Kansas City’s proposal to finance $600 million for a new Royals stadium at Crown Center could face a new obstacle after a group representing low-wage workers submitted petition signatures to force a public vote.
If at least 2,068 petition signatures are certified, Kansas City voters could see two ballot measures over the next 10 months. The first would ask whether stadium subsidies should require a public vote. If that’s approved, a second ballot question will appear at the next election asking whether the city should contribute public dollars to the proposed Royals stadium.
But timing is everything, and Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas believes the petition may be too late.
“I think the deal is likely to get done before we even have some of these discussions,” Lucas said, “if we ever get to the point of a public vote.”
The stadium is proposed for the current Hallmark Cards headquarters site. The city would help finance about $600 million of stadium costs, and the state would help finance about $200 million to $300 million of stadium costs. Including extra money for debt service, upward of $1.5 billion in state and local subsidies would go toward the stadium over the next 30 years.
The Missouri Workers Center, who gathered the signatures, believes that money is better spent elsewhere.
Royals owner “John Sherman is a billionaire,” said Terrence Wise, a leader with Missouri Workers Power, the nonprofit political arm of the Missouri Workers Center. “The city is ready to hand him over $600 million of our money while we’re told there’s nothing left for the schools our kids go to, the buses we ride to work and the housing we can’t afford.”
The proposed $1.9 billion stadium would end up being among the most expensive major-league ballparks of all time.
To help you understand the latest development in the Royals stadium saga, The Beacon put together an FAQ guide to the petition that aims to put the subsidy to a public vote.
Click on a question to jump to a section:
We had a vote on the 2024 stadium proposal for the Royals. How come we aren’t automatically being given a vote on this one too?
The key distinction between the 2024 stadium question and this latest Royals deal is that the 2024 ballot question involved a sales tax that would have generated money to be spent on the Chiefs and the Royals.
When voters approved a sales tax for the teams in 2006, that tax was given an expiration date after 25 years. So Jackson County needed to renew the tax, and any time the city or the county wants to tax voters, it needs to be put to a vote.
In the case of the new proposal to subsidize the Royals, there is no tax increase associated with the deal. Instead, it’s a tax-increment financing deal, also known as a TIF, which means that the city is going to redirect new tax revenues the project is expected to generate to help fund the stadium.
To learn more about how that deal will work, you can read The Beacon’s explainer here.
The city plans to use a similar mechanism to fund infrastructure upgrades in the Country Club Plaza. In the past, TIF deals have helped fund the Midtown Costco and Home Depot and the Power and Light District.
Those deals never went to a public vote, and neither would the Royals stadium at Crown Center TIF — except in a situation where a petition forces a vote.
“Public money should strengthen our communities, not their private fortunes,” Wise said. “We collected these signatures because Kansas City workers deserve a voice in this decision like we had in 2024 when voters rejected a new stadium deal.”
Sam Mellinger, a spokesman for the Royals, declined to comment on the petition.
How does the initiative petition process work?
Kansas City’s initiative petition process is outlined in Article VII of the City Charter.
(The charter is the city’s version of a constitution. It’s the document that outlines the structure of city government and can only be changed with a charter amendment, which must go to a vote of the people, like the Missouri Constitution.)
First, a group of five Kansas City voters — called the “committee of petitioners” — writes an ordinance and gathers signatures from other Kansas City voters who want to see it passed into law.
They must gather a number of signatures equal to 5% of the number of voters who cast ballots in the most recent mayoral election. In this case, that threshold is 2,068 signatures.
(Missouri Workers Center collected 4,500 signatures, more than double that requirement.)
Then, the signatures must be certified by the city clerk within 10 days after the signatures are turned in.
From there, the Kansas City Council is given 60 days to take action.
They have two options. The first option is to send the petition to a citywide vote at the next election. In this case, the ordinance would appear on the November 2026 ballot.
Or, if the council thinks the petition is likely to be approved anyway and wants to skip the hassle of an election, the council can vote to simply approve the ordinance.
If the City Council does not take either option after 60 days — or if the council passes a modified version of the ordinance that the committee of petitioners disapproves of — the petitioners can go back to the city clerk and ask them to send it to the election boards.
Once it appears on the ballot, a simple majority vote is enough to approve the ordinance, which will become law once the election results are certified.
At that point, to repeal the ordinance within the first 12 months, at least nine council members would have to vote to repeal it, rather than the typical seven.
What would the Royals petition do?
The petition calls for a new city ordinance that would require the city to put any large arena or stadium receiving “material support” to a vote of the people.
(You can read the proposal in full here.)
This would apply to any “stadium, arena or similar venue” with a seating capacity of more than 2,500 people. For reference, T-Mobile Center has about 17,000 seats, and Kauffman Stadium has 38,000 seats.
The ordinance defines “material support” to mean that the stadium is receiving funding from the city budget, property tax incentives or frozen tax rates, or if it’s receiving any real property such as land from the city.
Any city employees who “implement, advance, further or foster any plan to design or construct” any venue that meets that criteria would be fined $500 for every day that the stadium has not been approved by voters.
Who organized the anti-stadium petition?
If you saw petition gatherers at places like River Market a few weeks ago, they were wearing shirts from the Missouri Workers Center, which took the lead on gathering signatures.
In April, when the City Council first passed its ordinance kicking off negotiations with the Royals, Councilmember Johnathan Duncan suggested that he was exploring whether to put the Royals deal to a public vote. But he was not involved in writing this petition or organizing a signature drive.
KC Tenants, the citywide tenants union, also did not participate in the signature gathering and has not organized around the petition.
The tenants union was vocally opposed to the 2024 stadium sales tax measure. The union organized a door-knocking campaign and spent thousands of dollars to send mailers to Jackson County voters telling them to vote no on the “billionaire ballpark.”
What does the timeline look like from here?
Once the city clerk certifies the petition signatures, which will likely happen within the next two weeks, the City Council will have 60 days to act. If the council decides to run out the clock, that will likely put the petition on the ballot in November.
However, Lucas said that if the chips fall a certain way, the question may not appear on the ballot until April 2027.
Does this mean we get to vote on the Royals deal?
Possibly.
If the City Council decides to put the question on the ballot, rather than approving it on their own, the earliest that the ordinance could go into effect would be in November of this year, if not April 2027.
Lucas said he expects the Royals deal to move much faster than that. He had already hoped to have the deal negotiated by the end of the summer to break ground as soon as the end of the year.
“I’ve had an interest in all the agreements being complete largely by the end of the summer already,” he said. “There was an argument about starting demolition, real groundbreaking work, before the end of 2026. I continue to stick to that.”
And because the proposed ordinance is only a proposal at this time, Lucas said, the city is under no obligation to abide by it in advance.
So if the City Council and the city manager move quickly, it’s entirely possible that they could sign a development agreement with the Royals and Hallmark before anyone ever casts a ballot.
Litigation would likely follow in that scenario, but once the contracts are signed, it would be difficult to force the city to back out.
And that’s assuming that there are no legal challenges to the stadium petition itself. If the petition writers made any mistakes in how the ordinance is written, the city could ask a judge to throw it out.
But if the ordinance becomes law before the city finishes negotiating the deal, then the city would need to schedule a second election to get voter approval of the Royals subsidy.
That would happen, at the earliest, in April 2027.
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