‘It looks like a landfill’: Kansas City area highways have an embarrassing trash problem

Editor’s note: This story is part of The Star’s series “Talking Trash.” All of the stories were inspired by questions and concerns we heard from Kansas Citians through listening sessions, an online callout and other conversations in our community. Stories will run throughout April, and you can find them all here. You can share your thoughts by emailing kcq@kcstar.com or filling out the form at the bottom of the story. We’d love for you to join Star staff at a community cleanup event this month (more on that below).

Morris Wells sees it all the time: Trash strewn along the sides of the highways around Kansas City.

The junk ranges from small stuff, like fast food wrappers, disposable cups and old plastic shopping bags, to bigger items such as car parts, wooden pallets and broken furniture.

Wells, a Lee’s Summit trucker who drives local routes for a living, is just one of many Kansas City area residents who have been complaining for years about the garbage on the area’s state and interstate highways.

Many have wondered who is responsible for cleaning it up. And not a few have pointed out that the trash suggests a distinct lack of civic pride in Kansas City.

“There’s certain areas of the city, it looks like a landfill,” Wells said. “You shouldn’t see that in a city that has, you know, Super Bowl teams and World Series teams.”

To understand the problem, The Star interviewed city leaders who have broad responsibility for sanitation in the city limits and state transportation officials on either side of the state line, who have responsibilities for the highways and interstates.

The newspaper also surveyed readers last month, asking for their questions and observations about litter on the area’s major roadways. Many jumped at the chance to point out long-familiar trouble spots:

In the Northland, they pointed to Interstate 29 and Missouri 152. On the southeast side, Bruce R. Watkins Drive and Interstate 49. Interstate 70 downtown and the whole Interstate 435 loop around the metro were noted.

On the Kansas side, Interstates 35 and 635 as well as Kansas 10 and Kansas 7 highways came up.

But an overwhelming consensus emerges that the litter problem is worse on the Missouri side of the state line. And that is confirmed by Bo Anderson, chief operating officer of Interstate Business Solutions, a private company hired by both Kansas and Missouri to clean up highways.

Anderson said the litter problem is worse on the Missouri side, but that’s mainly because it is more urban. There are more people, living in a higher concentration of homes, with more trash trucks using more highway ramps to use more heavily-trafficked roads.

“I don’t want to disparage either of the states, but population density absolutely determines the amount of litter that’s deposited,” Anderson said.

The litter matters not only to people who live here, Anderson said. Part of the reason his company was hired to clean up the interstates is so that corporate site selectors coming into the metro are left with a favorable first impression.

Read more about the Kansas Citians who voluntarily pick up our litter, and what they wish you knew.

“If your front door doesn’t look good, it’s really hard for you to sit there and say, ‘Yeah, we’re a great place to come and do business.”

And part of the problem in cleaning up the garbage on the Missouri side is that state transportation officials have not prioritized it.

Matt Killion, assistant district engineer for the Missouri Department of Transportation’s Kansas City District, readily admits that the agency is not picking up litter as much as it should.

The department, called MoDOT for short, does not have enough employees to get all of the work done, Killion said.

And it has chosen other priorities over the litter.

“We’re really focused on those priority items on the roadway — patching potholes, fixing signs, repairing street lights and traffic signals,” he said. “So once those priority items are taken care of, it’s sometimes difficult to dedicate a workforce to pick up litter.”

‘Empty promises’

City Manager Brian Platt said he was struck by Kansas City’s trash problem when he arrived two years ago.

“It was very obvious that something was not working right,” Platt said. “There’s just piles of debris along the sides of the highway.”

Kansas City has been working hard to partner and collaborate with MoDOT to solve the trash and litter problems along the highways in the city, Platt said. But he has found the state agency has not been reliable when it comes to taking action, instead “moving the goalposts” and “making empty promises” when they have planned work together.

“Despite efforts to collaborate, the city has not had much success with MoDOT being aggressive enough to address the issue,” Platt said.“Patience has run thin and the city is now taking matters into its own hands.”

“They’re not our roads, but it is our city,” Platt said.

To that end, the city has earmarked $600,000 specifically to address litter. It wants to provide litter crews across the city to cleanup trash, including in areas that MoDOT has not reached.

“We thought we had better partners in MoDOT,” Platt said. “Unfortunately we’re just going to have to take this into our own hands at this point.”

Lack of staffing, low priority

Killion, at the Missouri Department of Transportation, said the agency has had a growing workforce shortage for the past five or six years.

That was exacerbated when the workforce shrunk during the pandemic, he said.

Killion said he did not know how many maintenance positions were unfilled in the Kansas City District. Statewide, he said more than 1,000 positions were unfilled, which meant the agency was understaffed by about 30%.

To attract workers for open positions, the agency has a web page that describes maintenance workers opportunities at modot.org/opportunities-maintenance.

Openings are posted on MoDOT’s website, which includes a compensation calculator, and on MOCareers website. The agency also uses social media to advertise the positions as well as attend career fairs throughout the district. It also visits trade schools and give talks about working at MoDOT.

The starting pay for entry level maintenance workers is $19.84 an hour in the Kansas City urban area, which includes Jackson, Clay and Platte counties, Killion said.

The transportation department also offers an “excellent benefits package,” Killion said.

“Compensation isn’t all about the dollars in your paycheck,” he said. “It’s really about the total compensation.”

Killion said he thought MoDOT had a good working relationship with Kansas City. He pointed to the agency’s partnerships with the city on a few local cleanups.

When Bruce R. Watkins Drive was built, MoDOT partnered with the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department on a contract for additional mowing and litter pickup. The agency plans to continue that partnership.

Recently MoDOT announced a partnership with the Downtown Kansas City Community Improvement District for a $300,000, six-month pilot outreach program to connect people living on state highway rights of way with housing and other services, including medical, psychiatric, and dental care, as well as storage of belongings and help obtaining identification.

The partnership also includes litter and camp cleanup in Kansas City’s downtown area, Killion said.

Read more about how to join a community cleanup in Kansas City.

In the past, MoDOT had litter crews made up of prisoners from the Missouri Department of Corrections, but for a variety of reasons, including restrictions in the COVID pandemic, such crews are no longer available in the Kansas City area, he said.

Meanwhile the state is spending more on picking up trash.

Last year, Missouri spent $7.7 million to remove trash from more than 385,000 acres of rights of way along 34,000 state highway miles. It expects to spend more than $9 million this year, which includes additional contracts in Kansas City and St. Louis.

The transportation department’s budget for the 2023 fiscal year is $3.6 billion.

At the start of spring, MoDOT launched its annual No MOre Trash! Bash encouraging volunteers to pickup litter throughout this month. The campaign is an effort to help curb the costs and timed to clear trash before the mowing season begins.

On the Kansas side, state transportation officials also said litter was comparatively low on their list of priorities.

“We’re very short-staffed and trash is kind of a low priority when it comes to maintenance,” said Drake Jennings, a Kansas Department of Transportation maintenance superintendent covering Johnson County and a small portion of Wyandotte County.

“We work from the highway out to the fences and the driving surfaces are the number one priority.”

Other, higher priority items like guardrails, signs and fences come next. Then it’s trash.

“Being short-staffed like I am, it’s hard to keep up with all the trash,” Jennings said.

His area has had too few workers since he took over as a superintendent 12 years ago, Jennings said. He has 16 positions to fill which means staff is short about 30%.

What success looks like

Interstate Business Solutions, the private company hired to pick up garbage in the Kansas City area, has crews out on a daily basis, rotating routes so they clean a given area every two weeks.

The company works on 62 miles of highways on the Missouri side, where it has been contracted for a year, and 68.5 miles in Kansas, where it has been contracted for two years.

The company, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, has set up an office in Kansas City to direct the work, and recruits workers locally.

Anderson is able to describe what lasting success in litter control looks like.

The company has found that where there is trash already on the ground, people are more likely to add their refuse to it.

“When you start picking up an exit, generally what happens over time is people stop littering on that exit once they start seeing it clean all the time,” he said.

It’s like they realize it isn’t a dumping ground and they stop littering, he said. But it takes time.

Read more about the Kansas Citians who voluntarily pick up our litter, and what they wish you knew.

The crews find a variety of trash on the side of the roads, including the expected fast food wrappers, foam cups, bumpers, tires and wallets. They have also found a laptop in Kansas City, which they were able to return.

The company has an informal competition in which crews see who will collect the most ladders or mattresses. This time of year, discarded furniture is very common as people use their tax refunds to buy new furniture, Anderson said.

“If nobody’s out there picking that stuff up, that stuff can get back into those travel lanes,” Anderson said.

“We’ll admit that it’s an uphill battle,” he said. “We know that there are certain areas that need collections way more frequently than other areas that we serve. We’re doing our best to allocate our forces in the way that we can.”

Disapproval of others

When it comes to littering, people are likely to do what is expected of them, said Robert Cialdini, author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” He has studied littering and ways to persuade people to stop littering in public places.

People follow what seems to be the norm in the environment, Cialdini says. So if an area is already littered, it tells people that littering is OK there and that area will see significantly more littering.

“The environment speaks that this is what is normal here — this is what is acceptable here,” Cialdini said.

His research has also shown that there are things that can be done to reduce littering, even in a fully littered environment.

Just merely observing someone pick up a piece a trash and throw it properly into a waste container significantly reduces the likelihood that those who witnessed that action will litter, he said.

Social disapproval is the most powerful way to reduce the behavior, his research has shown.

“It’s one of the biggest motivators of human behavior that exists . . . ,” he said. “People care about the disapproval of others and adjust their behavior accordingly.”

For officials to communicate that social disapproval, Cialdini suggested they conduct a survey asking people what label they would give someone who litters. Then they post signs around that says: “This is what people will think of you if you litter” along with the names gathered in the survey.

Communities have to be careful not to normalize the bad behavior in their messaging by indicating that many people are littering. Instead, he suggested saying, “If even one person litters, it despoils our environment.”

Another effective way to show social disapproval is having volunteers pick up trash and communicate their disapproval of the idea of littering.

‘It’s embarrassing’

To some extent, Kansas and Missouri transportation departments say they are relying on volunteers to clean up highways.

Cory Lamaster of Lee’s Summit became one after noticing, in November 2021, how much litter was piled up along roads around the metro.

He started picking up trash himself. But he quickly realized it was a big problem that needed more attention.

So he started reaching out to others. First, his mayor in Lee’s Summit, then to MoDOT, where he was told the department was short-staffed.

“Honestly, when I reached out to them initially, I thought this was just going to be like a two to three month process of getting it cleared up,” he said.

Nothing has improved since he first went to MoDOT, Lamaster said.

“Actually, it’s the worst the city has ever looked,” he said, especially Interstate 470 and parts of northbound Interstate 435. The area near Arrowhead Stadium looks like a landfill.

In January, frustrated that no one seemed to be taking the lead in cleaning up the highways, he decided to start the volunteer group Summit Eco Warriors, which will be putting together litter cleanup events every month this year.

Its first and biggest event of the year is planned for 9 to 11 a.m. Saturday where volunteers will remove litter from U.S. 50 highway and Interstate 470 through Lee’s Summit. Lamaster hopes to attract 1,000 participants, having them meet at the Target on Pryor Road in Lee’s Summit.

“It’s just become a huge issue and like nobody wants to take charge on getting it resolved,” Lamaster said. “It’s almost like we’ve accepted this as our life now. People’s pride has kind of gone out the window.”

MoDOT values the annual efforts by volunteers to pick up litter at more than $1 million. There are more than 5,300 groups consisting of 50,000 volunteers who have adopted 6,200 miles of roads across Missouri through the Adopt-a-Highway program.

Nancy Gorton signed up for Adopt-a-Highway in 2019 in part to honor her parents who were community activists.

“Like everybody else, you look around and you see this trash in the streets and it’s embarrassing,” said Gorton, who runs a business in Kansas City’s Northland.

While picking up trash, Gorton would post photos on Nextdoor, a social media app where neighborhood members can post messages. Someone suggested she check out the Facebook group Northland Community Cleanup KC, which was struggling to get off the ground.

Read more about how to join a community cleanup in Kansas City.

Through the group, Gorton started scheduling events. Even if people didn’t show, she would still pick up litter and post photos to the group’s page. The group started to grow and Gorton took over organizing clean up events.

Now in its third year, the group has 530 members, but not all are active in cleanup events. About 50 people participate in cleanups, but not necessarily at the same time, she said. There will be multiple events in various locations Saturday, Sunday and April 22 and 23. People interested in helping are asked to join Northland Community Cleanup KC’s Facebook group for a listing of these and future events.

“It’s developed into quite a community of people that really care and they really want to see this trash picked up and they are willing to put in the time,” Gorton said. “It is growing.”

The group cleans up the areas surrounding Interstate 29, generally from Northwest 64th Street to Missouri 152 highway, and Missouri 152 from North Amity Avenue to North Platte Purchase Drive. Eventually, she would like to go all the way over to Liberty on Missouri 152.

Northland Community Cleanup KC will be signing a contract soon with Kansas City and money from that contract will be used to give donations to nonprofit groups that help with cleanups as part of their fundraising efforts.

A long-term goal is to spread the volunteer effort so widely that they could address litter problems in the urban areas of Kansas City.

“We really need an army,” she said. “We need massive amounts of people that are willing to go out and clean the city up.”