Pressed for time here on a bunch of projects (I’ll be able to reveal more about one next Thursday or Friday), so let’s take a brief spin through the rest of this week’s news:
- Wyandotte County will hold a public hearing sometime in the next three weeks to help decide whether to put some amount of city and county sales taxes into a Kansas City Chiefs stadium that would be built somewhere in the county. Meanwhile. legislators from both parties are criticizing the deal as “tax giveaways for billionaires.” The Chiefs deal isn’t falling apart or anything, but it does still have a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot before Clark Hunt can cash his $4 billion check.
- Clay County officials said three weeks ago that they were no longer talking with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman about building him a new stadium, and now the county commission has announced that the deadline has passed for putting a stadium measure on the April ballot. Royals stadium sites are truly falling like dominoes (I don’t think that’s actually how that metaphor works, but sure, close enough).
- It’s been almost four years since the Los Angeles Angels‘ sweetheart stadium land deal was torpedoed by an FBI fraud and bribery investigation into then-Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, which means it’s about time for city officials to start bringing up the prospect of a new stadium land deal. Councilmember Natalie Meeks, who proposed the agenda item, seems open to ideas — selling the parking lots around the stadium for quick cash, leasing it out for development for slow cash, turning it into open space — and any proposal will also have to deal with the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires that any sale of public land prioritize affordable housing. City officials say they haven’t talked with Angels owner Arte Moreno about any of this, which will probably be necessary, only hopefully this time with fewer federal investigations.
- ICE is going to be present at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, and Batman will not stand for it.
- The owner of a dead mall in Phoenix wants to get one of those “theme park districts” to divert tax money to a new domed women’s soccer stadium. Tasmania says hold my beer.