Kansas City, Missouri – The City of Kansas City’s novel Capital Improvements Management Office (CIMO) wants no lines, no waiting. The unique office was created by Mayor Kay Barnes and City Manager Wayne Cauthen as a new way to tackle burgeoning issues of bottlenecked capital improvement projects that both large and small American cities and counties traditionally face.
CIMO merges the best practices of two private program management firms, MWH and Burns & McDonnell, with common public-sector project delivery methods thus centralizing responsibility within one organization. In less than 15 months, City Hall projects, often stalled due to funding, right-of-way, land acquisition, and contract issues are now moving swiftly.
“In the past year, CIMO has made significant progress getting projects underway and developing streamlined approaches to project management,” said City Manager Wayne Cauthen. He continued, “The CIMO team will continue to improve project delivery and establish permanent structural changes in how Kansas City manages capital projects in the years the come.”
The city established CIMO, consisting of 25 employees from both the private and public sectors, in January of 2004 and tasked it to complete the daunting assignment of 151 backlogged capital improvement projects and to implement best practices to address the infrastructure and maintenance needs.
In little more than a year later, the office now oversees more than 300 capital improvement projects, over 90 employees, and $1.2 billion in infrastructure improvements and development as well as projects as extensive as the 7-block KC Live! Entertainment District, the $ 250 million downtown arena, and Phase III of Liberty Memorial, the national World War I memorial, and as neighborhood focused as street improvements, sanitary sewer improvements, and fire and police stations.
Both the $400 million KC Live! Entertainment District and the 500,000-sq.-ft, $120 million H&R Block World Headquarters, two of the largest projects of the $4 billion total being spent, would not have been possible without CIMO’s instrumental efforts of fast-tracking the clearing of trolley tracks from the early 1900s which were located on the site of both projects. The removal of the trolley tracks enabled the City to perform the necessary utility upgrades needed for these two projects.
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About MWH
Headquartered in Broomfield, Colo., MWH is a private, employee-owned firm with approximately 6,000 employees worldwide. The company provides water, wastewater, energy, natural resource, program management, consulting and construction services to industrial, municipal and government clients in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, India, Asia and the Pacific Rim. For more information about MWH, please visit the company’s Web site at www.mwhglobal.com.
