Why the Chiefs and Royals couldn’t convince Kansas City voters to foot the bill for their stadiums

Had the Jackson County tax extension passed, the Kansas City Royals would have likely moved to a new downtown location. Kirby Lee/Getty Images by Victor Matheson, College of the Holy Cross For the Kansas City Chiefs brass, it must have seemed like the perfect time to ask local voters to cough up some money for stadium renovations. The team was riding high from a big Super Bowl win in February 2024, its third NFL championship in the past five years. Two fellow NFL franchises, the Buffalo Bills and Tennessee Titans, had received record taxpayer handouts for new stadiums in the past two years. And voters in neighboring Oklahoma City had recently approved at least US$900 million in subsidies for a new NBA arena. But the Chiefs and their partners in the effort, the Kansas City Royals of MLB, were in for a rude awakening. On April 2, 2024, voters in Jackson County soundly rejected a referendum to extend a local sales tax for 40 years in order to provide $2 billion in public funding to build a new baseball stadium in downtown Kansas City and fund major renovations of Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Chiefs. The vote in Missouri...