The Kansas City Royals on Tuesday unveiled renderings of the team’s proposed new stadium in downtown Kansas City and released some details on the proposed funding of the ballpark.
The latest proposed site for the project is in the Power & Light District, a dining, shopping, and entertainment development in the downtown area, and it comes with an estimated price tag of at least $2 billion:
With a seating capacity of 34,000, the new stadium would be slightly smaller than the 37,000-seat Kauffman Stadium. The Royals have called Kauffman home since 1973, but heavy renovations to the stadium were completed in 2012. The current aim is to have the new ballpark completed and ready for games by the 2028 season.
As for paying for the project, ESPN summarizes:
The Royals’ ownership group plans to invest more than $1 billion in private funding for the project, but some of the money will come from the 3/8-cent tax, which also will provide funding that the [NFL’s Kansas City] Chiefs plan to use to renovate Arrowhead Stadium.
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The Royals and Chiefs pushed to put the sales tax on the April 2 ballot, and Jackson County legislators initially approved the referendum, only to watch Jackson County executive Frank White — a five-time All-Star and member of the Royals’ Hall of Fame — veto the measure. Last month, two legislators changed their vote and joined five others in overriding the veto.
Public funding referenda for stadium projects tend not to succeed all that often, which is why team owners and cooperative elected officials typically try to avoid them. However, it appears the taxpaying public will have a say regarding the Royals’ project.
Teams and their advocates commonly trumpet the economic benefits of investing public dollars in such projects, but academic research has unanimously found that such benefits are at best negligible. As such, payouts to private entities like a professional sports team, whether in the form of new taxes or via the opportunity cost of tax breaks and the like, are not sound investments. Still, teams are typically successful in getting what they want when it comes to new stadium projects. As is also so commonly the case in matters such as these, the price tag put forward by the club and its proxies is far shy of what the project figures to cost the public in actuality.
