So the coalition of Kansas City union, housing, and transit groups that had said if Royals owner John Sherman and didn’t agree to a community benefits agreement by Tuesday they’d tell people to vote against his stadium sales tax referendum declared Friday that his latest proposal was so unacceptable, they would be pulling out of joint talks with the team and county while continuing their own separate talks with team execs:
The announcement came just before the March 19 deadline set by the coalition for a CBA to be negotiated. Now, the coalition said it plans to continue negotiations with the Royals separately from the County.
“The window for negotiating a robust, powerful and transformative CBA with the Royals and the Chiefs is quickly closing,” said the Heartland Center and Missouri Workers Center in the letter. “Unfortunately, the responses we have received from the teams at the County Table largely ignore the community’s demands, fail to make meaningful progress on racial and economic justice, and assign value to the Teams’ own customary charitable works in an attempt to bloat the CBA’s value without actually providing the community the benefits sought.”
The gripe in particular is that Sherman was promising less in community benefits than he typically gives now to local charities, and the team would pick and choose where the money would go. Meanwhile, proposals from the coalition — such as that the team owners would replace any housing destroyed for stadium contruction with triple the number of units and provide housing affordable to people making 30% of the area’s annual median income — were rejected.
Walking away from the table — well, from one of two tables — is clearly an escalating ultimatum to Sherman (and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, who is also part of the CBA talks) to agree to their terms or risk having them call publicly for a “no” vote. It was already looking like a bad weekend for Sherman after one of his main legislative supporters, Jackson County legislator Manny Abarca, accused County Executive Frank White of holding a grudge against his old team for how they had treated him as a coach and broadcaster and used the phrase “let’s call a spade a spade,” ohhhh, no you didn’t want to do that! After getting piled on by Xitter users and called out by White for using “overtly racist” language, Abarca wrote a followup post beginning, “Here’s a reality that I became aware of yesterday…” in which he apologized for “inadvertently making an insensitive comment,” while saying he had previously “only heard this phrase in association to the card game,” which is bizarre because while the phrase’s origin wasn’t initially racial, it also has nothing to do with the card game Spades, but whatever.
Will all this significantly influence the voting in the April 2 referendum? Who knows! But one of the consequences of early voting periods is that it’s nearly impossible to take polls on ballot measures like this — which is probably fine as polls are mostly garbage anyway, but it does mean lots of reporting in a vacuum about what it all means. Which maybe encourages more journalism about the actual meaning of events and not just horse race coverage trying to guess what voters will make of it all? That would be good? I’m not accustomed to things involving journalism improving, I need to sit and think on this one a bit.