NORTH KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Clay County believes it still has a shot at landing a new Kansas City Royals baseball stadium. That’s the view of Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte.
A site in the city at 18th Avenue and Fayette Street was one of two finalists for the team two years ago before they ultimately picked a site in the East Crossroads to try to build their new ballpark in February of 2024.
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The Royals, along with the Chiefs, lost the Jackson County sales tax election by 16% in April of 2024, causing fans to wonder where they’ll be playing in the next decade.
If a stadium’s going to go near 18th Avenue and Fayette Street, the voters of Clay County would have to say yes to a sales tax just like the voters of Jackson County did in 2006.
The leases for the Kansas City Chiefs and the Royals end in January of 2031 in Jackson County.
The deadline to be on a November ballot in Clay or Jackson County has come and gone. That means the next possible time the Royals or Chiefs could ask voters for county sales tax money to help pay for their stadium, would be in April of 2026.
“I think that we are making progress, but the part of it that has to happen is we have to get to a point where we have kind of closure on that,” Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte said in an interview with FOX4 Tuesday. “So, those discussions are ongoing, but like a lot of things in life, when they start rolling, they roll a little faster than you’d anticipate, so it might take a while for us to get there, but I think as we get closer to a point to where we may come up with a solution, I think that solution might be rather quickly arrived at.”
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On the other side though, may be a resident like Mindy Hart, who moved her business at Fayette Street and Armour Road away from the once proposed ballpark site after hearing about the Royals’ interests there. The intersection is just one block north of the potential stadium site.
The Royals wouldn’t comment on our story Tuesday.
“We don’t have information. No one’s presented it to us as a residential community of what the impact is going to be on the community,” she said in an interview with FOX4 Tuesday. “No one from the Royals’ camp has come to us and said, ‘We want to come to North Kansas City, and here’s what we want to do for your community,’ so we can’t do an analysis of the cost and the benefit because we don’t have any information.”
“Right now, we’re not even as far as we know at the table really having conversations. Those conversations are happening with the county, but they’re not happening with the residents, and we’re the ones that are going to be most impacted.”
If the Royals and county leaders want an April stadium election, that would be exactly six months away from Tuesday, October 7th, taking place April 7th of 2026.
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According to the Missouri Secretary of State’s Office, the certification date for an election that day is January 27th of the upcoming year, just three and a half months away.
This summer, the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce said the average stadium construction time is four years and five months, so, if the Royals want to be playing in a new ballpark by March of 2031, construction would need to start around October of 2026.
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