Category: Kansas City Chiefs

Friday roundup: D-Backs tax kickback plan rushes ahead despite questions, Utah bill would let a hundred stadiums bloom

access_time personNeil deMause

Springtime is always a busy time for stadium and arena shenanigans, if only because it’s budget season for most states and cities. But still! Buncha bullet points today, is what I’m saying, and expect a lot more next week, and so on and so on until legislators break for the summer or come to their senses, whichever comes first (you know damn well which will come first):

  • An Arizona state legislative analysis says because Diamondbacks players pay $3.5 million a year in state income tax, that would over more than a quarter of the tax kickbacks team execs want for stadium renovations — asked and answered, move to strike. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, meanwhile, says the state analysis doesn’t look at actual economic data but rather projections like calculating every fan buys two beers (first, assume a spherical fan). No worries, though, the bill still has to go through — oh, welp, looks like it already passed the state house and just needs to clear the senate, and House Democratic Leader Rep. Oscar De Los Santos has expressed “alarm” and said “we should not be rushing through this legislative process,” guess there’s no time to worry like the present.
  • Utah state senator Scott Sandall, figuring one MLB stadium with no team to play in it and no way to pay for it isn’t enough for a growing state, introduced a bill to let Salt Lake City’s stadium district build multiple stadiums as small as 18,000 seats for any sport, “to be proactive, just for the future,” not because he has any particular sports teams in mind that could use an 18,000-seat stadium or anything.
  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas is supporting a new Missouri state bill to raise money for Royals and/or Chiefs stadiums by providing … okay, Lucas didn’t say exactly how much money or from where, and the bill itself isn’t posted on the Missouri senate website yet, but Lucas says it’ll help Kansas City “host FIFA World Cup games,” please nobody tell him that it’s going to be decades before the U.S. gets another World Cup after 2026, I don’t want to spoil his day.
  • The proposed Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park is set to lead to the creation of a new Circle K gas station, maybe, if government bureaucrats don’t get in the way with their red tape about “residents” being “concerned,” can you believe those guys?
  • Phoenix Suns co-owner Justin Ishbia has pulled out of bidding for the Minnesota Twins and is instead upping his minority stake in the Chicago White Sox, which certainly can be read as positioning himself to become majority owner once 89-year-old Jerry Reinsdorf gives up either control or this mortal coil. Whether he would go ahead with with Reinsdorf’s current stadium plans, let alone rebranding the team as the Chicacago White Sox, remains to be seen.
  • The MLB cable empire keeps on crumbling, and at least one small-market owner, the Milwaukee Brewers‘ Mark Attanasio, says he wants a TV revenue sharing model more like the NFL’s where all the money is shared equally. This is worth watching since it would have a major impact on where teams could relocate to (Green Bay would suddenly be a viable MLB market), plus all sort of other things like how long the 2027 baseball lockout is likely to last.
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KC area officials compete to bid for Chiefs/Royals stadiums, team owners sit and twirl mustaches

access_time personNeil deMause

Shit’s gettin’ real-ish in Kansas City:

  • Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe met with city and Jackson County leaders yesterday for 30 minutes to discuss plans for Chiefs and Royals stadiums. County legislator Sean Smith, who was a swing vote in approving a referendum on the last stadium-funding proposal for the teams, came away saying “it went really well” and “the governor indicated that there’s clearly some state-level tools they can bring to bear,” which is unspecific but sounds like state funding of some kind is in play.
  • State officials said they’ll work on property tax reform, which #1 stadium backer county legislator Manny Abarca said could help get county voters on board with raising taxes for stadiums.
  • KFVS-TV opined that “The Kansas City Chiefs bring more than just championships to Missouri. The Chiefs estimate Missouri receives $28.8 million in tax revenue each year from their games.” (That sound you just heard was millions of economists suddenly crying out in terror and being suddenly silenced.)
  • In neighboring Clay County, meanwhile, two state senators introduced legislation to create a county sports complex authority to spend money it would get from somewhere, somehow.
  • In neighboring Kansas, House Rep. Sean Tarwater recommended against using money from a fund to lure sports teams to spend on education instead, on the grounds that the state is currently negotiating with the Chiefs and Royals owners and if officials offered money and then had to reveal they blew it all on schools, “we’d look like jackasses.”
  • The video from the same KMBC story that reported on Tarwater opined that Missouri house speaker Jon Patterson said last spring’s stadium funding referendum “likely failed because there wasn’t a sense that Kansas City Jackson County were on the same page,” which, okay, Jon.

Nothing concrete, in other words, but the bidding war is clearly very much on. Presumably legislators are currently putting their heads together to figure out how to approve money in a way that doesn’t require going before voters, or at least going before voters with a “but we’re cutting your property taxes at the same time!” carrot. The Chiefs and Royals owners, meanwhile, have not publicly commented, which has been working pretty well so far as they’ve let competing elected officials do their work for them, bwahahaha.

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Friday roundup: Ravens get even more public cash, D.C. United wants somebody to buy them a roof

access_time personNeil deMause

Greetings from New York, where we now have two terrible mayors instead of one! That’s hardly the worst of today’s political news, so instead let us distract ourselves with some (mostly) terrible stadium and arena news:

  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $434 million stadium renovation project is now a $489 million renovation project, and 64% of the additional cost is set to be covered by state taxpayers. Or, if you’re whatever AI is writing the headlines over at Sports Illustrated, “Ravens Spending Over $50 Million More on Stadium Upgrades,” sure, that’s probably right, no need to read your own story to check.
  • D.C. United‘s owners want to add 10,000 seats and a roof to their (checks) not yet 7-year-old stadium, and “what remains unknown is the potential price tag or whether the team will ask the city for subsidies.” Also the Axios reporter passing this along (from an original source of “two sources,” not even “familiar with the team’s thinking” or anything) calls D.C. United “American soccer royalty,” what ever happened to no more kings?
  • Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson is turning up the heat on Jackson County, saying “time is running out” for “a plan and course of action” for new Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadiums, or else … the teams will kick everything back a year and try again, again? Too many showrunners these days really do substitute overbearing string sections for viable suspense plots.
  • D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says a Washington Commanders stadium “will be the anchor that attracts other investment–housing, amenities, jobs, and opportunities,” guess somebody doesn’t remember what the late Allen Sanderson said about NFL stadiums and cemeteries.
  • In 2023, the city of Anaheim commissioned a $325,000, two-month study of how to keep the Angels‘ stadium viable for decades to come, and now the study may not be done until 2026 and will cost over $1 million, cool, cool.
  • New Sacramento Republic F.C. vaportecture! And it looks like, uh, a soccer stadium? At least there are some smoke bombs, on both ends of the pitch for some reason, but no fireworks or people holding up scarves dramatically and we can’t even see what ridiculous formation the players are in, I give this a B-minus for entertainment value at best.
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Have Chiefs/Royals stadium talks torpedoed K.C. border war “truce”? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

There was a lot going on yesterday, but Kansas City’s NPR station still had time to get out a big think piece — reprinted from local nonprofit news outlet The Beacon — on what the Chiefs and Royals stadium battles mean for the region’s eternal economic border war between Missouri and Kansas. How did KCUR and The Beacon do? Let’s drop in and see:

The two states had for years engaged in a bloodletting competition to lure businesses to their side of the Kansas City region — handing out lucrative incentives to move a corporate headquarters just a few miles across the state line.

These deals brought no new jobs to the region. They sacrificed millions in taxes that could have gone to hire more teachers, pave more roads or invest in public safety. They did nothing to improve the regional economy.

It was, as many called it, a race to the bottom.

So far, so good, though Kansas City is hardly alone in this regard.

Suddenly, that race came to a halt. In 2019, the governors in both states recognized the futility of these battles and agreed to stop the poaching. Since then, most economic development officials in the region say, the truce has worked.

Sort of? The 2019 truce only applied to payroll tax kickbacks, and even then was seen as fragile given that it was “binding” only until one state or the other chose to walk away, as reported at the time by oh hey look it’s KCUR!

A recent study conducted by Brookings Metro underscores why the states shouldn’t waste those resources. The study found that the Kansas City region’s economic output is almost evenly split on both sides of the state line, an anomaly among other multistate regions.

What’s more, the metro’s total GDP significantly boosts each state’s economy. Of Missouri’s total GDP, nearly a fourth comes from the Kansas City metro. Kansas, in turn, gets more than a third of its total from our region.

This is where the article starts to get weird: Kansas and Missouri shouldn’t be throwing public money to lure businesses back and forth across the state line because … the K.C. metro area is evenly split between the two states? Notably, that’s not even what the linked Brookings study says about the K.C. border war, which is the more lucid argument that “both states attempted to move jobs and businesses in the Kansas City metro area to their side of the state line, resulting in zero net new jobs for the region—at taxpayers’ expense.”

But if a place like Wyandotte County has a chance to use incentives to attract a business, why shouldn’t it? In fact, even with the truce, the county and its neighbors across the region still strike deals with businesses in nearby cities and counties.

Uhhhh, because it results in zero net new jobs for the region, at taxpayers’ expense? Also, what happened to “the truce has worked”? Can we get a fact-checker in here?

The difference today, said Greg Kindle, CEO of Wyandotte Economic Development Council, is those businesses are the first to broach the idea of a move. And even then, they aren’t, he said, asking for anything more than what the county typically gives to qualifying businesses.

Consider Mies Family Foods, a family-run business that will be moving from Missouri back to Kansas, where it got its start. Earlier this year, Mies was looking for a larger site and turned to Wyandotte County because that’s where the owners live.

The county offered Mies its standard 50 percent tax abatement. That, coupled with an attractive site near Interstates 70 and 635, was enough to convince Mies to make a $15.6 million investment and bring 51 employees to Kansas. When the abatement ends, the property will generate $200,000 a year in taxes.

“You look at that and say, does that qualify as a border war?” Kindle said. “Well, they had a connection to Kansas and wanted to move.”

Oh, okay, the county is handing out tax breaks to everyone, including companies owned by people who would want to move to your state regardless and are just happy to pocket the cash as a bonus. That’s … better? Kindle seems to be trying to go with “better,” I think?

If you’re wondering why The Beacon chose to ask the head of the local public-private pro-business advocacy group about whether giving public money to local businesses is a good idea, you clearly weren’t the editor of this piece, because that’s the only kind of source heard from here: People quoted include the CEO of K.C.’s regional business marketing arm, the CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the aforementioned Wyandotte economic development council CEO, a Kansas state official who voted to spend $28 million on the 2026 World Cup even though it’ll be held in Missouri, the CEO of K.C.’s World Cup bid group, and one of the Brookings authors. Any other experts in or critics of interstate bidding wars or the economics thereof didn’t get a call for comment, so we’re left viewing the end (?) of this truce (?) through a lens of “actually, it’s all fine, probably.”

As for the Chiefs and the Royals, though they’re the hook for the headline, they don’t make that much of an appearance in the article itself, though it does note that “on balance, the subsidies offered to major league sports franchises rarely, if ever, deliver that boost.” That’s followed, however, by a digression about how stadium employees would likely live in both states either way — true enough, but kind of beside the point if the whole issue is that paying to move businesses back and forth across state lines is a net zero for the region as a whole — and then this:

And the region, certainly, does not want to lose either the Royals or the Chiefs. [Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Joe] Reardon said that even if one or both teams move to Kansas, the truce will remain because the region will have kept its prized teams.

You heard it here first: Without tax kickbacks, the Chiefs and Royals could move to Greensboro or someplace, according to the head of the organization dedicated to obtaining tax kickbacks for its members. Great journalism, everybody — who needs meddling billionaires when we have reporters who’ve been trained to follow their lead on who is and isn’t worth talking to?

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Friday roundup: Chiefs hire clown consultants for fan poll, Bears try to conjure stadium money with magic words

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday of another week, and at this writing Los Angeles is still extremely on fire. For a good writeup that also has a sports spending angle, check out yesterday’s excellent article by the excellent Alissa Walker, in her excellent 2028 Olympics newsletter Torched. Her takeaway from the fires darkening her skies: “Here’s what residents should ask themselves when surveying LA’s ashen neighborhoods: if our leaders haven’t yet put together a coherent strategy for something we supposedly want to happen in LA in three years, how can we believe that they’re going to put together a coherent strategy to address the worst-case scenario that confronts us now?”

We don’t always get the life-changing megaevents we should have seen coming that we want, we get the ones we … no, “deserve” isn’t right, either. Maybe: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and if it’s not too much trouble I would really like to have a word with the playwright.

Meanwhile, in the parts of the country where only our hopes for an equitable, democratic system of government are on fire:

  • Kansas City Chiefs ownership is going to email its fans asking them whether they want a new or renovated stadium, and if that doesn’t already raise all kinds of questions like “How will they make sure it’s scientific?” and “Shouldn’t this be up to all Kansas City area residents, not just those on the Chiefs’ mailing list?”, wait till you see who’s conducting the survey. This is clearly a push poll, yet the K.C. media is reporting it as a way to “decide the stadium debate,” add journalism to the list of things that are on fire.
  •  Chicago Bears chair George McCaskey says “we’re making progress” on a new stadium while team president Kevin Warren says “downtown still remains the focus” but also “we have 326 acres of beautiful land in Arlington Heights” and “I remain steadfast that the goal we have is shovels in the ground in 2025.” Pretty sure that’s not how performative utterances work, but points for trying!
  • The Los Angeles Rams playoff game has been moved to Arizona because of the fires, and Newsweek is upset that the stadium there is named after an insurer that canceled insurance coverage for homes in areas at high fire risk. One would hope that the denial of coverage would discourage people from building (or rebuilding) in fire-prone areas, but the state of California provides insurance if private insurers won’t, and anyway you don’t need insurance if you buy a house with cash rather than taking out a mortgage so it won’t discourage the truly rich; trying to solve societal problems with economic incentives always seems to run into the problem that some people’s incentives are more economic than others’.
  • Cincinnati business and political leaders debated (at the local Rotary Club, of course) where the city should build a new arena, which is a nice way to avoid discussing the $560 million in sales taxes, alcohol/tobacco/cannabis taxes, and rideshare surcharges that it’s currently proposed the city spend on the project. Mayor Aftab Pureval said of the arena, which would be the new home of the Cincinnati Cyclones ECHL team, looks like, and that’s it: “We’ve got to do everything we can not to kick this down the road again, but to come together as a community, have a call to action and decide, ‘Yes, we’re doing it,’ and that needs to happen now.” Or, you know, “No.” “No” is also a decisive action!
  • Ohio state senate president Rob McColley says if the state is going to put $600 million into a new Cleveland Browns stadium, “There would have to be an ability to be paid back.” That’s a reasonable demand for state lawmakers to make, though McColley went on to say “I think there very well could be conversations regarding that going forward, but we’ll see,” which makes it sound less like a requirement than a thing that legislators will maybe ask for but not refuse to do a deal without, doesn’t anybody ever read my articles?
  • The Salt Lake Tribune ran a big article on whether history shows kicking back property taxes to a new Utah baseball stadium would require taxes to be raised elsewhere, and while I will freely admit I lost track of some of the fiscal details when it started talking about “mosquito abatement districts,” the answer is yes, obviously yes, cutting property taxes in one place either causes them to rise elsewhere or for services to be cut, that’s how math works.
  • There are new renderings for the Buffalo Bills stadium that is costing New York taxpayers $1 billion and costing Bills fans a pile of money in PSL fees, and they come with extra fireworks! Also a quote from NFL stadium consultant-for-life Marc Ganis about how the stadium will feature “airiness and interaction” and not for “a sophisticated urban environment where people want to get dressed up and go to the game” but for “fans who take great pride in showing up when it’s snowing,” all of which is a nice way to say “We could have built a roof but that would have been too expensive, you live in Buffalo, deal with it.”
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Friday roundup: Browns officially want $1.2B for Brook Park dome, Chiefs will take whatever stadium money someone offers

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to those who’ve re-upped as FoS supporters in recent days without my reminding you. There are still a handful of numbered Vaportecture art prints left, so donate now if you think that’s the kind of thing you’d like, or if you don’t want that thing near your house at all but just want to support the work of this site.

Speaking of work, there’s a whole lot of it today:

  • Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam have confirmed they are indeed focusing on a new domed stadium in suburban Brook Park, releasing a statement yesterday saying, “The transformative economic opportunities created by a dome far outweigh what a renovated stadium could produce with around 10 events per year.” The statement also said that “this stadium will not use existing taxpayer-funded streams that would divert resources from other more pressing needs,” which neatly obscures the fact that it would use $1.2 billion in new taxpayer-funded streams that would divert resources from other more pressing needs. And headlines like “It’s official: Cleveland Browns moving to Brook Park” remain premature, since nobody in state or local government has approved the $1.2 billion in tax money yet, so really we’re still just at “Browns owners’ #1 choice is someone giving them $1.2 billion,” and who wouldn’t want $1.2 billion? I bet you could roll around in it real nice.
  • Speaking of non-announcements, Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt says he might want to move to a new stadium in Kansas, or move to a new stadium in Missouri, or renovate his current stadium in Missouri, whatcha got? “I certainly don’t expect to have anything finalized by [next spring], but I’d like to know the direction that we’re heading in that time frame,” said Hunt, which isn’t even a fake deadline, come on, man, don’t you know you’re supposed to set a date and then move it later if necessary? Do I have to call you up and read Chapter 4 to you out loud?
  • In extremely unsurprising news, NFL owners unanimously approved Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s plan to accept $775 million in public money to pay for stadium upgrades. “The NFL believes in Jacksonville. I believe in Jacksonville, and I know our fans and the people throughout the community believe in Jacksonville,” Khan said after the vote from London, where his team will keep on playing one “home” game a year under the new deal because one can always believe in two places at once.
  • As if Chicago doesn’t have enough new stadium demands, Chicago Fire owner Joe Mansueto says he’s looking at building a soccer-specific stadium as well. Mansueto says it would be privately funded, but they all say that, so if he does settle on a location and a plan, it’s worth keeping an eye on the fine print.
  • For everyone writing up your “Where will the Tampa Bay Rays play in 2025?” articles, please cross Durham, North Carolina off the list, Bulls management says there’s no room there. Also if you’re wondering what is being done with the Rays stadium roof that was blown off last week, you can buy bits of it on eBay.
  • Green Bay Packers management says it wants to sign a 30-year lease extension on Lambeau Field and pay for all stadium upgrades in that time and just wants the city of Green Bay to freeze its rent in exchange. That’s probably not a terrible deal, but it would cost city taxpayers something — $30 million, according to city operations chief Joe Faulds — and the current lease runs through 2032 with a 10-year team extension option, so one can see why the city might not jump at the chance. Anyway, let this be a reminder that even fan-owned sports teams can demand public money, nonprofits got the profit motive too.
  • It took 27 years for this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon to come true, but with cities like Tulsa offering cash payments for remote workers to relocate to their cities, you too can now be Ned Balter.
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Friday roundup: Sacramento celebrates A’s move with new golf simulators, KC residents say cap public stadium funds at one-third

access_time personNeil deMause

Sports economist Victor Matheson and I were both on a radio show this week to discuss the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium situations — you can listen to it here, but first check out the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, it’ll be quick, I promise:

  • There’s a “major economic boost” coming to Sacramento now that the Oakland A’s are relocating there temporarily, reports KCRA-TV: A new brunch-and-golf-simulators venue is opening across the street! (It was going to open there anyway, but now that the A’s are coming, the owner is trying to open it earlier.) Also, the mayor is “in discussions” with three new restaurants! Feel the excitement!
  • There is no excitement in St. Louis, where the Cardinals are still technically in the playoff hunt, but fans in the best baseball city in the world don’t want to watch .500 baseball, it turns out, or even buy hot dogs. “I love being the hot dog lady,” says hot dog lady Karen Boschert. “I’ve cut my staff down. My prices are reasonable. You can take my food into the stadium.” Maybe she could pivot her sales pitch to point out that you can buy her food and not bring it into the stadium? Just an idea.
  • Pollsters in Missouri decided to ask an unusual question of local voters: not whether taxpayers should pay toward new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, but how much. The average was two-thirds team, one-sixth state, one-sixth city and county, which is kind of arbitrary and doesn’t account for whether the public would get back any share of revenues or community benefits or anything, but sure it sounds fair. Ish. Time will tell if the team owners come back with “zero-thirds team, poke in the eye with a sharp stick public.”
  • Most of the San Antonio residents who testified at a Wednesday hearing on a $160 million Missions minor-league baseball stadium “voiced concerns and skepticism,” according to Fox San Antonio. For actual quotes we have to turn to KSAT, which notes that a local arts and social justice activist said, “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” while a resident of a housing complex that would be demolished to make way for the stadium said, “I would not be able to get somewhere else, and I would end up in the street yet again.”
  • Chicago’s city budget is facing a $982.4 million shortfall, and Mayor Brandon Johnson says, “There are sacrifices that will be made,” but not new Bears and White Sox stadiums, those are important even if they would cost the city upwards of $1.2 billion and $2 billion respectively, sacrifices are for little people.
  • Team-funded studies of a Philadelphia 76ers arena say it would be great, other studies show it would be a disaster; the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board says it’s up to the mayor and city council to figure out where the truth lies in the middle!
  • Another group of developers unrelated to either the Royals or the city has come up with renderings for a new downtown baseball stadium, and guys, you should at least look up how many players are on the field for a baseball game.
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County kills Chiefs stadium sales-tax vote planned for November, because reasons

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m being punished for not posting anything to the site yesterday by all the news happening today, right? Anyway, so this also happened:

There will be no vote this fall on a Chiefs-only sales tax measure. By a vote of 5 to 4, Jackson County legislators on Monday defeated an ordinance that would have put a quarter-cent sales tax measure on the November general election ballot.

If you’re scoring at home, that’s the revised sales-tax measure that Kansas City councilmember Manny Abarca introduced last week to fund about $300 million worth of a Chiefs stadium renovation. The vote then was 5-4 in favor, and yesterday it was 5-4 opposed, and the application of advanced mathematics allows me to determine that somebody switched sides in the interim, but the Kansas City Star coverage doesn’t report on who that was. It does report that the Chiefs owners did not support the ballot measure proposal, which seems bizarre, but maybe they think they have a better shot at getting approval for stadium subsidies that don’t require a public vote? Come on, somebody allegedly in the business of journalism, can you share some hints? KCUR? KMBC? No? Well, fine then.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas did post on Facebook:

The Chiefs will be playing in Kansas City, Missouri for a generation to come.

The Royals will be playing in Kansas City, Missouri for a generation to come.

Don’t get distracted by the day-to-day sausage making. Good work is getting done to ensure a positive future for all.

Sure, maybe? Not getting distracted by political posturing is always a good plan, but Lucas here is clearly doing political posturing of his own, so who knows. A generation from now we’ll look back at this time and think either “Wow, remember when people thought the Royals and Chiefs were really going to move if they didn’t get some crazy amount of public money from K.C.?” or “Wow, remember when people thought that the Royals and Chiefs might not get some crazy amount of public money from K.C.?” or “That Quinton Lucas guy had as bad a crystal ball as that 1970s Montreal mayor.” My bet, based on past history, would probably be on Door #2, but past performance is no guarantee of future results, though sometimes it rhymes.

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County readies re-vote on tax hike, this time just for Chiefs stadium, to see if voters hate that any less

access_time personNeil deMause

It looks like Jackson County, Missouri is going to go ahead and follow up the resounding April defeat of a referendum on raising sales taxes to fund new Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadiums by holding a redo of the vote, only this time just for the Chiefs. The new ballot measure would raise the county’s sales tax by 0.25% for 20 years instead of 0.375% for 40 years, and would leave out the baseball team — presumably because Royals owner John Sherman’s stated desire to build a new $2 billion stadium on top of an existing neighborhood with no guarantees of any aid for residents and businesses that would have been displaced was seen as too great a liability.

Whether Jackson County residents would really vote in November to approve a trimmed-down version of what they overwhelmingly rejected in April is another story. If the quick back-of-the-envelope math I just did is right, the present-value cost of skimming off those future tax revenues would go from around $600 million for the two teams combined in the April plan to around $300 million for the Chiefs alone in the new plan — which is better but not really that much better, since it would still leave the Royals to be dealt with. And while $300 million might seem cheap compared to some other recent NFL upgrades I could name, there’s no guarantee that Chiefs owner Clark Hunt wouldn’t try to wrangle state or city funding on top of a county sales-tax surcharge.

Of course, whether a re-vote can actually work may be less important to county officials than looking like they’re at least doing something in response to Kansas’ offer of potentially billions of dollars in state money: Jackson County legislator and new-stadium stan Manny Abarca told KMBC, “I think it’s about having folks at the table truly negotiating in good faith and not just sitting there,” which is an impressive bit of saying the quiet part loud. After voting 5-4 this week to amend the referendum proposal, the county legislature must hold a final vote on it next week to get it on the November ballot. If that goes through, we can let the shouting re-commence!

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Kansas official: Multibillion-dollar bidding war for Chiefs and Royals is “gross” but still “the right thing to do”

access_time personNeil deMause

The Missouri Independent ran a long article on Friday about the current border war between Missouri and Kansas over the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, much of which is about how throwing money at sports teams to move to your state is pointless, which you can probably skip if you already read this website. What’s more interesting, to me anyway, is what it says about how and why elected officials in both states are totally chill about engaging in a bidding war despite agreeing to a binding ban on interstate bidding wars just five years ago:

“I do not like this. It feels gross,” Kansas state Rep. Jason Probst said during a caucus meeting of House Democrats in June. “This whole show that’s going on feels disgusting to me. And it’s still the right thing to do.”

In an interview, Probst, who is from Hutchinson in central Kansas, said the reality of professional sports requires governments “to play the game” and offer public assistance, lest they risk losing teams altogether.

“You can stand on your principles. … But if another state isn’t playing by the same set of rules you are, then they’re going to make that investment and they’re going to take that away,” he said.

Yeah, that whole “this is bad policy, but if we don’t do it somebody else will” thing is precisely why development subsidy watchdogs have been saying there’s a need for cross-border nonaggression pacts for almost 30 years now. And Kansas and Missouri did just that in 2019, but unfortunately it only seems to have applied to Kansas’s payroll-tax-kickback program, not the sales-tax kickback program it plans to dip into for $1.4 billion or more of state stadium spending, so oh well! Also, apparently legislators back in 2019 forgot to say out loud that they were including an unstated “sports teams don’t count” clause:

“The sports teams are sort of in a special category of their own. I don’t think that’s what that legislation really was meant for,” [Missouri House Majority Leader Jonathan] Patterson said of the truce.

The article also includes some dirt on the STAR bonds program that Kansas has approved for use on new Chiefs and Royals stadiums, noting that it is “often-criticized” and has mostly “failed at its goal of increasing tourism” and has even led to defaults on one project’s bonds when sales tax revenue came in slower than expected. Kansas officials point out that since these are revenue bonds, the state can just let the bondholders swing in the breeze if the bonds default; University of Colorado-Denver economist Geoffrey Propheter counters that that’s never going to happen:

“In the real world, there’s a huge risk to Kansas state taxpayers,” he said. “They’re going to have to decide to either bail out the project or do nothing. And if they do nothing, their credit, the state’s credit worthiness, will take a hit. And that will make all future borrowing more expensive.”

All of this is an excellent example of why relying on states and cities to agree to stop raiding each others’ businesses is a hopeless cause: As the 1995 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis paper cited above notes, there have been lots of attempts at interstate nonaggression pacts, and they’ve always ended up being broken by one state or another. The only solution is for Congress to step in — which U.S. Rep. David Minge tried to get it to do back in 1999 by taxing local level subsidies out of existence, only to find that his colleagues in the House had no interest in even giving it a committee hearing, doubtless because business leaders in their states wanted to keep those subsidies flowing.

The next best hope is that local officials on one side of the state border or the other decide to say “too rich for our blood” and let the neighboring state “win” the team and all the stadium costs that go with it, knowing that those can never be paid off by whatever small bump results in local tax revenue. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like anyone made this point in the Independent article, but hang on, I’m not to the end yet, oh look:

But this sort of jockeying between states only benefits team owners, said Neil deMause, a journalist who has written a book about stadium subsidies. Taxpayers and fans, he said, stand to gain little, especially if game tickets become more expensive at new facilities.

“All the economists I know say the best thing you could do is reject it for your state and have the stadiums get built in the other state,” deMause said. “You still get to go drive across the border and see the games the same way as you would otherwise … but you don’t have to pay for building the thing.”

What that guy said.

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