KCUR gets Royals stadium math all wrong (again)

Kansas City NPR station KCUR, which has a pretty bad record of trying to explain stadium financing, set out to do an explainer today on the city’s plan to spend $600 million toward a new Royals stadium, and how’d that go?

The plan to pay the $600 million Kansas City plans to borrow for or spend on the downtown Royals stadium relies on tax revenue that wouldn’t exist without the new ballpark.

Ooh, not great! Most of the $600 million would be paid off with tax revenue that wouldn’t exist at the ballpark — the money would come from increased sales and income tax revenues in the stadium district — but it could very well just be substituting for money that would no longer be spent at the Royals’ current stadium, or at restaurants elsewhere in the city, say. As J.C. Bradbury writes in his new book This One Will Be Different, in a quote that deserves to become as well-known as Allen Sanderson’s about the helicopter, crediting spending at a new stadium as all increased revenue for your city is “like moving a $100 bill from your right hand to your left, and then declaring that the money in your once-empty hand represents a financial windfall of $100.”

If revenue projections come up short, the city still has to cover the bonds through alternative means since the Royals have “no obligation to repay” those bonds.

That’s true as far as it goes: Kansas City is on the hook to cover the whole $600 million, regardless of whether it receives enough tax revenue from the assortment of proposed tax sources (there’s also a 1% sales tax surcharge in the stadium district and some other city money) to cover the principal and interest. But the implication that so long as tax revenues meet projections, K.C. taxpayers are fine, is not true — if some of this is tax revenue that would have been received at Kauffman Stadium if the Royals stayed put and would have gone into the general city treasury, then that’s money the city could have used for other public services, but now won’t have access to because it’ll be earmarked for the Royals.

In total, the stadium project costs $2.05 billion, with the team covering $911 million.

That’s only true if you don’t take into account the roughly $350 million in property tax breaks Royals owner John Sherman is in line for, or the benefits of getting to use the stadium for just $1 a year in rent. In reality, the public will be covering closer to three-quarters of a Royals stadium cost than one-half.

Friends don’t let friends read KCUR for their stadium news, I guess. It would be nice if more journalists would care about reporting the actual facts rather than what’s in the press release, but that’s been a problem for a long while now.