Missouri gov calls special session to approve billions in subsidies for Royals, Chiefs, maybe Cardinals?

Well, that didn’t take long: The morning after Thursday night’s conclusion of the regular session of the Missouri legislature with no vote on his plan to fund half of all future sports stadiums with state money, Gov. Mike Kehoe announced he was calling legislators back for a special session to consider Kansas City Chiefs and Royals subsidies:

“The Chiefs and Royals packages, and this has been very public, about remodeling on the Arrowhead Stadium and a potential new baseball stadium are somewhere between $2.5 and $3 billion, I would consider that significant economic development.”

Yep, spending between $1.25 billion and $1.5 billion in state money on stadiums for the Chiefs and Royals would indeed represent between $1.25 billion and $1.5 billion in economic activity, if “economic activity” actually means anything, which it doesn’t really. But you know what else would create the same amount of economic activity? Spending that public money on literally anything else — for example, the $513 million in construction projects for community health centers and national guard facilities and other stuff that was killed by legislative leaders earlier this month, enraging members of the Democratic minority and leaving Kehoe’s sports subsidy plan short of votes, since Missouri Republicans are split on whether it’s good or bad to give state tax money to billionaires.

Haggling over stuff like those other construction projects is likely to be one focus of the special session. Democratic State Sen. Barbara Washington said, “While the Chiefs do bring a significant economic impact as well as the Royals, the greater economic good is to put a hospital down in the rural parts of our state, it is to make sure that we have obstetrics care north of US 36, it’s to make sure that we get the $48 million that we still need to do the mental health hospital in Kansas City,” and Kehoe said “everything is on the table” for what can be discussed going forward. How the political calculus works out is still to be determined, but clearly the governor really wants to create this ongoing stadium fund (it’s all the rage!) and is prepared to barter with whatever he can.

The time pressure here is that Kansas’s offer to siphon off future growth in sales tax receipts to pay for new Chiefs and Royals stadiums expires at the end of June, raising fears that the team owners could jump to accept that plan before time runs out, and prompting headlines about how Kehoe’s bill is needed to “keep the teams in Missouri.” (Neither Chiefs owner Clark Hunt nor Royals owner John Sherman has so much as publicly hinted at announcing a move in June, mind you, but state officials seldom let that stop them from bidding against themselves.) Kehoe’s plan would up the ante significantly — siphoning off all existing tax receipts as well as future ones — and a total price tag is hard to estimate, though it would certainly be many billions of dollars, especially if teams like the St. Louis Cardinals seek to take advantage of it for upgrades to their now-19-year-old stadium. This sure looks to be the year when all records are shattered for public stadium funding proposals; whether these break records for public stadium funding approvals as well is now in the hands of legislators. One hopes that these debates will keep focused on whether there’s any justification for spending billions of dollars of public money on private stadiums won’t just devolve into exercises in horse trading — there’s a first time for everything, right?