Kimberly Portillo, Planner III

City development doesn’t just happen.

“It’s thought out in five, ten or even 20-year plans,” said Kimberly Portillo, City of Lenexa Planner III.

That means before a new building goes under construction in Lenexa, the plan gets reviewed by a staff member in the Community Development Department’s Planning Division.

"In the site design, we get down into the nitty gritty details like how wide the sidewalk is going to be and how deep a parking stall will be,” Kim said. “Every single project that comes in to get reviewed will receive comments of some sort, none of them are perfect.”

Kim has experienced a lot of personal planning to get to where she’s at today. After her first year of college at Rockhurst University in August 2008, she was not ready to continue schooling with student loans.

“I got this little flier in the mail that said, ‘We’ll pay for your college,’ and I said, ‘All right’ and I did,’” she said. “I knew I didn’t want a bunch of debt.”

Kim enlisted in the Army National Guard. That meant she attended 10 weeks of basic training, six months of individual training, and then returned to the Midwest for home base where she was only required to serve one weekend per month.

That was until she got deployed in 2011.

“I served as a 94 Echo and was sent to Djibouti, Africa,” she said.

As a radio equipment repairer, Kim was selected for a three-month assignment with a military police unit.

“They immediately threw me into doing all the military police training for deployment because they just needed bodies,” she said.

While abroad, Kim also volunteered to serve an Ethiopian mission for the next eight months alongside a small team of the United States Naval Construction Battalions, better known as the Navy Seabees.

“They were builders going into small villages and building wells,” she said. “My role was basically security, which is crazy to think about. I remember the Seabees were building a well in the village and we had been working on site for four to five weeks and they finally got to the water. I just remember like a huge spring of water came up so massive into the air and the entire village was surrounding us and completely ecstatic.”

When she returned from her deployment, Kim immediately moved to Lawrence because she had been accepted into the University of Kansas.

“I knew I wanted to finish school when I got back — that was whole the reason I joined the Guard — to help me pay for college,” she said.

With a general interest in architectural studies, Kim completed an accelerated program at KU where she graduated with her master’s degree in urban planning.

“I took a sustainability class and it just happened to be taught by the dean of urban planning,” she said. “I just loved that class so much because it opened me up to so many ideas and started getting me thinking about development of cities long-term. That’s when I knew I wanted to go the urban planning route.”

She graduated with two degrees and no debt.

“If I could redo it all, I would do it the way I did it."

Her seven-year contract with the National Guard ended in 2016. While she no longer has to wear the uniform, the experience and knowledge she gained from serving the Army have become part of her foundation.

“The biggest takeaway were the people skills I gained,” she said. “When you're in the military, you're working with all sorts of people with varying skill sets, and you must be able to work with them and to get along with them well enough to live and survive 24/7 with these people."

As a mom of two daughters, Kim hopes her life experiences can teach her kids that they can go whichever route in life and pivot.

"I think the dichotomy of my life then compared to my life as a soccer mom and a city planner now, just shows that you don't have to hold yourself to one mold,” Kim said. “You can branch out, you can try something, and then you can try something else and you can be successful at all of it."

Her first job out of college was working for a non-profit low-income housing organization in Wyandotte County before she transitioned to a new role in local government working as a development review coordinator. After six years working in one city, Kim was looking for a change.

“I just needed a better work-life balance,” she said.

Her first impression of Lenexa?

“They had been doing a lot of city-led projects that I thought were really cool,” Kim said. “There was so much development happening.”

When Kim started working for the City of Lenexa in March 2022, she had two degrees, six and a half years of local government experience, plus a military background.

“It’s interesting to see how we all have different skill sets and different ways of doing everything to get the same or similar end result,” Kim said. “It’s useful because if you’re having issues with something, somebody else on the team can usually show you a work around or a different way to approach it.”

From planners and a technician to an intern and senior administrative assistant, there are a team of seven within the planning division.

“The way the City of Lenexa has organized their staff and their teams, it just created so much more collaboration internally,” she said.

Kim has stayed in the public sector because of the community.

“In private sectors roles, you're often with a community that you've never been in or heard of,” she said. “You get hired on as a consultant to help the organization for a period of six months. During that time, you learn what you can, you give them suggestions and then you pack up and leave. You have no real investment in what you're creating for those communities.”

Working for the City of Lenexa, staff get to see projects and visions from start to finish.

“In Lenexa, we take the time to be involved in the community,” she said. "We're just so focused on one place at a time that we can become experts in that area.”

Outside of work, Kim enjoys spending time with her husband, Antonio and two daughters, Sofia and Josefina. They live in Kansas City, Kansas. Every Sunday, you can likely catch Kim with her family at the softball fields playing on a co-ed adult softball team.

Published October 18, 2023