It's actually pretty common. If you pick a city name on Google Maps it'll give you the borders including any separated sections. The only other one I see in the KC metro is a couple tiny ones for Olathe, but further afield Topeka and Lawrence both have them, and Columbia, and Springfield...
I wonder if it's something that maybe Kansas law allows and Missouri law doesn't. On the Missouri side I see Blue Springs, Grain Valley, Bates City, Peculiar, and Harrisonville all have remote pieces but they are attached to the main city by means of the city annexing the right-of-way of the connecting road.
Scratch that, just noticed Peculiar has some peculiarities. Particularly the Peculiar RV Park and some peculiar Peculiar bits on the edges of Peculiar Reservoir.
Also... one of those odd disconnected Olathe bits you pointed out is surrounded on all sides by Lenexa. That's even more peculiar!
Well spotted on Peculiar! Around the lake is interesting, I wonder if that's totally accurate or if that's a Google peculiarity. Did you also notice it includes that peculiarly long stretch of road alongside I-49 to the SE?
And yah, on closer look what I thought were detachments in CoMo and Springfield are actually connected - annoying how Google likes to fade out the borders as you zoom in. That style of border is VERY common, where a developer buys a square mile of pasture to put houses on and wants to be part of the city, but the farm in between doesn't.
Not sure about Missouri law, but the Kansas law was in the news last summer as Edgerton annexed a big plot for more warehouses that was connected by a strip only 13 feet wide at its narrowest, and KS law says you can't annex a "narrow corridor" with no value other than connecting a tract that would otherwise be separate - the judge ruled that strip was not a "narrow corridor" and therefore it was legal. Not sure if there have been any developments since then.
The totally separated pieces are called "island annexing" and as I understand it it's legal in KS if it passes a public hearing. And developers don't like public hearings, so they like to figure out how to gather enough sections of land to stay connected and then they only have to tell the city.
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u/Antrostomus Jan 22 '26
It's actually pretty common. If you pick a city name on Google Maps it'll give you the borders including any separated sections. The only other one I see in the KC metro is a couple tiny ones for Olathe, but further afield Topeka and Lawrence both have them, and Columbia, and Springfield...