Missouri gov calls special horse-trading session to pass his blank-check stadium bill

The Missouri state special session to throw tax money at Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt and Royals owner John Sherman is on, y’all:

[Gov. Mike] Kehoe, at a press conference inside his state Capitol office, ordered lawmakers to return to Jefferson City on June 2.

The special session will focus on the teams, disaster relief after recent tornadoes and severe weather in St. Louis and eastern Missouri, and state funding for projects that didn’t pass during the regular session, including funding for a new mental health hospital in Kansas City.

“The Kansas City Chiefs and Royals are Missouri’s teams,” Kehoe said.

Yep, they sure are! The question now is how much money Missouri lawmakers are prepared to shell out to avoid even the possibility that one team or the other might move across the border to Kansas — something neither owner has outright threatened but Kansas passed a bill last June to provide state sales tax and lottery money for stadiums and that provision expires at the end of this June (unless it’s extended), so now Missouri has to do the same, that’s just how mutual assured destruction works, I don’t make the rules.

To recap briefly: Kehoe’s proposal is to create a slush fund of state tax money to pay for up to 50% of construction or renovation of all stadiums upwards of 30,000 seats, seemingly forever. Even though Kehoe’s Republican party controls both houses of the state legislature, a whole bunch of Senate Republicans think it’s not the best idea and Senate Democrats are already mad that the Republicans have been overruling public referendums that the Dems supported, so it didn’t pass in the two days left of the regular session after Kehoe surprise-introduced it as an amendment with no public notice or hearings. Only one thing to do in that case: Call everyone back to try to overrule the initial non-vote with some high-powered horse trading!

The Kansas City Star characterizes the special session as “potentially volatile” and Kehoe’s path to winning approval as “challenging“; Senate Appropriations Committee chair Lincoln Hough added, “Governors seem to like these special sessions for some reason. They usually go like crap.” The inclusion of disaster relief and the new mental health hospital seems telling, given that those were two items that stadium fund opponents singled out as priorities — “stadium subsidies for some, new hospital for others” is very much the kind of compromise that is often the outcome of these kinds of special sessions, so pay close attention to who seems like a potential swing vote here, and what they’re demanding in exchange for agreeing to swing.