Chiefs, Royals stadium funding plan passes the Missouri House. Can it become law?
The Missouri House on Tuesday approved a last-minute plan to keep the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals in the state, opening a path for Missouri to potentially offer state aid to help pay for new or upgraded stadiums for the teams.
The GOP-controlled House voted 108 to 40 on the proposal, after Gov. Mike Kehoe pitched the plan to lawmakers earlier in the day. The stadium-funding package now heads to the Senate, where its future appears murky in the final days of the legislative session.
The vote marks Missouri’s first major retaliatory shot against Kansas in the ongoing fight over the future of the teams.
“We need to compete with Kansas. We need to compete now,” said Rep. Chris Brown, a Kansas City Republican from Clay County who offered the proposal on the House floor. “The state of Kansas has been aggressively negotiating with the Chiefs and the Royals to try and lure them away from Missouri.”
He added later: “These are Missouri teams. They need to stay in Missouri.”
The 11th-hour vote came after a two-hour closed-door meeting of House Republicans in the last four days of the session, which ends at 6 p.m. Friday. The plan, which relies on bonds and tax credits that could pay for up to half the costs of upgrading or building new stadiums, would allow the teams to apply for the aid but the state would have to sign off on each project.
Under the plan, the total amount of state funding will be capped at 30 years and cannot exceed 50% of the total project costs. The proposal will also require contributions from local governments.
The legislation says state officials must be satisfied that there is “sufficient public investment” by local government to support infrastructure or “other needs generated by the project.”
The push signifies the state’s most expansive plan to keep the teams since Jackson County voters in April 2024 rejected a stadiums sales tax. In the wake of that local vote, Kansas lawmakers approved a sweeping proposal to offer supercharged bonds to finance up to 70% of the cost of new stadiums for one or both teams.
Researchers over several decades have consistently found that stadiums and arenas are not major drivers of economic development. A 2022 review of 130 studies over 30 years found that nearly all empirical studies found “little to no tangible impacts of sports teams and facilities on local economic activity” and that the level of subsidies typically provided for stadiums “far exceeds any observed economic benefits.”
Still, elected officials cast stadiums as significant economic development hotspots. Supporters of the plan emphasized Tuesday that Missouri will keep any new revenue generated by the teams under the program.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas threw his support behind the proposal, with his office saying that it would ensure the teams “are Kansas City’s teams today and will remain Kansas City’s and Missouri’s teams for generations to come.”
“Having met with Royals leadership just yesterday, Mayor Lucas is grateful to see state legislation that responsibly facilitates public support, ensures taxpayers are protected, will generate revenues for Missouri well into the future, and provides transformative opportunities for Kansas City and communities across Missouri,” a statement released by Lucas spokesperson Megan Strickland said.
Republicans rolled out the plan for the first time on the House floor Tuesday afternoon after Kehoe’s office circulated a two-page summary in the Capitol promoting the idea. Brown, the Kansas City Republican, offered the proposal as an amendment to a GOP Senate bill that was initially intended to lure the Royals to North Kansas City.
“The state tax revenue that would be utilized for this program is the exact state funding that Missouri would lose out on if the teams left to go to Kansas or anywhere,” Brown said on Tuesday. He said he could not imagine the state’s economic landscape without the Chiefs and the Royals.
“It’s in our DNA, the Chiefs and the Royals literally are a part of us to some degree,” he said. “They are a fabric woven within the state of Missouri.”
To be eligible for state aid, a stadium funding project must cost at least $500 million and seat more than 30,000 people. It would only apply to Major League Baseball and National Football League teams and would include the St. Louis Cardinals.
Kehoe told reporters earlier on Tuesday that the potential total value of the package, which he called a major economic development proposal, would be more than $3 billion – a figure he labeled “huge.”
Tuesday’s vote came after hours of behind-the-scenes discussions among Republican lawmakers with no public hearing or input from the general public, which drew condemnation from some legislators.
“I will be supporting this amendment because I am looking at the economic development that we can have,” said Rep. Emily Weber, a Kansas City Democrat. “But I am extremely disgusted and disappointed with the process.”
Will it become law?
Earlier in the day, House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat, said that while she supported the stadiums proposal, she had no interest in helping Republicans pass it without concessions. She mentioned dropping efforts to put an amendment restricting abortion rights before voters and a proposed repeal of voter-approved paid sick leave, among other priorities.
Some House Democrats, particularly those outside the Kansas City area, expressed frustration with the proposal during floor debate. Some lawmakers were also angry with the lightning-fast nature of the plan, which was brought to the House floor without any public hearings.
“The Royals are not in my DNA. My blood bleeds Cardinal red and offensive remarks like that should not be tolerated on the floor,” Rep. Bridget Walsh Moore, a St. Louis-area Democrat, told Brown. She criticized Republicans for not paying for other priorities, such as hospitals, while pursuing the stadium funding.
“It’s a heck of a look,” Walsh Moore said. “That’s a hard selling point for me.”
While passing through the House, the bill faces an uphill battle in the Senate. GOP senators are still hoping to pass several controversial pieces of legislation that could gum up debate on the stadium funding proposal, including a plan to overturn the voter-approved abortion rights amendment and paid sick leave.
Opposition to those proposals — or the stadium funding itself — could lead to a run-out-the-clock filibuster by any individual senator.
At the same time, some legislators of both parties are incensed by a stunning decision from House leadership last week to cut more than $500 million in construction projects from the state’s upcoming budget. The move has strained relationships between House and Senate lawmakers, which could imperil the stadium-funding bill in the session’s final days.
Whether the proposal has enough votes to clear the Senate remains an open question. For some inside the Capitol, Kehoe’s involvement in the twilight of the legislative session poses a big test of the new governor’s political clout after spending years as a prominent Jefferson City businessman.
Prior to Tuesday’s vote, the Republican governor teased the possibility of calling lawmakers into a special session if the proposal does not pass both chambers of the General Assembly.
He called it “that big of an economic project,” pointing to the fact that other governors have called special sessions over projects with similar economic impacts.
