Some Kansas lawmakers see a chance to lure Kansas City’s two biggest professional sports teams across the Missouri border, but an effort to help the Super Bowl champion Chiefs and Major League Baseball’s Royals finance new stadiums in Kansas fizzed. Kansas legislators worried about how it might look to taxpayers.
TOPEKA, Kan. — Some Kansas lawmakers see a chance to lure Kansas City’s two biggest professional sports teams across the Missouri border, but an effort to help the Super Bowl champion Chiefs and Major League Baseball’s Royals finance new stadiums in Kansas fizzed over concerns about how it might look to taxpayers.
Legislators’ work on a plan began in earnest behind the scenes after voters on the Missouri side of the Kansas City metropolitan areaearlier this month to extend a local sales tax used to keep up the complex housing the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium and the Royals’ Kauffman Stadium for more than 50 years.
The proposal would allow the bonds to finance 100% of the construction of each of two new professional sports stadiums with at least 30,000 seats. State and local officials would have a year to sign off, and the teams would be on the hook if local tax revenues weren’t enough to pay off the bonds. “We’ll be in a situation where we go back to the drawing board,” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt told reporters last week. “I do feel very much a sense of urgency, and we will approach it from a broader perspective going forward.”
Critics have long argued that allowing the bonds to finance big projects represents the state picking economic winners and losers instead of the free market. The same kind of bonds have financed multiple projects, including NASCAR’s Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kansas.
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