Jackson County will sell old Arrowhead seats but it needs help bringing them to sale
Jackson County is pushing ahead with a plan to haul away 30,000 used Arrowhead Stadium seats and put them into storage until officials can decide how best to resell many of them to Chiefs fans and sports memorabilia collectors.
Monday’s decision could boost the county budget with a nice windfall, County Executive Frank White’s chief of staff, Caleb Clifford, told the county legislature, which voted 6-3 in favor of the plan.
Those in the minority, however, were skeptical, questioning whether county government should be spending time selling stadium seats when so many other projects, such as the jail, are demanding staffers’ attention.
“When I look at it, that’s not what the county does,” legislator Dan Tarwater said during a nearly 45-minute discussion. “We don’t sell things like that. We’re not good at it, plus we don’t really have an outlet to do it. “
Before the vote, Tarwater withdrew his competing plan, which would have entrusted the Chiefs to recycle virtually all of the plastic and metal seating components and turn the net proceeds over to the county, which he said would amount to roughly $28,000.
Instead, the county will pay a moving company $42,725 to remove the dismantled seats from Arrowhead’s parking lot and store them for up to three month in 10 semitrailers. Clifford said the county stands to recoup its costs and much more, if the reusable chairs are put back together and sold with the help of a vendor who specializes in doing just that.
He said Harris County, Texas, grossed $1.5 million from selling 7,000 pairs of seats that were removed from the now-dormant Houston Astrodome several years ago.
It would be “a monumental mistake,” Clifford said, if Jackson County didn’t try to get the most value possible from the surplus Arrowhead seats. Many of them were damaged when they were removed from the stadium and will end up being recycled. But half or more could be reclaimed and wind up in people’s rec rooms, Clifford said.
The Chiefs are replacing most of the seating in Arrowhead’s upper deck as part of an $11.5 million renovation this off season. The team had planned to scrap all but a few thousand of the 20-year-old chairs. Under one proposal, the team considered selling 3,500 to the public through the sports memorabilia vendor Fanatics and giving away a few thousands to season ticket holders, suite owners and corporate sponsors.
But the county intervened, saying that the Chiefs did not own the seats. The taxpayers do.
No one in county government is happy about spending nearly $43,000 for moving and storage charges. Clifford said that could have been avoided had the Chiefs given its landlord more notice of the project and worked with the county in deciding what to do with the seats. The team unveiled its renovation plan on Jan. 15 and started work later that month.
“This is an event that never should have occurred,” Clifford told legislators.
County officials are working with both the Chiefs and the Royals, as well as the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority, to see that something like this doesn’t happen again.
The next step is to draft a request for proposals and seek bids from companies that could help market the seats. County officials hope to have that done before the end of the seats’ three-month stay in an Olathe storage lot.
This story was originally published April 1, 2019 at 5:00 PM.
