Missouri committee okays stadium funding bill, Chiefs, Royals lobbyists noncommittal about staying put

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s bill to pay for half the cost of all future MLB and NFL stadium construction and major renovations passed the state senate fiscal oversight committee 6-3 yesterday, setting up a vote of the full senate, where the legislation faces stiffer opposition. Lobbyists for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, meanwhile, responded with a decisive hmmmm, tell us more about what other money you’ll hand over on top of this:

“If we are to stay, with state and local participation, this is the type of plan that could work,” [Chiefs lobbyist Rich] AuBuchon said…

“The Kansas proposal is better in the respect that we don’t need a local vote and in the respect that it would cover up to 70% of the construction,” Aubuchon said. “But it’s new construction. It is also not going to be the loudest stadium in the world. You don’t have the allure of Arrowhead.”…

Like AuBuchon, [Royals lobbyist Jewell] Patek would not say whether the team would stay in Missouri if lawmakers approved the incentives plan. Patek emphasized that the Royals also need additional commitments from either Jackson County or Clay County — which has been floated as a potential stadium spot — and have not received those yet.

This is maybe not the best way to win friends and influence people, but the team lobbyists seem to be going full-on “Nice paratroopers, be a shame if someone was to set fire to them,” coughing and looking longingly across the state border at Kansas whenever anyone dares suggest not using tax money to pay for most of their stadium costs. Not that there’s any sign that either team owner genuinely wants to move to Kansas — that state’s stadium subsidy offer has been sitting around for nearly a year now, and neither has jumped at it, instead using it as an attempt to leverage Missouri into upping its own ante.

The team lobbyists saying they’d have to wait on local money does appear to throw a wrench into the whole June 30 deadline threat that Kehoe has used to force the legislature into special session: It’s extraordinarily unlikely that either team would get city or county money approved by the end of this month, so even if the senate passes Kehoe’s bill, the teams won’t be signing any stadium agreements imminently. That means they would have to let the Kansas offer expire — or, more likely, would ask the Kansas legislature to extend it, in order to keep holding that threat over Missouri’s head while teasing the neighboring state that they might yet move there if local Missouri governments won’t sweeten the pot.

It’s a complicated game of chicken, and I don’t envy AuBuchon and Patek (who appears to be sadly unrelated to Kansas City’s more famous Patek) their jobs in trying to pull it off. On the other hand, they’ve already successfully gotten two states into a bidding war to see how many billions of dollars they can throw at sports teams whose stadiums were just renovated at public cost in 2009, even after voters overwhelmingly rejected doing so last April, so they’re kinda playing with house money here.

The full senate could take up the stadium subsidy bill as early as today, though it may want to wait until senators have successfully hashed out what concessions (tornado relief, tax cuts for the wealthy, no more rainbow flags) they can extract from Kehoe first. If you want to watch the sausages get made, it looks like the Missouri senate will be webstreaming it here once things get rolling, though probably not the more interesting part where the governor’s staff sits down with key swing voters to ask them what they’ll demand in exchange for voting “yes.” On further consideration, maybe democracy could have used some more beta testing before going live.