Royals stadium announcement left unanswered questions. Is it a done deal?
Inside a ritzy event venue overlooking the Kansas City skyline, Royals majority owner John Sherman on Wednesday unveiled plans for a new stadium in Crown Center, a celebratory announcement that marked the apex of the team’s yearslong, chaotic hunt for a new home.
“Today we open up a new chapter in the history of the Kansas City Royals and a reimagined Crown Center that will be home to the best and most expansive ballpark district in any downtown in America,” Sherman said, sharing a stage with the governor and mayor.
Amid the crown-shaped cookies, catchy slogans and Royals banners, however, Wednesday’s announcement left a series of unanswered questions about the team’s plans. Those questions loomed over the event, which was billed as a “Bring the Crown Downtown Celebration” featuring various legislative, business and team leaders.
Sherman laid out the project’s surface level elements and mock renderings. Team officials, partnering with Hallmark Cards and bolstered by state and city funding, want to build a roughly $1.9 billion stadium in Crown Center as part of a more than $3 billion ballpark district.
But Sherman’s rollout — and comments from Gov. Mike Kehoe and Mayor Quinton Lucas — offered little specifics on the finer points of the plan. State funding is still unclear. Ownership of the stadium wasn’t confirmed. It’s uncertain when city officials learned the stadium would be built in Crown Center instead of Washington Square Park. And none of the speakers mentioned an opening date or clear next steps.
Lacing all of those issues is the fact that the city’s role in the project — a funding package worth up to $600 million — still has to return to the city officials for final approval. Citing the dearth of information, at least one City Council member and frequent skeptic of the plan has vowed to slow the whole process down through an amendment added to the city’s incentives package.
“We are so far away from a done deal,” council member Johnathan Duncan, who represents the 6th District, told The Star on the eve of Wednesday’s announcement, pointing to the lack of a fleshed-out term sheet and broader financial deal between the Royals and the team.
Team, city and state leaders — who posed for photos with personalized Royals jerseys — could have used Wednesday’s ceremony to provide more specifics about the plan. But after they exited Crown Center Wednesday afternoon, many of the same questions remained.
Other attendees were more optimistic about the announcement. Council member Wes Rogers, who represents the 2nd District, said he saw the stadium renderings for the first time on Wednesday and framed it as “making a good site better.”
“It is, in fact, an even better site than it already was,” Rogers said. “I’m really excited about it.”
When asked by The Star how much money, exactly, Missouri would contribute to the project, Kehoe was noncommittal, saying that the state’s portion was roughly one-third of the “total investment.”
Pressed on the lack of specifics, Kehoe said the state’s contribution would rest on the annual amount of tax revenue the team generates, which he estimated at “somewhere in a $15 to $17 million a year range.”
The Republican governor, for his part, appeared to acknowledge that the stadium project was not completely a done deal.
“A project this big, with a lot of complex kind of parcels and pieces and partnerships, it takes a while to continue to work it out,” he said. “I think it’s safe to say that all entities involved felt we were at a point where we could move forward and that’s what today is about.”
Missouri’s contribution will rely on a sweeping incentives package lawmakers approved last summer in an attempt to keep both the Royals and Kansas City Chiefs inside state lines. The law allows Missouri to pay for up to 50% of a new stadium for the team, but the state’s contribution is largely expected to fall short of that percentage.
Once city officials apply for state funding, the Missouri Department of Economic Development will determine the state’s contribution based on the amount of withholding tax, sales tax and athlete and entertainer tax revenues generated by the team last year, a Kehoe spokesperson previously told The Star.
Another unanswered question centers on the stadium’s actual ownership. Sherman appeared to briefly touch on that issue in a gaggle with reporters, saying that the Royals would purchase property from Hallmark’s development arm and “contribute it to the city or whatever governmental entity will own it.”
Lucas told reporters that he believed a “city entity is going to own the stadium.”
Over the past two weeks, Lucas and other city officials have referenced a desire to open the new stadium by Opening Day 2030, a timeline that Lucas has acknowledged as aggressive and would put the Royals in Crown Center before their lease expires at Kauffman Stadium in 2031.
However, Sherman and Don Hall Jr., the chair of Hallmark’s board, did not reference that date in the announcement on Wednesday.
After the speeches and presentations, Lucas, Kehoe, Sherman and Hall Jr. took questions from a crowd of reporters. In a roughly five-minute gaggle, Lucas said the announcement illustrated a “great day for Kansas City.”
He listed off a series of outstanding concerns that had been answered, pointing to questions about parking and office development. He touted the overarching collaboration between the Royals and Hallmark as “one of the most robust private development commitments.”
But when The Star asked about the stadium’s footprint, the mayor acknowledged that he expected finer details to be shared at a later date.
“You know, I think I continue to learn more about what the exact plans are,” he said. “I think that all of this came quickly.”
