From Smart Sewers to First of Its Kind Infrastructure: How KC Water and Jacobs are Shaping Kansas City’s Future

By 2050, 89% of the U.S. population and 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas. While cities offer greater economic opportunities and vibrant places to connect, keeping up with demands and dealing with aging infrastructure, as populations increase, creates a critical need for infrastructure owners and utilities around the world to focus on the future.

Take for example the Kansas City metropolitan area. Straddling two states with often-competing interests poses a greater need for inter-community communication and stakeholder engagement. The local water utility for the Kansas City, Missouri side, KC Water, has a service area that spans over 300 square miles with a population of just over 500,000, meaning officials are tasked with maintaining and improving an infrastructure network that is incredibly spread out. Like other metro areas around the world, the community includes a section of people that are at poverty level and in underserved neighborhoods, challenging city officials to improve service without increasing their financial burden.

Jacobs has worked in tandem with KC Water for close to 20 years to address these challenges head on and help enhance their level of service to the local community. One such effort is the Middle Blue River I/I (Inflow and Infiltration) project.

Completed earlier this year, the project was a $6.5 million investment to restore the aging separate sewer system infrastructure in the historic Waldo neighborhood. The residential neighborhoods and commercial properties experienced significant utility and public works construction in the years leading up to this project, along with local waterbodies receiving sewer overflows. Jacobs provided design and construction phase services for over 33,000 linear feet of sewer main and over 300 manholes, improving capacity of the collection system and preserving the local environment by reducing the volume of sewer overflows.

The project, named by the Kansas City Industrial Council as its 2024 Sustainability Award winner, is part of a larger programmatic effort to meet the goals set out by KC Water's Smart Sewer program - a 30-year multi-billion dollar program that we've been supporting via projects such as Middle Blue since our local Kansas City office opened in 2005.