The same quarter cent pays for treatment beds and the jail. Here is every dollar, so you can decide which one you are voting on.

What is COMBAT?

A county sales tax. Every time you buy something in Jackson County, a quarter of a penny of every dollar goes into one fund, about $31 million a year. It has existed since 1989 and voters have renewed it every time.

Who pays for it?

Everyone who shops in the county, but not equally. A sales tax takes the same cut from a family spending every dollar it has on groceries and rent as it does from a family with money to save. Poorer households pay a bigger share of their income.

Where does the money go?

Two places. The larger share pays for the criminal legal system: the county jail, prosecutors, courts, the drug task force, and 21 Kansas City police positions. The smaller share pays for community programs: addiction treatment, recovery housing, violence interruption, youth programs, and help for people coming home from prison.

What happens if it fails?

The tax stops on March 31, 2027. Every program it pays for loses that money at once. Police and the jail have other budgets to lean on. Most of the community groups do not.

What happens if it passes?

It continues for ten more years, through March 2037. The split between the system and the community is not set by the ballot. County officials decide it every year.

“Shall Jackson County continue its anti-crime sales tax, commonly known as COMBAT, at the rate of one-quarter of one cent for a period of ten years for the purpose of promoting and providing public safety within Jackson County, including the prevention and treatment of drug abuse and addiction and the prevention, investigation, prosecution, and detention of violent criminals and drug dealers?”

Vital to how this fund functions is that treatment and detention live in the same sentence, paid from the same fund. And that is why there is no fully principled position to take (Yes or No) on this fund in our estimation.

Most people who have heard of COMBAT know one of two stories. One says it is a tax that funds cops. The other says it keeps the treatment programs open. In fact, both are true, and the numbers we pulled tell you in what proportion.

• Over the last five years, COMBAT sent more than $101.3 million to the broad carceral apparatus (police, prosecution, courts, and corrections), while in contrast sending roughly $58.3 million to prevention and treatment. Roughly 63 cents of every dollar went to the system.
• In 2025 alone, the criminal punishment side got about $25.8 million: $6.3 million to “corrections,” about $4 million each to the Jackson County Drug Task Force, KCPD, and criminal prosecution, and $2.5 million each to deferred prosecution, the circuit court, and family court.
• The community side got about $4.96 million for 23 treatment programs, $5.35 million for 66 prevention programs, and roughly $1.96 million for eight neighborhood hubs. Another $1.29 million went to school-based police initiatives.

Now while simply comparing the amount of funding going to the criminal punishment system vs. community resources the answer might seem simple, we believe it is more complex than this. COMBAT pays for 21 KCPD positions, mostly in the narcotics-focused Special Investigations Division. That is about $4 million in a department whose adopted budget is $385 million. To KCPD, COMBAT is about one percent. To a recovery house or a violence-interruption group (which are already extremely underfunded and understaffed in our city), COMBAT funding can be the difference between staying open and closing.

Collections, by year: $27.4 million in 2021, $31.1 million in 2022, $32.4 million in 2023, $31.5 million in 2024, $33.9 million in 2025. The money runs on sales tax, which means it comes disproportionately from the people who spend most of what they earn.

Who decides where it goes: the prosecutor, now Melesa Johnson, runs the program and appoints its director. The current Director is a Black man, Murray Woodard. A nine-member COMBAT Commission, appointed by the county executive, recommends grants, one member from each of the six legislative districts and three at-large seats for law, healthcare, and substance-abuse treatment. Then the County Legislature votes on every allocation. None of those formulas is written into the ballot question. The split is decided every year, by people you can name.

Voters created COMBAT in 1989 with 63 percent, at the height of the crack panic, and it is widely described as the first tax of its kind in the country. Its name was the Community Backed Anti-Drug Tax. It was built in the era that gave us the 100-to-1 crack sentencing gap, and its first purpose was the drug war, fought on the east side of Troost. In 2009 voters widened it from drugs to all “violent crime,” and the “D” quietly became a “C.” It has been renewed every time it has been asked, 73 percent in 2016.

The program was moved from the county executive to the prosecutor in 2018, after the Legislature overrode White’s veto and sued him. Audits in the following two years documented what had happened before. A 2019 audit commissioned by then-prosecutor Jean Peters Baker found millions spent with little oversight under County Executives Mike Sanders and Frank White, including about $2.2 million on jail cell doors and COMBAT money paying part of the salaries of White’s chief of staff and communications staff. In 2020 the state auditor found $1 million in COMBAT money spent renovating a building the county then sold to a school district for ten dollars.

What one side says: vote yes and you are supporting cops. Well, yes and no. COMBAT is about one percent of KCPD. The department has an exorbitant $385 million budget, a state-controlled board, and a city required by law to fund it. If COMBAT disappears, policing survives it easily. The programs least able to survive it are the ones with no other money.

What the other side says: vote yes and you are funding community healing. Again, yes and no. You are funding that, sure, and you are also funding the drug task force, the jail, and prosecution at nearly twice the rate. A yes vote does not choose the healing half. It renews the whole fund for ten years and leaves the split to the Commission and the Legislature.

So the honest question on this ballot is not “Do you support the police?” and it is not “Do you support treatment?” It is this: do you trust the people who control the formula to move it, and are you prepared to make them?

We stamp a measure when one vote clearly moves our people toward freedom and the other clearly moves them away. COMBAT does both at once.

Abolition means building a world where people are safe because they have what they need: housing, healthcare, treatment, work, and each other, so that cages and police stop being the answer to every problem. COMBAT funds a piece of that world but it also funds a lot of the old one, from the same quarter cent.

Vote no, and you cut off roughly $12 million a year in treatment, prevention, and neighborhood programs with nothing ready to replace it. The people hurt first are people in recovery, young people in violence-prevention programs, and people coming home from prison, many of them Black and poor. Policing barely notices. Vote yes, and you renew a drug-war-era fund for another decade, with the jail, prosecution, and the drug task force still taking the larger share.

Telling you there is one clean answer would be lying to you. What we can tell you is where the power actually is: the split is not written into the ballot, and it can move every single year. That is a fight our communities can win, but only if we are in the room.

Abolition isn’t a vote. It is a budget, fought line by line, year after year, by people who show up when the line items are voted. This tax was born in the drug war. Whether it dies in 2027 or spends the next decade becoming something else depends less on November 3 than on who is in the room or organizing in the streets after.

Questions to sit with before you vote:

• If it passes, what would it take to flip the split from two-to-one for the criminal punishment system to two-to-one for treatment and prevention?
• If it fails, what replaces the treatment beds and the prevention programs on April 1, 2027? No one has said.
• Why does a county’s addiction treatment depend on a fund whose ballot language also promises the “detention of violent criminals and drug dealers”?

Decide with your eyes open. Then, whichever way it goes, the fight is the formula. Learn who sits on the COMBAT Commission from your legislative district. Watch the County Legislature when it votes allocations. Ask every county legislature candidate on your ballot where they stand on COMBAT. And ask the treatment and prevention providers you trust what this money means to them.

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