Oct 26, 2026

SHAWNEE CITY COUNCIL MEETING

October 26, 2026

You can stream the full City Council meeting at the link below! If you don't have time to watch, here's my quick recap. 

Tonight’s meeting was pretty quick. The only item that saw much discussion was the changes to the ordinance governing the Bicycle Advisory Committee. Based on feedback from the committee, staff proposed removing term limits for members of that committee and increasing their yearly meetings from 4 to 6. The reason for removing term limits is that they have a difficult time finding new members to serve on the committee, and there are people who have only served a short amount of time who would like to continue. A few members suggested lengthening the terms instead of term limits, but after hearing these concerns from the Parks & Rec director they unanimously approved the proposed changes. There was no Business from the Floor, and the mayor presented service awards to city staff members who have reached milestone years of public service. 

The Council considered the following:

• Passed consent agenda (unanimous)

• Rezoned 17 acres near 67th and Clare from single family to agricultural (unanimous)

• Approved purchase of new playground equipment for West Flanders Park (unanimous)

• Approved contract for the 51st St Improvement Project - Black Swan to Quivira (unanimous)

• Approved SEED grant for Gallagher’s Coffeehouse to add a patio (unanimous)

• Ratified semimonthly claims (unanimous)

At Council Committee, staff presented their annual updates to various Policy Statements. There were a lot of small changes, but a few items generated discussion between the council committee and staff. Ultimately, the committee reached a consensus to move forward with all of these changes as proposed (I believe they’ll need to formally vote on this at a future meeting.)

Parks & Rec proposed a change to the membership structure for our pools, condensing from 13 memberships down to 5. Rather than offering family memberships, they will offer individual memberships in order to more fairly distribute costs across those who use the pool (under the current structure, a family of 2 pays as much as a family of 4 which doesn’t make sense.) It also means the city doesn't have to define a household/family and that people don't have to provide their tax return to get a pool membership. For larger families with a lot of members who use the pool, the city will continue to offer scholarships and coupon books to reduce their costs. They will also continue to offer their discounts for active duty military, seniors 62+, and city staff.

City staff also proposed several changes to Policy Statement 7, which governs participation in public meetings. They discontinued offering digital visual aids (since plugging in a flash drive to city devices presents a security risk,) but speakers may still provide visual aids ahead of time and city staff will print them off before the meeting. They reduced each speaker’s time from 5 minutes down to 3 minutes to remain in line with surrounding cities, and removed Citizen Interest Groups which allowed one speaker up to 30 minutes to speak at every meeting if they gathered enough signatures. They also proposed removing the 5-meeting restriction on city councilmembers participating remotely in meetings because that rule was not enforceable. Councilmember Murphy pushed back on this with concerns that someone could get elected and never attend in person, but the rest of the committee wasn’t concerned about this and felt that they ran for office to be present and serve. From what I’ve seen, councilmembers do not come even close to exceeding the current limit. Because councilmembers are elected, they can’t be automatically removed from office by a policy statement no matter how it’s written, so the committee agreed to remove the 5-meeting limit and address the behavior on a case by case basis if someone does abuse this policy in the future.

Live Stream Meeting Link: 

https://cityofshawnee.civicweb.net/document/323134/?splitscreen=true&media=true 

Recap by: Alex Welch Blattner