No tax increases for Chiefs’ move to Kansas? This Grinch has bad news | Opinion
Merry Christmas, Kansans — or should I say the Whos in Whoville?
We are finally getting a major professional sports team. To quote my baby sister, “We got just what we wanted, but there was that one thing.” Isn’t there always just that one more thing that we want? In this case, we all know that’s the Royals — but it doesn’t stop there. We need to talk seriously about overuse of the state’s STAR bonds.
Yes, I am feeling particularly Grinchy this year.
To be fair, STAR bonds have served good purposes in Kansas for almost 30 years. The building of the Legends and the Kansas Speedway shave been good things for Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, which was once a food desert. Other communities throughout the state such as Dodge City, Hutchinson, Wichita and many others have benefited from STAR bonds by enhancing the cultural and entertainment appeal of their communities.
However, this Professor Grinch is beginning to believe that STAR bonds are becoming a problem. This one is a blowout year on the old STAR bond credit card — because we buy the gifts now, but then we pay for them for the next 20 years. All the Whos will insist that they are not really raising taxes with the STAR bonds, but that isn’t really true. The state and its municipalities are giving up all the additional revenue that would have naturally compounded anyway.
In the case of the Chiefs, the proposed stadium and entertainment district spans two counties and eight municipalities by my count. The big dollars, though, will come from the state of Kansas, which has a sales tax rate of 6.5%, compared with the 1.25% in my little corner of Douglas County. So, Kansas will be paying off the stadium project with lower sales tax yields for the next 20 years from the already fastest-growing part of the state.
The Whos might also point out that like all STAR bonds, those offered to the Chiefs are designed to increase sales tax revenue, and so they would just capture that expansion. Professor Grinch would point out that inflation is nearly constant, which means that the sales tax yields would increase naturally anyway.
And this was already set to be a blowout year on STAR bonds, with projects in Wichita, Lawrence, Bonner Springs and others. At least three former STAR bond projects have failed, including the Schlitterbahn water park, Heartland Park in Topeka and the Museum at Prairiefire. It is hard to see where this ends, but when communities can put the state on the hook for new amenities, they and their developer partners are not going to ask for the STAR bond program to go away.
The question that needs to be asked is whether projects such as sports arenas and amusement parks are things that the state needs, and whether all the Whos in Kansas are willing to pay for them.
Professor Grinch’s heart is likely two sizes too small, but he would really like for someone to go steal that STAR bond credit card, cut it up into a million pieces and throw it in the trash.
Zach Mohr is an associate professor of public budgeting and finance at the University of Kansas, and even his kids think he is a Grinch.
This story was originally published December 24, 2025 at 11:03 AM.