Jackson County legislator tries to block sale of Arrowhead Stadium seats to fans

Don’t clear out space in your man cave just yet, Chiefs fans. Those surplus Arrowhead Stadium seats might not be put up for sale after all.

A lot depends on what happens at Monday’s meeting of the Jackson County Legislature. Dan Tarwater, a Democrat representing the 4th District, is sponsoring a resolution that challenges County Executive Frank White’s plan to sell fans some of the 30,000 seats that are being replaced in Arrowhead’s upper deck.

Tarwater says the White administration’s proposal to haul away and store the dismantled seats is ill conceived and too expensive given that there’s no solid plan on what to do with them next.

White, also a Democrat, wants to raise funds for county parks by selling the seats to sports fans, but hasn’t had time to contract with a vendor to do that yet.

“The county doesn’t have any sort of infrastructure to deal with 30,000 seats,” Tarwater said. “I think it’s the dumbest idea in the world to pay $43,000 to move them to a storage place in Olathe, Kansas.”

Tarwater suggests, instead, that the Chiefs do what the team was in the process of doing before White’s chief of staff, Caleb Clifford, intervened in mid-February: Recycle most of the plastic and metal seat components, then write the county a check for the scrap value, minus any costs the team incurred. About $28,000, Tarwater says.

The Chiefs and Jackson County Sports Complex Authority Executive Director Jim Rowland say that most of the dismantled seats now piled in an Arrowhead parking lot are in poor condition and not suitable for resale. Of those that are worth marketing to sports fans, Tarwater believes that the Chiefs are in a better position to sell them and be in compliance with the NFL’s marketing rights as some of the seats would be emblazoned with team logos.

His proposal is on the agenda for Monday’s regular meeting of the county legislature, as is White’s request for funds to haul away and store the seats.

Both address an issue that, until recently, had never come up before during the 47 years since the Truman Sports Complex opened for business in 1972.

Jackson County taxpayers own the stadiums and the teams are, under terms of the current leases, responsible for maintaining them and ensuring that they are state of the art.

If that means replacing worn out seats, they do so and then are reimbursed out of the tax-supported RMMO fund, which stands for repairs, maintenance, management and operations.

The Jackson County Sports Complex Authority is the county’s property manager and signs off on such projects. But the Chiefs and baseball’s Royals across the parking lot in Kauffman Stadium have been free to do pretty much whatever they liked when it came to disposing of old seats and other stadium artifacts.

That changed last year, when the county’s legal department called out the Royals for putting some old bullpen and dugout phones up for sale to collectors.

The phones and everything else bolted or screwed onto the stadiums were owned by the taxpayers, the county counselor’s office said. And both teams have since conceded that point.

With seats yanked out of other famous stadiums selling for several hundred dollars a pair, Jackson County could stand to make a lot of money, Clifford says.

Tarwater’s not so sure. And if his resolution to block the White administration’s plan fails on Monday, Tarwater says he will be keeping close tabs on the county’s progress on this project.

“At at least once a month, I’m going to ask how many have we sold,” he said.

This story was originally published March 31, 2019 at 3:24 PM.