Chiefs owner Clark Hunt on what renovated Arrowhead Stadium will (and won’t) include
The Chiefs’ front windshield illuminates about six days into the future — a date Sunday with the 49ers at Super Bowl LVIII.
But the much longer-term future is more than background noise, even at Super Bowl week in Las Vegas.
We’re inside of two months before the Chiefs and Royals will ask voters to extend a 3/8th-cent sales tax in Jackson County — with the Royals using the funds to help pay for a new downtown ballpark, and the Chiefs planning to renovate GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.
Both teams have yet to reveal the full nature of their stadium plans — the Royals have actually not even revealed which downtown site they plan to build — but both say those details are arriving soon. To be clear, they are not the only details yet to be made public.
But that question — what will each team do with the money? — is certainly at the top of the list.
On Tuesday morning, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt offered a broad-strokes peek into the plans while sitting in the team hotel in Lake Las Vegas.
“Our primary goals will be creating additional fan amenities on all three levels. We’ll also do some things in the parking lots that will make the tailgating experience better, particularly if the Royals vacate Kauffman Stadium,” Hunt said. “And then there are a number of things we need to do to modernize a building that’s 50 years old and make sure that the infrastructure associated with it is good to go for another 25-plus years.”
The Chiefs explored options outside of renovating Arrowhead Stadium — including, like their (potentially short-time) neighbors in the Truman Sports Complex, building a new stadium, one that would include a retractable roof. That would entail a higher cost, potentially three times the amount as a renovation, though it could also offer additional opportunities.
I asked Hunt about that decision Tuesday.
“The truth is that at the end of the day, we believe that Arrowhead would be just as good, if not better, than any building that we could create,” Hunt said. “We thought a little bit about a domed facility, which would be much more expensive to build. But as a family and as an organization, we’re a big believer in playing football outside. We think it’s something that gives us an advantage come December, January, when we’re approaching the playoffs and playoff games.
“There’s just something about Arrowhead that would be irreplaceable no matter how good the design is.”
The Jackson County vote is scheduled for April 2 after the county legislature last month overruled county executive Frank White’s veto to put the item on the ballot.
Hunt’s father, Lamar, owned the team when Arrowhead Stadium opened in 1972. He’s frequently mentioned that his dad called it his favorite place on earth.
And the elements that made it just that, he said, will be preserved after a renovation.
“Arrowhead will largely look like it’s always looked in the renovation,” Hunt said. “That’s something that we’ve thought a lot about — because one of the special things about Arrowhead is the site lines and the way the bowl holds the noise in. We want to be very careful not to do things that take that away, so the designs will all have that in mind.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2024 at 12:20 PM.