Royals, city of KC studying new downtown stadium site. Mayor Lucas wants to avoid vote
Four months after Jackson County voters rejected a Royals stadium proposal in Kansas City’s Crossroads District, and two months after Kansas legislation paved the potential for an alternative path, the vision of downtown baseball endures.
With some motivated support from the city.
The Royals have discussed multiple downtown stadium locations with the city of KC since their April ballot measure packaged with the Chiefs failed, sources told The Star.
Those conversations have more recently concentrated on studying the viability of a site not prominent in their last exploration: Washington Square Park, which sits just north of Crown Center and east of Union Station. More on that in a bit.
The Royals declined to comment on their stadium site preferences or their next steps, but the team has been consistent since April with its intent to explore all possibilities. That process continues, and I’ll note that voices inside the Kansas Legislature have been vocal about their pursuit of the Royals, as well.
The context, in that case: Washington Square Park has been a growingly robust part of conversations between the Royals and Kansas City Hall on downtown baseball options, multiple sources told me, but it is not the only option that remains on the baseball team’s radar. It is important to remember, though, the Royals’ original conceptualization was to move to the heart of the action.
Downtown.
It is the only location in the metro that fits the original validation for wanting to leave Kauffman Stadium after the lease expires in 2031
They have an important advocate for it.
Kansas City Mayor Lucas has vehemently pressed for the Chiefs and Royals to stay in the city and, since April, pressed for the Royals to add to the downtown landscape specifically. He too declined to discuss specific sites, but both he and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson have publicly urged acceleration to that process.
Lucas has urged something else, too: bringing downtown baseball to fruition absent another ballot measure before the Jackson County electorate. The talks between the team and city have not included Jackson County leadership, multiple sources told The Star.
If the Royals ultimately select a downtown location, Lucas appears prepared to offer a financial structure that instead relies on city incentives and therefore bypasses the extension of a 3/8th-cent countywide sales tax turned aside by voters in April.
Which leaves a pair of pretty obvious questions: Does Kansas City have the tools to make that happen, given it would rank among the most ambitious projects in the city’s history? And, more notably, what is the premise for pushing public money toward a project that county voters so recently rejected?
Absent a Jackson County vote
A recent interview with Lucas focused primarily on the latter question: the idea that a package with city incentives would be something of a workaround to the roadblock established by the voting electorate just four months ago.
His response:
“I think what I took (from the vote) — and, frankly what I learned from the STAR bonds conversation in Kansas — is that maybe the challenge the voters were issuing to us in Jackson County was to say, are there other taxes, redirection and other things that can facilitate a good stadium project?” Lucas said. “... So the people paying for the stadium are the people who are going to the stadium.
“I think I’ve heard a lot of people in Kansas City and Jackson County saying that makes a heck of a lot more sense.”
There are several reasons the Royals-Chiefs vote failed in April — too many to rehash here, in fact — though it’s been pronounced how a Kansas STAR bonds proposal has been met with far less pushback than the teams’ sales tax extension ask.
The Kansas Legislature’s attempt to lure the Chiefs and Royals across the state line, more specifically with that foundation of STAR bonds, passed two months ago. It would allow the state (or a city or county) to issue bonds to finance up to 70% of the cost of stadiums for either team, with the bonds backed by future taxes generated from the stadiums and their ancillary development.
“If you look at the STAR bonds tool, much of it is generated from the project itself,” Lucas said. “So, therefore, using the sales tax as incentives (and) the other things that roll off of the stadium itself. We have that now. We know the financing for it now. So I would like to think we can match just about anything you’re looking at, both what’s generated from the stadium and what’s generated from a surrounding area.”
The Royals and the city have not reached a full economic picture for a downtown ballpark proposal, Lucas said, stressing that by saying, “Nobody has come to my office and said, ‘Here’s the site. Here’s the contract we want. Here’s the deal.’”
But Lucas has certainly very intentionally emphasized that the city has an ability.
And willingness.
Which speaks to a point I’ve made in the past: The Royals and Chiefs were turned down at the ballot box, and the near-immediate result was they actually gained leverage. The vote failure did not cross an option off their list — instead, they’ve added to that list, and they’ve added more publicly obvious support from important figures in the discussion.
Lucas, for one.
But it certainly doesn’t hurt either team that Mike Kehoe won the Missouri Republican race for governor and will presumably take office after the November election. Kehoe was the candidate in the race most adamant about offering state help to keep both teams in Missouri.
But where?
The lure of Washington Square Park
The Royals have been noticeably more quiet since the vote, at least publicly, but they have been active behind the scenes.
Both teams, the Royals and Chiefs, used lobbyists to advocate for the Kansas Legislature to pass the STAR bonds measure this summer.
The hunt for Plan B, though, started long before.
Just a week after the vote, Lucas and staff members met with Royals leadership. And he most recently met with the same leadership last week. City officials have been part of more frequent meetings.
Those conversations have focused on the viability of several downtown sites, multiple sources said. Two sites more familiar to the public — the Crossroads District and East Village — have been part of discussions since the vote, along with a location along the North Loop of downtown, sources said.
But Washington Square Park has recently emerged as the more substantial exploration, and they are still in that phase — exploration.
Both the team and the city have separately studied the viability of the location neighboring Crown Center and Union Station, including having Populous, the Royals’ architectural firm, analyze the most basic question of the uniquely-shaped space:
Will it fit?
In that potential site, the ballpark would sit between Main Street and Grand Boulevard in Kansas City, just north of Pershing Road.
It’s an intriguing possibility, including to several city politicians outside the Mayor’s office with whom I’ve spoken, and the first thing that catches your attention is that the ballpark would face north, leaving the most prominent downtown Kansas City skyline as the left field backdrop.
When asked about specifics of any site, Lucas said his primary objective is a downtown ballpark. But he offered this more generally:
“I think probably the most interesting thing about the downtown stadium conversation is whoever figures out parking the best is going to be perhaps the most successful site,” he said. “And, I think more broadly, everybody in the conversation is probably saying, ‘How do you remove some of the negative variables in connection to what you’ve seen in certain spots?’”
That’s almost certainly a reference to the Royals’ attempt to move to the Crossroads District, which became more cumbersome than popular, and the team never did solve it. The difficulty of the land acquisition overrode the plans — not only a lack of agreement with small business owners on the periphery of the site, but the exorbitant asking price of the former Kansas City Star printing press at the heart of it.
That is a discernible difference in a Washington Square Park site that features only three land owners, an eager-to-contribute city being one of them. The insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield is moving out of its building located north of the park space in favor of a new tower at 1400 Baltimore Ave.
It would stand to reason the significantly fewer property owners would shrink the total project costs, though sources emphasized it’s premature to estimate the total costs of a project there, particularly because the Royals and city have not yet thoroughly discussed what would be among the ancillary development if a ballpark would be placed at Washington Square Park.
In my conversations with other politicos locally, they describe the opportunity to provide Crown Center a boost, showcase nearby Union Station and put a stadium on the same block as the streetcar and with easy access to multiple hotels.
“It has a lot of people thinking about how to connect that area with the Crossroads District, because right now, there are too many stale blocks between them,” a city council person said. “I couldn’t tell you whether this is going to happen or not, but there is certainly some support for that location.”
The where, in other words, hasn’t been finalized, but there’s progress. Momentum, even.
The when? Lucas said he aligned with the Chiefs’ publicly stated desire to have a good idea of the site location by the end of the year, before offering a more optimistic timeline for both teams — predicting a matter of several weeks, not several months, for reaching a resolution.
The how? Well, much of that is to be determined. The economic picture — what mechanisms can be used or would be appropriate to use — is not yet clear.
“I fully expect whatever ends up being done, wherever a stadium is and whatever the teams do in the future — that there is still a good, strong public conversation,” Lucas said. “I think it is a misnomer if one were to say there will be no public engagement because there’s no vote. I think, instead, what it’s saying is that we listened to voters and said, hey, maybe the best way to do this isn’t necessarily just Kansas City putting on a 3/8th-cent sales tax in lieu of another jurisdiction. But instead: How do we come to these really good solutions that are additive?”
This story was originally published August 14, 2024 at 11:05 AM.