These questions hover over the Royals’ planned stadium at Crown Center
The skyline placed Union Station over the shoulder of Royals owner John Sherman. A quick glance would have put the iconic Liberty Memorial in his line of sight.
And now? A baseball stadium is a planned addition sandwiched inside the nearby landscape — “right here somewhere,” Sherman quipped.
But wait. Where exactly is the stadium going?
The Royals unveiled a plan Wednesday to construct a new ballpark at the Hallmark Cards headquarters on the campus of Crown Center — sort of next to Washington Square Park, but unequivocally not within the park’s boundaries.
That’s a stunning revelation because, well, they left us to be stunned.
And not just us. Elected officials whose recent support has been and will be a required component of the Royals’ downtown baseball aspirations received the same surprise. They just received it before we did. Barely.
The location, gorgeous skyline view and broad strokes of the project offer plenty of intrigue — offer less to quibble with than, say, a Crossroads District plan that never moved past the to-be-determined stage of displacing local businesses. There’s a reason the mayor is all but daring his social media followers to complain about this site. It has real potential, if nothing else.
There is something else, though, and it’s the nature of which the future of the project could use a lift:
The transparency.
The details.
You know, the items on which the team’s last attempt crumbled.
The celebration inside a glamorous event space atop Crown Center was counterbalanced by a series of unanswered questions, along with prominent new ones:
What did people know about the precise stadium location? And when did they know it?
That’s not just me asking. Those fundamental to the past, present and future viability of the project are asking around.
Top city officials drove the bus on pulling the legislative levers, but as recently as two weeks ago, they quite evidently were barreling with urgency toward Washington Square Park. The original ordinance set to be introduced to City Council on April 9, obtained by The Star as part of our reporting then, centered on Washington Square Park and did not even mention Crown Center. Not once.
That was just 13 days ago, and only a day before the ordinance was introduced to the council — then, though, with a new location title that kept its lead: the “Washington Square Park/Crown Center area.”
In an exclusive interview with The Star that same day, Mayor Quinton Lucas made a point to say the park and adjacent Blue Cross Blue Shield building were large enough for the stadium footprint, which is only relevant if, you know, that’s where you believe the stadium is planned to reside.
Some City Council members inexplicably didn’t learn until Tuesday — as in less than 24 hours before the announcement — that the Royals had plans to make Crown Center their epicenter for a new downtown stadium rather than Washington Square Park.
Johnathan Duncan, who represents the 6th District, told The Star on Tuesday that he’d just learned of the planned location hours earlier. And he knew at least three other council members were still in the dark when he shared that, he said.
How can that be?
Here’s the rub: That vital information didn’t make its way to some city council members until five days after they authorized city manager Mario Vasquez to negotiate a deal to contribute $600 million to a project they thought centered around Washington Square Park. The ordinance’s mention of Crown Center, they believed, accommodated the ancillary development.
And the Kansas City Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners eight days ago approved the use of Washington Square Park for the project. Asked if she knew the park would be used for mixed-use development rather than the stadium footprint, board president Beth Haden told me, “Officially, no.”
“I’m on Twitter. I had seen the speculation,” she added.
Last week, the parks board passed the resolution after an hourlong closed-door session that included Lucas. The original language stating that Washington Square Park would be used for “developing a plan for a professional baseball stadium” was edited to add three words to the end of the sentence before it passed:
“and related development”
Haden and commissioner Pat Contreras — both of whom are supportive of the project at Crown Center — told The Star they still anticipated the stadium would sit in the park.
So two groups voted on perhaps the largest financial project in the city’s history with unclarity about its location.
The Washington Square Park location has led the downtown baseball narrative for nearly two years now. The Royals can absolve themselves from the responsibility of that narrative running wild outside their walls — they hadn’t confirmed that location, after all — but they took precisely no responsibility in correcting it.
Why?
“We were trying to protect Hallmark and their employees, if something leaked, (on) where they were going,” Sherman said.
That’s not refuting the secrecy. It’s explaining its rationale.
Sherman said Don Hall, chairman of Hallmark’s board, floated Crown Center for the stadium “months ago” before “we spent a lot of time together thinking through it with architects and land planners thinking about conceptually what we could do here.”
As for passing along those talks, Sherman said Wednesday, “We told them we were coming to Crown Center a while ago.”
Which leaves Washington Square Park, well, where exactly?
On a day in which the Royals touted the acreage of Crown Center, do they also need the less than five acres of a public park?
Sherman mentioned it as mixed-used development, and later said it could provide “a great entrance to the stadium.” In the lone rendering shown Wednesday, Washington Square Park appeared to be untouched.
Haden, the president of the Parks board, said she has not received “any plans for the park.” To be clear, she and Contreras both said they would have supported the resolution anyway, and they were unequivocal in their excitement for the project.
But it shouldn’t be a hypothetical. It should be clear and specific.
It speaks to the past, and it speaks to what comes next. A lot will change in this project. That’s the nature of plans of such scope. The unexpected changes are baked into them.
But the public deserves to know what’s happening, even if they won’t have the chance to actually vote on what’s happening. The absence of a ballot measure doesn’t negate the responsibility of transparency along with it.
The residents are owed answers, even while understanding the reasonableness of not knowing all of them just yet.
During the announcement Thursday, Sherman referred to a $3 billion total project — which will seek approximately $1 billion in public funding — as the initial phase.
As much as it would have been nice to know everything that initial phase might include, it’s the next phases that should require all involved to clear up important details — the full public financial contributions including the to-be-announced total from the state of Missouri, the plans for a park that apparently won’t feature a stadium, who will own that stadium, what the plans are for ancillary development, a community benefits agreement, the extent of the TIF (tax increment financing) district, what the partnership with Hallmark fully entails and on it goes.
But here’s the bigger point: They should clear them up publicly.
The ballpark location has the potential for a real “wow” factor. It can ditch the shock factor, particularly when those still holding the votes for final approval are among those shocked.
At one point Wednesday, Sherman acknowledged the Royals “misfired” with their Crossroads District plan they put in front of voters in April 2024. This, he said, “is a much different situation.”
It is.
Or it needs to be, anyway.