Starting today, Kansas City, Missouri, tenants facing eviction have free access to an attorney, regardless of their income.

The program’s launch comes six months after the Kansas City Council overwhelmingly passed an ordinance guaranteeing free legal representation to tenants in eviction court. Kansas City is the 13th city in the United States with such a program.

Members of KC Tenants, the Missouri Workers Center, Stand Up KC and the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom gathered outside City Hall on Wednesday to celebrate the program’s launch and demand that city officials fully implement it. They said the city needs to hire a tenant legal services director and to ensure that all tenants are notified of the program.

Earlier, the city missed some key implementation deadlines and failed to finalize contracts with legal services organizations for attorneys, stirring concern that the program would not be up and running by June 1, as the ordinance specified. Interim Housing Director Jane Brown said at the time that she was overseeing the right-to-counsel program while the city looked for a permanent director.

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