KC’s $600m in Royals stadium funding could make end run around public vote

In the wake of Thursday’s passage of an ordinance by Mayor Quinton Lucas to give Royals owner John Sherman $600 million in city money toward a new downtown stadium, Kansas City councilmember Johnathan Duncan wants to force the city to let residents hold a public vote on the plan. The city’s charter allows voters to force a public referendum on city ordinances if opponents gather signatures equal to 10% of the number of votes in the most recent election for mayor within 40 days — something Duncan says “wouldn’t be a giant lift” — but there’s also a major catch:

The city’s charter bars citizens from forcing referendum votes on ordinances “with an accelerated effective date or emergency measures,” giving city leaders the ability to stave off a referendum by declaring the ordinance as an emergency or expediting the ordinance’s effective date.

The proposed ordinance introduced by Lucas on Thursday includes an accelerated effective date because it involves “appropriating funds and relating to the design, repair, maintenance or construction of a public improvement.” That language is likely to block any potential referendum push.

And here we are back at why public votes on sports subsidy deals are so much more common on the West Coast: It’s really hard to get a referendum on the ballot in the rest of the country, in part because of those states’ pre-Progressive Era constitutions that provide tons of loopholes for elected officials who don’t want to be subject to the whims of voters. “There’s more ways to finagle your ways around referenda laws [in] other parts of the country,” remarked University of Colorado Denver public affairs professor Geoffrey Propheter in 2022. In 1998, for example, New York city council speaker Peter Vallone tried to put a referendum on the November ballot to block then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s push for a new Yankees stadium in Manhattan, but Giuliani successfully knocked it off the ballot by means of a law that allows the mayor to preempt any ballot measures that year by proposing one of his own on any issue he likes. (That Yankees plan ultimately fizzled, but Giuliani succeeded in laying the groundwork for his successor Michael Bloomberg to approve more than a billion dollars in public money for a new Yankees stadium in the Bronx eight years later.)

Whether you think direct democracy is a good thing or not — and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, from the legacy of California’s Prop 13 to that state’s public initiative industry that increasingly allows those with the deepest pockets to buy ballot measure wins — it’s definitely a stumbling block for sports subsidies, as Propheter has found that the general populace approves those about 58% of the time, vs. 96% of proposals that go to a vote in legislative bodies. An owner like Sherman could certainly pour money into fighting a Royals stadium ballot measure, but it’s historically a lot easier to win over a relative handful of local elected officials.

None of which is to say it’s going to be impossible to force a vote on some piece of the Royals plan, given that so much of it is only vaguely penciled in and could require future votes by city, county, and state legislators, some of which could be more susceptible to gathering signatures to block them. But Sherman appears to have gained momentum among lawmakers since the Chiefs‘ announced move across state lines to Kansas, with fears growing that the Royals could follow suit despite team officials saying three months ago that they had abandoned thoughts of moving to the one Kansas site that had been floated. The public at large may make some dumb decisions and be subject to the influence of big money, but they still have a ways to go to catch up with their elected representatives in those regards.