2024 Super Bowl parade would be Kansas City’s most expensive yet, if Chiefs beat 49ers
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Kansas City taxpayers will kick in $975,000 toward the cost of this year’s Super Bowl victory parade and celebration on Valentine’s Day, should the Chiefs beat the 49ers yet again in the big game three days earlier on Feb. 11.
Technically, that appropriation is not official yet. The city council’s finance committee merely recommended on Wednesday that the full council approve the parade subsidy when it meets Thursday afternoon.
But c’mon. The chances of a thumbs down is about as likely as kicker Harrison Butker missing the extra point after a Chief TD. He mostly doesn’t.
The city always comes through when the Greater Kansas City Sports Commission asks for help underwriting this city’s right to party, and does so without a fight. With all due respect to Travis Kelce and that Beastie Boys shout-out of his, this is entirely possible.
City dollars helped pay for the Royals World Series victory parade in 2015, as well as the Chiefs’ celebrations in 2020 and 2023. The council would have helped out in 2021, too, had not Tampa Bay upset Kansas City’s Super Bowl parade plans that year.
Curse you, Tom Brady!
Should it be necessary to write a check, this one will be bigger than ever. That $975,000 comes from convention and tourism tax receipts and is $225,000 more than the city promised in 2023 for its share of what was estimated at the time to be an overall $3.5 million parade budget.
The sports commission did not respond Wednesday when The Star asked what this year’s proposed budget is. Who are the other donors, and would the Chiefs be among them? No answers to those questions, either.
Jackson County put in $75,000 last year, but as of early this week had received no request for funding, a county spokesperson said.
As for that $750,000 the city provided last year, that did not include the cost of the overtime pay that the Kansas City Police Department incurred for providing security along the parade route and at the celebration at Union Station. About 800 members of law enforcement worked the event: 530 Kansas City police officers, both off and on duty; and 275 from area police departments and sheriff’s offices.
According to the department, KCPD ended up absorbing that $200,400 in non-budgeted expenditures out of its regular appropriation from City Hall, but not without the police board of commissioners expressing “great frustration,” according to board meeting minutes.
After Chief Stacey Graves twice filed formal requests with Mayor Quinton Lucas asking for reimbursement and got no response, police commissioner Cathy Dean called out Lucas at that April 25 meeting.
“We’re going to be out of money,” she said, according to a KCUR news report. “We were going to use that for salaries.”
As he introduced the ordinance for this year’s parade appropriation to the sports commission at Wednesday’s committee meeting, Lucas said the increase over last year relates to “the increased cost of transportation and, of course, overtime for public safety personnel and other city employees.”
The ordinance, however, makes no mention of public safety or who would pay for it.
The Star asked the sports commission, mayor’s office and police department for clarification and got no immediate response on what has been arranged.
But on Thursday, a police spokesman wrote to say that the sports commission could potentially reimburse the department for overtime.
This story was originally published January 31, 2024 at 3:35 PM.
