Discover the Border War over Chiefs and Royals stadiums, incentives from Kansas and Missouri, and new developments analyzed on SportsBeat KC podcast. By Monty Davis and Randy Mason
On Monday morning, Chiefs team president Mark Donovan phoned one state governor, a brief conversation to preserve the prospect of prolonging a half-century relationship.
On Monday afternoon, a legislative body in a different state passed an extension for a bill designed to lure the Chiefs and Royals across the border.
Missouri by morning.
Kansas by afternoon.
A decision by ... ?
“You and your timeline questions,” Donovan quipped, jokingly, when I asked that.
Then he did share a detail: If the Chiefs opt to renovate Arrowhead Stadium rather than build a domed venue in Kansas, they would likely target an April 2026 ballot in Jackson County. That’s as opposed to November.
“I think given the timeline, it would be difficult to hit the November date at this point,” Donovan said, because any ballot measure proposal would need to be filed more than two months in advance.
That’s only relevant if the Chiefs opt to stay at Arrowhead Stadium.
And that’s only plausible if they can reach an agreement with the Jackson County Legislature on a ballot measure — a legislature that has some important, even unprecedented, business at the moment.
That legislature unanimously voted Monday to schedule a special election in August to let voters decide whether to recall county executive Frank White after the certification of nearly 43,000 signatures seeking the measure.
Even acknowledging its uncertainty, a special election result could change the conversation about the stadiums in Jackson County, given it could change who’s conducting the most important conversations about the stadiums in Jackson County.
White vetoed a measure to put a stadium sales tax extension on the ballot ahead of the April 2024 vote, before the legislature overrode that veto and put the item in front of Jackson County voters. And then those voters sided with White, resoundingly rejecting the Chiefs’ and Royals’ combined measure.
Which ought to be the primary takeaway: No matter the deal reached to secure a place on the ballot, or who is securing that deal, what’s left unchanged is the very thing that turned down the two teams the last time.
The voting public.
That’s where — and why — next April could come into play. The Chiefs are set on giving themselves ample time to provide voters with a clear plan, and the public ample time to determine their support for it. Waiting until April could offer that advantage to whichever team opts for it.
It could amplify some pressure, too. The Kansas Legislative Coordinating Council (LCC) extended the state’s stadium incentives package offer Monday afternoon, backed by STAR bonds. They’ll now give the teams until the end of 2025 to grab that offer.
That’s one deadline, for now.
Here’s another: If the Chiefs renovate Arrowhead Stadium, it would likely require 3-4 years of construction, the team estimates, because they would still need to use the facility in the meantime. That would limit when they’d be able to work on it.
Their current lease expires at the end of the 2030 season, roughly 4 1/2 years after a potential April 2026 election.
If the Chiefs instead pursue a new stadium in Kansas, they would likely attempt to finalize details and begin building before April 2026 — and not have to work around football games to do it.
You can get a sense of all the moving parts in play, right?
And to think, much of that — the extension of a Kansas deadline, a phone call with the Missouri governor and step toward a potential shift in county leadership — occurred in a single day.
“We need to know a lot,” Donovan said when asked what’s still outstanding. “We are so far down the line in both sides that now it’s the details. Now it’s literally getting down to the final points and making sure everybody’s in agreement on what we need to do and that we have all the pieces lined up.”
Some of those points are significant. While we know the Chiefs would make an ask of Jackson County taxpayers to renovate Arrowhead Stadium, we don’t yet know what form that would take. With the Chiefs and Royals having separated, extending the existing 3/8th-cent sales tax is almost certainly off the table.
Might the Chiefs try for a quarter-cent?
That’s the nature of discussions the Chiefs are having in both states — privately.
They are not publicly tipping their hand for their future stadium plans, and neither have the Royals, for that matter. It has transformed an economic debate into an all-out bidding war, with two states fully engaged.
“Our job is to go to the Hunt family and suggest, ‘Here are your two options,’” Donovan said of the Chiefs’ ownership. “They both make sense. Let’s make the decision that’s best for our fans and our organization.”