Royals owner says he “can” keep team in KC, stays mum on how to pay for new stadium

Staying in Kansas City, but this time the one where the sun sets in the west, Royals owner John Sherman held his first public meeting about his downtown stadium plans/dreams/nefarious schemes last night. Let’s see what happened:

Drawing the loudest response was Sherman’s response to a question late in the evening.

“Can you go on record tonight making a solemn promise that the Royals will remain in Kansas City, Missouri?” asked broadcaster Ryan Lefebvre.

“We can do that,” Sherman said after a cheer subsided. “We can do that.”

Lefebvre was the MC for the evening, which, since the Royals organized the “listening session,” means he was picked by Sherman for the occasion. (He’s the Royals’ play-by-play announcer, so he works for Sherman regardless.) It’s unclear from NPR’s coverage whether this question was submitted by an audience member or by Lefebvre, but either way it’s one that Sherman could easily give a positive answer to since he’s only looking at stadium sites within Kansas City, Missouri, though saying he “can” do that, not “will,” is actually a pretty weak promise.

Sherman and others addressed several complex issues during the session, including opposition to a downtown stadium expressed by the renters’ organization KC Tenants.

“As landlords raise rents across the city and as our people struggle to find decent homes, the proposed downtown stadium would usher in a new wave of gentrification, like it has in so many other cities with similar recent projects,” the organization said in a statement before the event.

The Royals directly addressed the potential of displacement of residences and businesses often through the night by saying that it’s not their intention to do so.

“They said ‘affordable housing’ 22 times when I was counting,” Ashley Johnson of KC Tenants said at an informal meeting outside Plexpod afterward. Johnson said she wanted the Royals to be more clear on how they defined “affordable.”

My #1 concern about a new stadium wouldn’t really be gentrification: With only 81 home games a year (plus the postseason — oh wait, this is the Royals, never mind), there wouldn’t really be enough foot traffic to dramatically impact whatever neighborhood a Royals stadium ends up in, though certainly sports venues can provide an excuse to bulldoze surrounding blocks as well. (Most of the gentrification that’s occurred around new sports venues has been in the works well before construction began.) Again, though, saying it’s not their “intention” to displace residents is less than entirely reassuring.

What about the maybe-$1 billion in public money Sherman is seeking for his project, did he say anything about that?

John Sherman ruled out some sort of a bi-state tax to fund the construction of a downtown baseball complex because “it’s too complicated.”

He reiterated his original message that the funding will be a public-private partnership and Jackson County residents will not pay any more in taxes than they are now for Kauffman Stadium, and said the team is serious about transparency.

“Won’t pay any more taxes than now” suggests a couple of things: One, extending the Jackson County sales tax surcharge, which is currently paying off upgrades to Kauffman Stadium, for a few more decades, which we already knew was under consideration; and two, probably some kind of TIF district to kick back taxes from the new ballpark district, on the grounds that this is tax money that the city and county aren’t collecting currently, even if that’s not how tax breaks work.

Then there could also be state or federal money involved, though Sherman didn’t say. Guess there’s transparency, and then there’s transparency.