Royals Unveil Renderings, Plans for Downtown Ballpark to Replace Kauffman Stadium
The Kansas City Royals offered a potential glimpse into the future as they unveiled Tuesday their plans for a new downtown stadium.
The venue would be situated close to T-Mobile Center and the Power & Light District. Team offices are incorporated into the site along with a hotel and other businesses.
In November 2022, Royals chairman John Sherman said the organization was exploring plans for a new stadium district, citing the age and cost to maintain Kauffman Stadium. To that end, team officials identified "several leading locations."
Last August, the Royals released renderings for prospective stadiums in East Village and North Kansas City.
By November, the search expanded to include the site of the old Kansas City Star printing press in downtown, and officials from Independence, Missouri, sketched out their own plans at the eleventh hour.
Royals ownership ultimately settled on the Star printing press site.
Tuesday's announcement represents a step forward in the process toward constructing a new home for the Royals, but fully executing the vision remains far from a foregone conclusion.
The franchise is estimating the venture to cost $2 billion, but the Star's Mike Hendricks reported in October that local legislators were projecting out decades ahead to see the potential finances required of Jackson County taxpayers:
As with anything financed over time, be it a house or a car, the final amount paid is higher than the amount borrowed due to interest payments and inflation. Those assumptions were built into the projections on the spreadsheet that County Administrator Troy Schulte provided legislators.
The spreadsheet is based on a scenario in which county voters would extend for 40 years the current ⅜-cent sales tax that funds the most recent renovations at Kauffman and Arrowhead stadiums. The tax also pays the Royals and Chiefs millions of dollars a year to maintain the venues in good condition.
To that end, the estimates ranged from $4.4 billion to $6.4 billion over 40 years. Jonathan Ketz of Fox4 in Kansas City followed up in November to report the high-end projection had been lowered to $5.13 billion.
The Royals disputed the initial projections to Hendricks, calling them "erroneous, misleading, and inconsistent with what we've shared publicly and in private negotiations."
Sixth District Legislator Sean Smith also said some of the figures adjusted for inflation "look too high" but also questioned the Royals' plans for the public funding.
Alex Love of KCTV5 interviewed business owners in the Crossroads, the Royals' proposed site, who expressed concerns both for their businesses and how much building an MLB stadium there might alter the area.
"To put a stadium in this neighborhood would destroy this neighborhood as far as the culture built down here for the last 25 years," said Matt Adkins, who owns a liquor store. "It's going to displace so many businesses and neighbors."
Voters in Jackson County will go to the polls in April to decide whether they'll continue to pay a sales tax that supplies revenue to the Royals and Kansas City Chiefs. That sales tax has now become a referendum on whether voters want the new downtown stadium.
