Residents near potential Royals stadium in JoCo speak out

One by one, Joe Davidson and his son have checked Major League Baseball stadiums off their bucket list over the last decade — taking in the sights and sounds of each city they visit.

What the Overland Park resident experienced in Washington, D.C., in August inspired him to imagine a bright future for his hometown Kansas City Royals.

“It’s in an area of town that wasn’t developed at all, and it’s really grown up around there. They’ve done a terrific job,” Davidson said of Nationals Park, which opened in 2008 in a previously neglected industrial corner of Southeast Washington best known for its asphalt plant.

Davidson likes the idea of Royals baseball downtown at Washington Square Park. He’s an even bigger fan of building the new ballpark across the river in North Kansas City, where he believes development could be transformational.

What he and an increasingly vocal contingent of residents in the Kansas City suburbs of Overland Park and Leawood feel less warmly about is the prospect of the Royals taking up residence at the Aspiria campus — the other location team management is soliciting feedback on from fans.

“Taking (Royals owner John) Sherman at his word, he wants to impact the Kansas City area with it,” said Davidson, whose Hawthorne View home is in one of several residential neighborhoods within about a mile of the Aspiria site that could become the ballpark.

“He wants to provide housing, provide retail, provide other forms of entertainment there. And I don’t see where he’s going to have the opportunity to do it here,” Davidson said.

A Royals affiliate purchased the mortgage of the 200-acre campus in May, giving the team some financial leverage over the site. City planning documents show the campus’s current owner recently withdrew its development plan, which called for a mixed-use regional activity district on 51 acres at the northwest corner of 119th Street and Nall Avenue.

Johnson County feedback

New public opinion polling showcases a sharp divide among Johnson County residents over whether the Royals should continue pursuing a ballpark at Aspiria.

In a November survey of 375 Overland Park and Leawood residents sponsored by the Kansas Policy Institute and conducted by SurveyUSA, 53% of respondents said they supported the idea and 40% said they opposed it.

Asked to compare various options, 40% of respondents said the Royals should stay put at the Truman Sports Complex. Twenty-six percent preferred the Aspiria site — more than the combined 17% who favored downtown or North Kansas City stadiums.

In municipal elections across Johnson County earlier this month, candidates who supported more local development swept to victory over their counterparts who expressed more skeptical views on growth.

But Jeff Hurt, president of Hawthorne View Neighborhood Association, said he and other HOA leaders near the potential stadium development have heard resounding opposition from homeowners worried about their property values and the potential nuisances a stadium could bring.

“We don’t think it’s a good idea for any number of reasons,” Hurt said. “The fact is, I don’t think the infrastructure would support a stadium like that. I think parking would be an extraordinarily difficult problem.”

Traffic flow in and out of neighborhoods is already complicated by developments on Nall, he said. He also worries about the impact a major sports venue could have on emergency vehicles from Menorah Medical Center, which is just across 119th Street from Aspiria.

“Eighty-one home games. If they make the playoffs, there’s even more,” Hurt said. “They shoot off fireworks, games late at night, and I just think noise, light, more traffic, more congestion. I’m not suggesting that crime would necessarily go up, but you know, you’ve got people parked all over the place. That oftentimes will attract people that like to break into cars.”

Beyond that, he said he’s read up on the decades of research that show stadium projects rarely earn back the amount of public aid that goes into them.

“From my point of view, it’s another billionaire owner wanting to increase his wealth at the expense of the community,” Hurt said.

‘Economically devastating’

The Royals declined to comment for this story. So did the Kansas Department of Commerce, which is leading stadium negotiations with the Royals and Chiefs on behalf of the state.

Rep. Mari-Lynn Poskin, a Leawood Democrat whose district includes the Aspiria campus and the surrounding area, said the feedback she’s received recently has been heavily critical of a new stadium in Overland Park.

Poskin said when Kansas held a special session in June 2024 to vote on a massive sales tax and revenue, or STAR bond, stadium incentive package, she received more emails encouraging her to support the bill than any other piece of legislation during her five years in the Legislature.

“Some people are like, ‘Oh, the Chiefs and the Royals are just using Kansas to get a better deal out of Missouri,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s fine because we just need them to stay here no matter what,’” Poskin said.

She still thinks a Royals stadium could make sense for Kansas. But she envisions it at Legends in Kansas City, Kansas, or in south Johnson County, where there’s more open space for development.

“Since the Royals announced that they purchased the mortgage to the Aspiria campus, I’ve only heard opposition, and I’ve heard quite a bit of opposition for a lot of different reasons,” Poskin said.

Central to her own misgivings about the proposal is the strain she worries it could put on the nearby hospital and schools, as well as the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, which has stood for 38 years just across 117th Street from where the ballpark could be constructed.

Poskin said a recent visit to the bustling community center convinced her that a Royals stadium so close would stymie the center’s growth and limit access to its facilities.

“They made a really strong case that bringing the Royals to that location would be economically devastating for their campus and basically destroy the heart of the Jewish community in Johnson County,” Poskin said.

A spokesperson for the community center declined to comment.

Menorah Medical Center did not respond to requests for comment on how its operations could be affected by a stadium and surrounding development.

Neither did T-Mobile, which has corporate offices on the Aspiria campus. Poskin said she hasn’t spoken to T-Mobile executives directly, but she’s heard rumors that the company might leave the state if the Royals choose to build at Aspiria.

“That would be very bad for us economically,” she said.

‘Not a selfish thing’

A group of top Kansas lawmakers voted in July to extend the law authorizing the STAR bond incentive package for the Royals and Chiefs through June 2026.

But as a caveat, they indicated they wouldn’t entertain a proposal brought to them after Dec. 31, 2025. Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican running for governor, has said he expects to take up a potential deal with the Royals before the end of the year.

Any stadium deal approved by the state would have to be considered by the local government, too. Overland Park officials contacted for this story referred The Star to a city spokesperson.

“Overland Park is supportive of our hometown teams,” spokesperson Meg Ralph said in an email. “We know the Chiefs and Royals belong in the Kansas City region and will do everything in our power to keep them here.”

Jan Kessinger, a former state representative who now serves as president of the Blue Valley school board, said in his opinion, a major league stadium at Aspiria would be disruptive for schools and the broader community.

“The area already has heavy traffic from 7:30 a.m. through 6 p.m.,” Kessinger said in an email. “In mid-afternoon, there is quite a bit of school traffic, including Blue Valley North High School with student drivers and Valley Park Elementary with parents and school buses taking students home around the time day games would be finishing up.”

He said the Royals’ vision for a stadium and surrounding entertainment and retail district isn’t one that can be realized in Overland Park.

“Dropping a stadium into suburbia across the street from an outdoor mall in one direction and a major hospital just across the street in another direction doesn’t seem to fit what the Royals want,” Kessinger said.

Pamela Skarda, who lives in the Enclave At Town Center Apartments just east of Hawthorne, said her own opposition to building the stadium there is philosophical.

“This may sound very classist, but it’s not meant to be. The people that reside in and live in Overland Park, by and large, are very affluent,” Skarda said. “And I’d rather see them build that stadium in a neighborhood where the people really need the jobs and the economic development in their neighborhood.”

Royals management, she said, should follow the lead of the team’s founding owner, Ewing Kauffman, whose philanthropy demonstrated his commitment to the inner city.

“They need to have corporate responsibility,” Skarda said.

“I don’t care about the traffic in my neighborhood, OK. This is not a selfish thing,” she added. “This is about using your means to empower populations as Ewing Kauffman did, and the people in Leawood and Overland Park do not need it.”