June 18, 2024, 07:45 pm ET
TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas lawmakers on Tuesday approved a bipartisan plan aimed at luring the Kansas City Chiefs away from Missouri by helping to fund a new stadium for the Super Bowl champions.
The bill passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and sent to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly would allow Kansas to issue bonds to cover up to 70% of the costs of a new stadium in the state for the Chiefs and another for Kansas City Major League Baseball. Royalty. The plan also encourages teams to move their practice facilities to the Kansas side of the metropolitan area, which is divided by the two states’ border.
Kansas would pay off its bonds over 30 years with revenue from sports betting, Kansas Lottery ticket sales and new sales and alcohol taxes collected in business and entertainment districts around the sites of the new stadiums.
Korb Maxell, a Chiefs attorney who lives on the Kansas side of the border, said state lawmakers were “embracing the possibility of the Chiefs and the Royals” and can now make a “very compelling offer” to the team. the NFL.
“We’re excited about what happened here today,” he said after the bill passed the Legislature. “This is incredibly real.”
The votes were 84-38 in the House and 27-8 in the Senate. Kelly stopped short of saying he would sign the stadium funding bill, but in a statement he praised the effort behind it.
“Kansas now has the opportunity to become a professional sports power,” he said.
Kansas lawmakers see the two teams in play because in April, voters on the Missouri side of the Kansas City metropolitan area refused to extend a sales tax used to maintain the teams’ existing stadiums, which are located one next to each other.
Top Republicans in the GOP-controlled Legislature had promised that the stadium proposal would not be debated until the Legislature passed a plan that would cut income and property taxes by a total of $1.23 billion over the next three years. Many lawmakers argued that voters would be angry if the state helped finance new stadiums without cutting taxes.
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“We definitely need to show that we are providing relief to our citizens,” said Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican who backed the stadium funding plan.
Kelly called a special session for lawmakers to consider cutting taxes after she vetoed three tax cut plans before lawmakers adjourned their regular annual session on May 1. Once lawmakers called the special session, Kelly couldn’t control what they considered, and that created an opening to consider the stadium financing plan.
The first version of the plan emerged in late April, but lawmakers did not vote on it before adjourning. It would have allowed state bonds to finance all stadium construction costs, but the version lawmakers approved Tuesday would cap the amount at 70% and require legislative leaders and the governor to approve any bond plan.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Sean Tarwater, a Kansas City-area Republican, said the Chiefs are likely to spend between $500 million and $700 million in private funds on a new stadium.
“There are no blank checks,” Tarwater told his Republican colleagues during a briefing on the plan before the House began debating it.
A new nonprofit group, Scoop and Score, formed last month to lobby to bring the Chiefs to Kansas, and that group and the Royals together hired more than 30 lobbyists for the special session. But the national free market and small government group Americans for Prosperity and the Kansas Policy Institute, a free market think tank, oppose the measure, and both have been influential among conservative Republicans.
Free market conservatives have long opposed state and local subsidies for specific businesses or projects. And economists who have studied professional sports teams have concluded in dozens of studies over decades that subsidizing their stadiums is not worth the cost.
“Most of the money spent on the Chiefs is money that would otherwise be spent on other entertainment projects,” said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in central Massachusetts who has written several books on sports. .
Missouri officials have said they will do whatever is necessary to preserve the equipment, but have not outlined any proposals.
“The story now is that, in my opinion, today was largely about leverage,” said Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Quinton Lucas. “And the teams are in a position of exceptional influence.”
The two teams’ lease on their stadium complex runs through January 2031, but Maxwell said renovations to the team’s Arrowhead Stadium would have to be planned seven or eight years in advance.
“This is urgent,” added David Frantz, general counsel for the Royals.
Supporters of the stadium plan argued that economists’ previous research does not apply to the Chiefs and Royals. They said the bonds will be paid for with tax revenues that are not generated now and never would be without the stadiums or the development around them. Masterson said it is incorrect to call the bonds a subsidy.
And Maxwell said, “For a city to be a major league, it needs major league teams.”
But economists who have studied professional sports said similar arguments have been a staple of past debates over paying for new stadiums. Development around a new stadium diminishes development elsewhere, where the tax money generated would go to fund services or schools, they said.
“It could still help Kansas and maybe hurt Missouri to the same extent,” Zimbalist said. “It’s a zero-sum game.”
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