Does Kansas City want to avoid a public vote on Royals?

For Becky Nace, there was a constellation of reasons why Jackson County voters soundly defeated a stadium sales tax for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals in 2024.

Concerns about the economy, frustrations over property assessments and nostalgia for the Royals’ Kauffman Stadium all played a role in delivering the lopsided vote. More than a year and a half later, there’s no reason to believe a new ballot measure would fare any better, Nace said.

“We’ve already expressed the will of the voters,” said Nace, a former Kansas City Council member who spearheaded a group opposing the tax. “And so they’re trying to find a workaround.”

While Missouri rallies around an effort to keep the Royals, two top officials told The Star that Kansas City could offer the team a new stadium commitment without a public vote. Those comments suggest to critics that officials are considering a stadium-funding plan that would avoid a defeat at the ballot box, while local and state leaders reject that framing.

The suggestion has drawn fresh scrutiny in the wake of Kansas’ recent effort to lure the Kansas City Chiefs, which sparked intense criticism after state officials and the team unveiled the plan late last month without direct public input from voters.

A pair of economics and political experts in interviews with The Star said the lack of a public vote in Kansas City would echo a familiar trend in stadium deals across the country. Bypassing voters through administrative tools would also illustrate a persistent tension between representative and direct democracy in U.S. politics, the experts said.

“They are trying to avoid a public vote — let’s be very clear,” said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts who studies stadium subsidies. “Stadium deals tend to be far more popular among city executives than they do among everyday taxpayers.”

The debate comes as Kansas and Missouri have spent the past 18 months fighting over the right to host the Chiefs and Royals. While both states passed sweeping stadium-funding incentives plans to secure the teams, the future home of the Royals has remained unclear.

A Royals spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Three potential locations have been floated publicly: downtown Kansas City at Washington Square Park, North Kansas City in Clay County and Overland Park in Kansas. After a key Kansas deadline lapsed last week, Missouri officials have expressed renewed confidence they can keep the Royals in Missouri.

That new confidence, however, also brought fresh attention to the looming question of whether the team is interested in building a new stadium downtown or in the Northland. House Speaker Jonathan Patterson touted both sites as appealing in an interview with The Star last week.

But the top Republican from Lee’s Summit also said there was one element in particular that made the downtown Kansas City site attractive.

“The attractive thing about a Kansas City, Missouri, downtown location would be that it would not be subject to a vote,” said Patterson. “And I think the vote would be one of the things that we would have to overcome.”

Patterson said he did not believe the Royals or Jackson County wanted to go before voters again after the failed 2024 vote.

For the Royals to tap Missouri’s stadium funding money, local governments have to prove to the state they can provide “sufficient public investment.” When asked about Patterson’s comments, Mayor Quinton Lucas appeared to echo the argument that Kansas City already had available tools in place to make an offer to the team.

“As the largest city in our region, the City of Kansas City has access to tools to support transformational development, like sports and entertainment venues, that can be approved by our elected and appointed bodies,” Lucas said. “We will develop any facilities in a fiscally responsible manner supporting the success of our teams, our taxpayers, and our community.”

A spokesperson for Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican whose administration would be in charge of approving any stadium deal that uses state funds, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trends across U.S.

Matheson, the economics professor, said stadium deals without public votes are becoming increasingly common, pointing to a minor league baseball stadium project in his hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts and a 2002-2003 renovation of Soldier Field in Chicago. That’s largely because the chances of a stadium-funding project passing voters at the ballot box is about 50-50, he said.

“When you go into the backrooms — in the smoke-filled backrooms of lore, right — the stadium deal always gets done,” he said.

Geoffrey Propheter, a professor at the University of Colorado-Denver who studies sports and urban affairs, said the tensions between direct and representative democracy can create conflict for public officials who are weighing stadium-funding decisions.

“The one conflict is a lawmaker, whether it’s the mayor, city council, or whomever, they believe this to be a good thing, but they have evidence that voters don’t like it,” said Propheter. “So how do they convince themselves that this is still good policy, even if voters said they don’t like it?”

In the wake of failures at the ballot box on issues they care about, Propheter said he’s found that officials tend to cherry-pick reasons for the failed vote that match their policy objectives.

Missouri officials respond

In a follow-up interview with The Star this week, both Patterson and Lucas rejected the notion that Kansas City was trying to avoid a public vote on a new stadium downtown. Patterson said leaders were simply saying there are existing programs in place to secure the Royals.

“We’re not trying to get around anything, but hopefully use…the tools that we have and not require any new burdens on taxpayers,” Patterson said.

Lucas, in a phone interview, echoed that idea that administrative tools for stadiums are becoming more common in cities as opposed to tax votes. He added that Kansas City’s plan would rely on funds from “users of the venue” and the surrounding development and would not require the entire city to back the project.

“I don’t think any of Kansas City’s efforts have been aligned with trying to avoid the people,” he said. “I talk to the people all the time. I look forward to hearing from them and the people, you know, obviously, fill up any number of public bodies as well in terms of how we get things done.”

Lucas added that he did not think the entire county needed to vote on a stadium project in Kansas City proper, saying that the tool the city is weighing was the result of finding the “best tools to get something done.”

“I would disagree with the viewpoint that in some way, by using representative democracy, we are not actually listening to the voice of people, something we do every day,” he said.

When asked for more specifics about Kansas City’s offer to the team, Lucas reiterated that the plan would involve tools that are based on users of the stadium and surrounding development “that help us finance this transaction long term.”

“I think we’re going to come to a robust package that looks to outstanding, additional tools that come from the state of Missouri and Jackson County,” he said.

Matheson questioned the argument that taxpayers would not feel a burden from a new Royals stadium — even if it was paid through administrative tools outside of a new tax vote.

“One of the famous quotes in economics is ‘to spend, is to tax’ — and there’s no getting around that,” he said. “If you’re going to say, ‘hey, here’s a bunch of money that we’re going to spend out of government coffers to build a new stadium,’ to spend is to tax.”

Nace, the critic of the 2024 vote, echoed that argument, saying that whatever plan Kansas City presents is “going to cost somebody a lot of money.” She said it appears that the goal is to move forward without a public vote.

“There are various ways they can find funding,” Nace said. “We’ll have to see what they come up with and see how the public responds to their funding sources.”