Category: Kansas City Royals

We all know by now that “a savvy negotiator creates leverage” is the basis for pretty much all sports team move threats: Whether an owner is seriously considering relocating or not, they’d be foolish not to at least kick the tires on another city or state in hopes of lighting a fire under local elected officials to fund a new or renovated stadium to “keep the team in town.”

What this leverage-making ends up looking like in practice is a long game of chicken, where two (or more!) sides issue ultimatums, hoping that those across the table will be afraid of seeing what happens if they don’t meet them. And while sports team owners aren’t always good at this, all evidence is that elected officials are much, much worse.

Which brings us to the meeting of the Kansas state legislature that took place yesterday to address the state’s year-old measure offering $1.4 billion-plus worth of future state tax money to the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals if they moved across the border from Missouri. The STAR bond offer came with an expiration date: June 30, 2025, by which time the team owners needed to decide if they were taking the money or not — as Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins said last month, “We gave them a year to get it done, and in a year, you know, they kind of keep messing around, going back and forth, and you extend it, and that’s what they’ll do. You know, the pressure is off. Then it could take another year and come back again.”

Would Kansas legislators stick their guns? Do you even need to ask?

Kansas lawmakers voted to extend the deadline for the state’s STAR Bonds, giving the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals more time to work out stadium deals.

The offer expired June 30, but the Legislative Coordinating Council met Monday to discuss an extension.

The committee unanimously voted to extend the deadline, meaning the offer is technically good for another year, which was the only extension option in the bill language.

Cue the pressure being off! Though not entirely off: The Legislative Coordinating Council, a group of eight legislators who meet to do legislature stuff when the rest of the legislature is off at the beach, approved a provision introduced by Hawkins that says the council won’t consider any stadium plans that arrive after December 31, 2025. Unless, you know, they change their minds again and decide they need another extension to ensure the ball crosses the goal line.

Again, all this gamesmanship is common, but it always seems to end up working out in favor of the teams. Take the then-Florida Marlins, whose owner Jeff Loria made an annual habit of threatening that this was the last chance for local officials to provide him with stadium funding — then when legislators declined to do so, he’d be back the next year asking again. Yet Loria still ended up getting everything he wanted, while repeatedly calling owners’ bluffs never seems to make elected officials realize that they can start reducing their offers, not increasing them.

Hawkins no doubt meant that December 31 deadline to be pressure on Chiefs owner Clark Hunt and Royals owner John Sherman to pick a damn state already, but we’ve already seen how deadlines function in this stadium war: The last deadline of June 30 was used by the team owners to get Missouri legislators to rush to approve $1.5 billion in state subsidies for the teams, lest they accept Kansas’s offer. With both Hunt and Sherman now seeking even more money on top of that from city and county governments, is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that “Approve more taxpayer money by December 31 or else” will be the message in Missouri — even if Hunt and Sherman are nowhere near ready to pull the trigger on an “or else,” not when they can keep the bidding war going?

Tl;dr: In an extortion racket, deadlines always end up benefiting the extortionists. “If you don’t accept our money, we’ll let you kill the dog” isn’t nearly as effective a threat, for some reason.

The Missouri state house wrapped up its special session yesterday by voting 90-58 to set aside around $1.5 billion in state money over 30 years for new or renovated stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. (Missourinet called this a “30-year tax break,” which isn’t really right: The state won’t be rebating taxes paid by the teams, but rather setting aside taxes collected on spending at the stadiums and on income by team employees and then using that to pay off state stadium bonds.) With the state senate already having approved the bill last week, the measure now heads to Gov. Mike Kehoe, who will undoubtedly sign it since it was his proposal in the first place.

Chiefs and Royals officials immediately responded to the prospect of $1.5 billion in state cash being dumped in their laps, and did so with a That’s nice, keep going:

From the Royals: “As we said from the beginning of the Legislature’s deliberations, their work is a very important piece of our decision-making process. Now that both houses have voted and the bill is headed to the Governor’s desk, we look forward to evaluating the plan in full detail.

“Our focus remains the same: to prioritize the best interests of our team, fans, partners and regional community as we pursue the next generational home for the Kansas City Royals.”

From the Chiefs: “We are grateful to Governor Mike Kehoe and the Missouri Legislature for taking this significant step forward. The passing of this legislation is an important piece of the overall effort. While’s there’s still work to be done, this legislation enables the Chiefs to continue exploring potential options to consider remaining in Missouri.”

Lobbyists for both teams have already said they will want additional state and county money on top of what the state is providing; this would likely require a re-vote on the Jackson County sales tax subsidy plan that was rejected last April, though such a vote — or votes, if the county decides to hold separate ballot measures for each team — is unlikely to happen this year.

That leaves Royals owner John Sherman and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt with a decision: Accept the state funding on offer from Kansas before it expires at the end of this month, or roll the dice on getting county money approved in Missouri. The Kansas bill would pay up to 70% of stadium costs, while the Missouri one is capped at 50%; however, city and county money in Missouri could bump up that figure to more than Kansas’s offer. (It’s also unclear if Kansas’s sales-tax-based plan would be able to generate enough money to cover 70% of what the teams want.) Also complicating things is that the teams haven’t even finished evaluating potential stadium sites in each state — Hunt says if the Chiefs stay in Missouri they will renovate their current stadium, Sherman says he wants a new stadium regardless, but hasn’t decided where — so it’s going to be a hard call which multibillion-dollar offer to accept.

Or, Hunt and Sherman could go to the Kansas legislature and ask for an extension on their deadline so they can keep weighing both offers. There’s nothing saying Kansas legislators would have to grant it, but the way things have been going, nothing is going to stop either state from continuing this bidding war until agreements for stadiums for both teams are signed, sealed, and delivered. What seems all but certain, barring an epic unexpected collapse of these deals as very occasionally happens, is that taxpayers in one state or another are going to be on the hook for a billion or two dollars in private stadium costs — all that’s left to decide is which side “wins” the race to be the ones to cut the check.

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.

We’re now one day into the Missouri legislature’s special session to discuss Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadium subsidies (plus stuff like tornado relief that legislators might demand as tradeoffs for approving stadium subsidies), and here’s where things stand, roughly in order of least to most LOL:

• Democratic Senate minority leader Doug Beck said his caucus is willing to consider Gov. Mike Kehoe’s plan for a multibillion-dollar stadium slush fund as soon as Kehoe approves an appropriations bill for other state spending, including disaster relief: “When that happens and it’s through the House and on the governor’s desk, then we can talk about it.”
• Republican Freedom Caucus member state Sen. Nick Schroer declared that “for us to sit at the table, and allow tax credits for billionaires to move forward, the little guy needs to get something in return.” His demand for benefits for the “little guy”: cutting the top tax rate on the wealthiest state residents.
• Schroer said yesterday that maybe he wouldn’t approve stadium funding even then, because the Royals posted on social media recently “baseball is for everyone” with a photo of a rainbow flag, which the senator called “shov[ing] sexuality down the throats of our kids.”

This is the usual kind of legislative horse-trading, only where the horses are all actually assortments of raccoons standing on each others’ shoulders inside pantomime horse costumes. There is at least legislation now, Senate Bill 3, which is — no, not that Senate Bill 3, come on, guys, can’t you at least not reuse the same bill numbers in the same year? KMBC-TV claims that the new bill would limit funding to projects “tied to a Major League Baseball or NFL franchise,” which would seem to at least rule out renovating St. Louis’s dome for the USL Battlehawks, but who knows what the bill will look like once the raccoons have gotten hold of it.

Today we’re going to talk about framing, one of the key methods that journalism has for turning a set of facts into a coherent story. Framing shows up first and foremost in the headline, which attempts to boil down an often complex set of events into one short phrase; but it also continues into the story itself, where reporters and editors have to choose which elements to highlight and what they want readers to take away from the article.

For this morning’s subject, we present a post by Kansas City NPR station KCUR on the start of Missouri’s special legislative session to discuss Chiefs and Royals stadium funding, which KCUR chose to give this headline:

Where will Kansas City’s teams move? Missouri lawmakers enter a high-stakes, high-tension battle

You can see why KCUR went with that phrasing: It’s immediately gripping, presenting an exciting conflict with an important outcome — where the Chiefs and Royals will move. It’s also factually incorrect, or at least misleading: The Chiefs and Royals may not move anywhere, either if the Missouri legislature doesn’t approve state money and the team owners decide not to take what’s on offer from neighboring Kansas, or if the owners just decide to wait and see if Missouri can be encouraged to up its ante next session, or if they decide they’d be better off renovating their current stadiums, etc.

The article’s subheading — the “dek,” in journalism parlance — doubles down on the heightened dramatic tension and starts to assign blame:

A big incentive package from Kansas is expiring soon, the Royals are investing in properties across the metro and lawmakers are already fighting among themselves. Will Missouri’s General Assembly be able to reach an agreement and end the drama over stadium funding?

“Lawmakers are already fighting among themselves” is a weird way of describing some legislators promoting a bill and others opposing it, which is pretty much the definition of lawmaking. And positing the goal as “reaching an agreement” — rather than “coming to a resolution” or, perhaps better, “deciding whether funding stadiums with state money is worth it” — stacks the deck in favor of subsidizing teams, since not doing so would be considered failure.

Why am I going on about this? Because framing matters intensely, not just for how readers perceive a news story, but for how legislators and other decision-makers do. It’s well established that the most important factor in how willing local governments are to lavish money on sports team owners is the strength of local “growth coalitions” — basically, whether elected officials, business leaders, and the local media can circle the wagons to decide that a stadium is necessary, after which it’s just a matter of figuring out how the public will pay for one, not whether. You may not think that politicians can be talked into voting for a bill because a news headline says they need to “reach an agreement and end the drama,” but it can be an important part of making them feel like handing out billion-dollar sports subsidies is just a regular part of their job.

As for the rest of the KCUR story, it mostly rehashes stuff we already knew: Gov. Mike Kehoe is proposing a bill to cover “half the cost of a new Royals stadium and a refurbished Arrowhead for the Chiefs” (and actually half the future cost of any stadium in the state with more than 30,000 seats and costing at least $500 million to build or renovate), there would be unspecified “local contributions” from Kansas City as well, and lots of state legislators are opposed to Kehoe’s proposal because they’re upset that the state repealed a popularly passed sick leave law/didn’t fully fund tornado relief/didn’t cut taxes enough. But mostly it’s about the “obstacles” lawmakers have to overcome and the “bitterness” that stands in its way — terminology that makes the stadium battle sound more like the third act of a romantic comedy than like a decision over how to prioritize the use of tax dollars.

The special session kicks off today and can continue for up to 60 days, giving plenty of time for local journalists to get their act together and cover the real issues involved. Or, you know, not, and just go for cheap drama that will drive clicks and not improve anyone’s understanding of anything at all beyond “legislators be disagreeing, LOL.” No need to think too hard about it, there’s only billions of dollars at stake, it’s not like state spending decisions can leave people’s lives hanging in the balance or anything.