“We are an economic engine for the county and for the state,” he said.
But all of that hasn’t been easy — growth comes with its own challenges.
For one thing, it can be hard to balance change with what neighbors desire to see in their area of the city.
Tensions have flared over the years when it comes to big developments, particularly along Metcalf Avenue and in southern reaches of the city that neighbor more rural and unincorporated areas.
“Growth usually comes with some apprehension of the part of someone,” Kite said.
It can be a balancing act, he said.
“One of the challenges has been,” he said, “how to manage growth and continue to be a growth engine, but then also make sure that such growth doesn’t have a negative impact on nearby homes and nearby families.”
He thinks that striking that balance will continue to be an issue the city has to grapple with going into the future.
“I hope, that we will continue our growth model, but maybe grow a little differently as we go forward,” he said, adding that he wants to see “a more sustainable approach.”
Kite looks to multiple city accomplishments
One thing Kite said he’s most proud of is the city’s passage of an expanded infrastructure sales tax in 2023, which paved the way for more major infrastructure maintenance projects and earmarked more funds for street preservation.
“That was a major accomplishment,” he said.
As the chair of the Overland Park City Council’s Public Works Committee, Kite has been able to see the extra dollars from that sales tax at work.
He’s also proud of the new comprehensive plan, a long-range guide to making development and infrastructure investment decisions for the next couple of decades. Called Framework OP, the city council adopted the new plan about a year ago.
Since then, they’ve taken steps to implement it, starting a years-long audit of the city’s development codes.
Partisanship is detrimental to local government, Kite warns
Kite did have a parting warning: Stop letting partisan politics creep into local government.
From his perspective, Overland Park has become as successful as it is as a city because it stayed away from political division by keeping partisan politics out of the mix when it comes to local decisions.
“You don’t do that by adhering strictly to party dogma,” he said. “I never let my own party affiliation creep into that, and the people I worked with didn’t either, and I think the product is better for it.”
For one thing, he said when it comes to city services, it shouldn’t matter.
“There’s no such thing as a Republican firetruck or a Democratic pothole,” Kite said.
Looking ahead:
Kite will serve out the remainder of his city council term until his successor is sworn in later this year.
As of Friday morning, two people had filed to run to fill his ward 3 seat: former councilmember Tom Carignan and BikeWalk KC’s Amy Scrivner.
Kite has advise for whoever replaces him on the council: that’s to work with other councilmembers and to rely on the expertise of the professional city staff.
After his time on the council is done, Kite is looking forward to spending time riding bikes with his wife, traveling and seeing his children and grandchildren, who are spread out around the country.
Kite also wants to do some more volunteer work, like continuing to serve with the food pantry at his church and restarting a jail ministry he used to do before the pandemic.
His wife Wendy also intends to keep making holiday cakes for the city’s first responders and public works staff each year (some 70 cakes, all told), a long-time tradition that started years before Kite served on the city council.
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