When Steve Routh moved his building material manufacturing firm, Sierra Building Products, to the West Bottoms in 1998, he thought he was in Kansas City for the long haul.
As he built relationships with customers in multiple counties surrounding Kansas City, Routh watched more and more business owners slowly follow him to the West Bottoms. Every year, his property value increased by 4% or 5%, raising Routh’s taxes at a slow but manageable rate.
Then in 2025, Routh received notice that the Jackson County Assessor’s Office had valued his property 366% higher than in 2023.
Now he’s among the group of Jackson County business owners — particularly in the West Bottoms — who are considering moving operations out of the county or across the river.
“I have a lot of customers that are in Clay County and North Town and Cass County,” Routh said. “I love this city. I love the county. I’ve been there my whole life. … I don’t want to see businesses be deterred, the way things are handled, and take their businesses and move them.”
As Jackson County staffers continue to meet with residents who appealed both their 2023 and 2025 property tax valuations, some business owners have described their taxable value as unreasonable and warned that they could move their operations out of the county for the sake of lower taxes.
Several similar complaints from businesses and homeowners came to light at a Wednesday night hearing of the Missouri House of Representatives’ Special Interim Committee on Property Tax Reform. The bipartisan committee includes 20 representatives from across the state.
Some property owners said Wednesday that the county’s current process for setting property values makes it difficult to plan financial futures, prices people out of their current addresses and exacerbates other rising costs, including energy bills and tariffs. Representatives from the Missouri State Tax Commission also attended, hinting at another overhaul of the assessment process if Jackson County voters opt in November to switch the role of county assessor from an appointed job to an elected office.
“Jackson County is the biggest mess in the state,” Rep. Jim Murphy, a St. Louis-area Republican, said Wednesday.
Jackson County property taxes
Jackson County is one of the only counties in Missouri that doesn’t value most of its properties significantly below market rate. However, representatives acknowledged that the current process has still had severe repercussions for home and business owners.
The 2025 property assessment cycle in Jackson County wrapped in mid-July, with thousands of parcels of residential, commercial and agricultural real estate assigned a value based on a state formula starting with their 2021 or 2022 value.
The values will be multiplied by levy rates set by city and local bodies, mostly school boards, to determine property tax rates for 2025, with tax payments due by Dec. 31.
Ian Davis, owner of Blip Coffee Roasters in the West Bottoms, said Wednesday that despite the rollback of property values from the 2023 assessment cycle, the 2025 assessment cycle sent many Jackson County business owners into financial trouble. Home and business owners across the county filed some 11,000 appeals contesting the values that their properties were assigned.
“Restore trust before businesses are lost,” Davis warned, addressing the committee directly.
Davis has been outspoken about the 626% rise in his property assessment this year since he was notified of the change in June. He testified Wednesday that he’s heard similar concerns from dozens of fellow Kansas City business owners in recent weeks.
“I am not opposed to paying my fair share of taxes, but a 626% property tax increase is not a bill,” Davis said Wednesday. “It’s a death sentence.”
Expected property tax hikes aren’t the only growing expenses that businesses like Blip have faced in 2025, Davis said. Evergy raised its rates about 14% for electricity in Missouri this year and is currently seeking approval for a similar hike in Kansas. Spire has requested a 15% rate increase on natural gas prices with the Missouri Public Service Commission, and Davis said he already weathered a 20% raise from the natural gas company this year.
Routh, the owner of Sierra Building Products, noted that business owners often offset increases in cost by raising prices with customers. However, he said, this strategy has failed during the current assessment cycle.
Some 6,000 property owners are still waiting for their appeals on their 2023 values to be heard, Jackson County legislator Sean Smith said Wednesday. This means some property owners contesting their 2025 values in Jackson County may not be heard for months, Smith said, as about 40 spots a day on the Board of Equalizations hearings calendar are currently organized around 2023 appeals.
Davis and others noted Wednesday that homeowners’ insurance rates also rise when a property is valued higher during a given tax cycle, but these insurance rates do not necessarily drop if the property’s value is rolled back, as occurred in 2025.
“We’re about to see a multitude of businesses go out of business,” Preston Smith, a former Board of Equalizations member and former candidate for Jackson County executive, said Wednesday. “There is no business that can withstand a tax bill that is going up 10, 20, 30 times what they paid the year before.”
Davis is among those who expressed to the committee that an annual cap on property valuation increases for commercial buildings would help quell fears of how future valuation cycles could affect business owners.
“There’s no guardrail on how much or how often commercial property taxes can be raised here in Jackson County,” Davis said. “This is a legislative failure by every Jackson County legislator, past and present.”
Rep. Ron Fowler, a Republican and former Blue Springs city councilperson, indicated that some state representatives on the the committee would support a commercial value cap in the next assessment cycle, along with stricter consequences for noncompliance with value caps and other State Tax Commission orders.
Additional grievances
Frustrated business owners were joined by a multitude of other residents at Wednesday’s hearing. Some proposed their own solutions to assessment troubles; some sought to air grievances with their residential property assessments.
Many residents noted that they are not upset about being asked to pay property taxes in general and enjoy benefiting from the social services they fund, but feel the current process for assessing home values leads to unreasonable tax rates.
Some residents said the extreme fluctuation in their homes’ assessed value over the past couple of years has made it difficult for them to identify houses they can actually afford to buy, or to rely on previous financial planning.
“I feel like our retirement plan is a ticking time bomb,” Susan Brown, president of the Kansas City Short Term Rental Alliance, said Wednesday.
Others said that small errors or oversights in the 2023 and 2025 assessment cycles have caused them a significant amount of financial strain that could be irreversible, even with rollbacks.
Anna Buser, who lives in Lake Lotwana, testified Wednesday that increases to her property value in 2023 caused her mortgage to double and remain unresolved.
“When there is this kind of an increase like we’ve been seeing, there’s probably other unintended consequences that [homeowners] will not be reimbursed for,” Fowler said.
Buser bought her home with her husband, Brian, in 2017 for $309,000 and was surprised to see her valuation jump from $341,000 to $938,720 in 2023.
“We can limp along,” Buser said. “Thankfully we had the savings. If we hadn’t, I’m not sure what would have happened. … We now live in a home we likely can’t afford.”
Some representatives on the committee continue to blame the assessor’s office staff in and beyond Jackson County, alleging that too many evaluations in 2023 and 2025 were completed without an in-person property inspection.
Murphy said that 85,000 properties in Jackson County were assigned a value increase of exactly 15% this year.
“They aren’t doing their job,” said Murphy. “They’re not going out and looking at property, they’re just assigning a value. That is not what our system is all about.”
Though Jackson County was in the hot seat, the special committee also discussed issues with the assessment cycle in Platte County. Platte County commissioner Scott Fricker engaged Murphy, Republican Rep. Dean Van Schoiak and other representatives in a heated exchange, criticizing a recent State Tax Commission order mandating a 15% increase in residential property values and demanding the removal of Platte County Assessor David Cox.
Kansas City was the committee’s third stop on a tour of six hearings across the state, where it will continue to collect feedback about the 2025 assessment cycle through Sept. 3.
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