Kansas City Chiefs executives have been pretty quiet about their stadium plans since June, when they asked for and got a one-year extension on Kansas’s offer of sales tax subsidies. Yesterday, though, team president Mark Donovan broke the silence to reveal a bit about the Chiefs’ plans, which are not to decide on any plans just yet:
Donovan said his team met again last week with Populous, the Kansas City-based international architectural firm tasked with designing the option of a renovated GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. They provided another set of renderings for that possible project.
The other possibility: The Chiefs this week will enact a six-week process seeking applicants to design a possible new closed-roof stadium in Kansas….
“That’s one of the things this opportunity creates — we can look at the best in the world, not just the NFL, in terms of venues,” Donovan said. “That’s one of the reasons to go to a competitive bid — to see what we can do.”
So the Chiefs could renovate their current stadium, or could build a new one somewhere in Kansas, the design of which will be chosen over the next six weeks, even if the location will remain TBD. They’ll only consider renovating, though, if next April Jackson County voters approve the same sales tax hike that they rejected for funding Chiefs and Royals stadiums in April 2024. Meanwhile, while the Kansas subsidy offer is good through next June, Kansas legislators have said they won’t consider any stadium proposal that doesn’t arrive by the end of this December — though they also said that about this June, and then granted an extension anyway, so we’ll see.
The Chiefs, at this point, are the dog that’s caught half the car: They have that Kansas STAR bond offer in hand — which is projected to be worth $700 million or more, if the stadium project can generate enough sales tax revenues to kick back that much to the team — plus a $750 million approved in June by the state of Missouri. But with a potential stadium price tag of $3 billion, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt is continuing to shop around for county and possibly city subsidies as well, because why not? It does make one wonder if the Chiefs really need a new or renovated stadium if the only way to make one profitable is to get taxpayers to cover more than $1 billion of the costs, but that’s apparently not the kind of thing asked in polite newspaper articles these days.
Kansas passed STAR bonds for sports teams 18 months ago, and the Chiefs just now are doing an RFP for possible new stadium designs there???
Tell me again how amazing and not-at-all-dubious bonds for 70% of a $3 billion stadium are again.
The thing about the STAR bonds is that to pay off $700 million in stadium costs, they would require about $1 billion a year in taxable sales at a Chiefs stadium — something probably not doable at a stadium alone, but if the team puts enough other retail on the site, they could lay claim to $700 million in state tax money. If the stadium designs come back with a mall attached, we’ll know why.
(I’ve revised some of the language in this post to make clearer how the STAR bonds are supposed to work.)
Does six weeks of seeking applicants to design mean applicants submit designs and one is chosen to be fleshed out? Or in six weeks an applicant will be chosen to begin a design?