Lee's Summit Drainage & French Drain Installation

Lee's Summit has 43,187 housing units and a median year built of 1994, but the distribution is what matters. The 1980s account for 15.5 percent, the 1990s 18.7 percent and the 2000s 21.5 percent. That is 55.7 percent of every house in the city built between 1980 and 2009, with only 3.4 percent predating 1950.

This is the cleanest case in the metro of subdivision infrastructure aging into failure on a schedule. The buried corrugated pipe, the downspout tie-ins and the lot swales that came with all that construction are now 20 to 45 years old, and they are reaching end of life across whole neighborhoods at roughly the same time rather than one house at a time.

Lee's Summit sits between two river systems. The Little Blue River rises in Belton and runs 45.4 miles to the Missouri River near Sibley; the East Fork Little Blue River and Cedar Creek drain the city, and USGS maintains a gage on Cedar Creek near Lee's Summit. Longview Lake and Lake Jacomo are impoundments on the Blue River system, and Prairie Lee Lake takes inflow from the East Fork and discharges into Lake Jacomo.

The Army Corps of Engineers is running a Little Blue River Watershed Study specifically to investigate whether changes in the watershed are affecting flood risk, with Lee's Summit among the partner cities alongside Kansas City, Grandview, Raytown, Independence, Blue Springs and Jackson County. When a federal agency is studying whether your watershed's flood behavior has changed, that is the context your back yard sits in.

Lee's Summit Public Works Inspections enforces erosion and sediment control under Code Sec. 22.5-3 and Design and Construction Manual Sections 1010, 2150 and 5100. The threshold is the sharpest in the metro: sites with more than 2,000 square feet of disturbed ground require a city land disturbance permit. A single building on a single lot already holding a building permit is exempt from the separate permit but still has to comply with erosion controls.

Compare that with Kansas City twenty miles west, where nothing under one acre, 43,560 square feet, requires a permit at all. That is a twenty-one-fold difference in trigger between two cities in the same county line region. A back yard regrade that is pure paperwork-free work in Kansas City can require a permit here. Lee's Summit also does not maintain public stormwater detention basins, outlet works or discharge pipes, so those stay the property owner's responsibility.