The Kansas City Royals on Wednesday put forth plans to build a new ballpark in downtown Kansas City, Mo., at cost of $1.9 billion — including $600 million in taxpayer money from the city, an unspecified contribution from the state that will likely total hundreds of millions, and at least $800 million from the team.
The stadium would be part of an 85-acre development at Crown Center, a shopping and dining district run by Hallmark Cards, which is headquartered at the center and is partnering with the Royals in the real-estate venture. Between the ballpark and the entertainment district, the project’s total bill could run to about $3 billion.
“Our founder Ewing Kauffman wanted the Royals to be Kansas City’s forever, and he wanted the team to benefit his hometown as much as possible,” Royals chairman John Sherman said in a news release. “Joining Hallmark with this project achieves both and extends the Hall family’s critical legacy of helping Kansas City grow.”
The announcement comes less than a week after Kansas City’s city council approved an ordinance earmarking the $600 million for the Royals. That ordinance, however, includes requirements for further approvals from the city council, which means the stadium isn’t yet a done deal. Groundbreaking is slated for 2027 with a targeted opening in 2030 if the process goes as planned.
A rendering of the proposed stadium amidst the larger planned shopping and dining district (Courtesy of the Kansas City Royals)
The Royals’ unveiling also arrives two years after Jackson County residents in Missouri voted down a tax measure that would have helped the Royals’ stadium efforts. Whether Jackson County will now provide funding is unclear.
Professional sports teams routinely go to great lengths to secure public money to support their businesses, and increasingly, they have found ways to do so without putting the matter directly to voters. Some organizers in Kansas City have publicly opposed using taxpayer dollars, including KC Tenants, which is focused on housing advocacy, and Missouri Workers Center, a labor group.
At a news conference Wednesday, Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas touted the creation of 20,000 jobs in construction trades, and his office said in a news release that the project “relies on revenues generated by baseball and ancillary development with no new taxes and no large special taxing districts.”
But those claims are specious, according to J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia who has an upcoming book about publicly funded stadiums. Bradbury, who is vocal on social media, virtually always opposes taxpayer money going to stadiums because economists have found the projects rarely, if ever, deliver the financial benefits that teams and local governments promote.
“You can’t get $600 million for free. You can’t just pull that out of thin air, that’s going to come from taxpayers,” Bradbury said by phone Wednesday. “That the funding is not coming from the general fund, I just wanted to point out that that’s totally irrelevant.
“Taxes are largely raised by locals who spend. … That’s money that people would have otherwise been spending elsewhere and transferred.”
Last year, state lawmakers in Missouri passed the Show Me Sports Investment Act, which could provide hundreds of millions to the team over the next 30 years to help pay for the park, according to The Beacon, a local news outlet in Kansas City.
“Economists have been studying the economic benefits of stadiums for five decades, and they consistently find that they are bad public investments,” Bradbury said. “They do not generate enough economic benefits to generate enough revenue to pay for themselves. They’re not self-funding things. If you’re building the stadium, you’re gonna end up costing your community money.”
Since 1973, the Royals have played at Kauffman Stadium, which is still in the city proper but away from downtown, about nine miles from Crown Center. Sherman’s group bought the team in 2019.
The Kansas City Chiefs, who play next door to the Royals’ Kauffman Stadium, are leaving Missouri for Kansas after securing about $1.8 billion in public funding for a $3 billion stadium there.
“Today’s announcement reinforces that the State of Missouri is not just where the Kansas City Royals play but where they belong,” said Governor Mike Kehoe. “This decision by the Royals to invest in our state is more than just a commitment to Kansas City, it is a commitment to communities and fans across Missouri.”
Other Major League Baseball teams are on their own hunts for public money to build new ballparks, including the Tampa Bay Rays. MLB teams are valued in the billions these days not only for the asset themselves, but for the real-estate opportunities they can unlock in the areas surrounding their stadiums.