Their first stab at getting public voting was met with a resounding rejection. Where do they go from here?
The Royals hopes for having a new home by 2028 were dealt a mortal blow Tuesday as Jackson County residents - or at least, about 19% of them. Man, voter turnout is really rough for those April votes, huh?
With no immediate path forward, the question on everyone’s mind is what happens next. So let’s talk about the options.
After the vote failed Tuesday night social media was completely saturated with two takes.
Nashville is a popular city when the topic of MLB relocation or expansion comes up. And, on the surface, it makes a lot of sense. It’s only a little smaller than Kansas City and it doesn’t already have a baseball team. It does, however, have a football team - the Tennessee Titans call Nashville home - so you can rule out the Chiefs moving there both because it’s too small to support two teams and because the Chiefs already have the best positioning they could ask for.
When the Rams moved to Los Angeles, Kansas City took over the entire midwest. Their closest competition, geographically, is about 8 hours away by car in any direction. Anywhere the Chiefs move, they’re going to have to fight for attention in a way they simply do not have to if they remain in Kansas City. Even if they’re the best team in the NFL by a wide margin, moving into a territory already controlled by another team is going to reduce the number of fans who are interested in them.
The Royals aren’t moving to Nashville because one of the biggest stumbling blocks for them in Kansas City was their failure to negotiate a good Community Benefits Agreement with the people of Jackson County. The community organizations that attempted to negotiate with the Royals tried to use two previous CBAs as a template, one from Milwaukee and one from Nashville. That means they’re extremely unlikely to get a better deal in Nashville than they get in KC with considerably less difficulty.
I know Salt Lake City has been brought up by a few people as well, but do you really think either team wants to try to compete with Mormons on Sundays? I’ve known a few Mormons in my time and that doesn’t sound like a winning proposition, either.
And, of course, that all ignores the biggest reason neither team is moving: John Sherman (to say nothing of the rest of his ownership group which include Kansas City staples like Patrick Mahomes and Eric Stonestreet) and Clark Hunt have deep ties to Kansas City and it doesn’t really make sense for either man to move his team when they can absolutely still work something out in KC. Say what you will about Clark and John, but neither of them is an idiot. They’ve both certainly dealt with setbacks in business negotiations before and still figured out how to get what they want. This shouldn’t be any different.
Some people seem to think this vote marks a shift away from giving sports teams money thanks to research which has led to more people understanding that new stadiums in downtown areas don’t bring in significant additional tax revenue over time. However, that isn’t my read of the situation at all.
As noted in the previous section, now that the vote has failed almost everyone is willing to acknowledge that both the Royals and Chiefs bungled this whole process even worse than I think any of us imagined was possible. And 42% of people still voted yes. In terms of election margins, that 58-42 margin is rather large, but you only have to make up half of that difference to flip the outcome and the Royals and Chiefs have a variety of ways in which they can manage that.
One of the biggest problems was that the Royals were still changing details and contemplating detail changes very late in the process and even saying they’d determine some stuff after the vote. Even the Chiefs waited until barely a month before the vote to announce what they hoped to do with their share of the funds. That pitiful excuse for a CBA also came out very late in the process and, like almost everything else, lacked critical details.
The Chiefs and Royals have been put in something of a timeout. They wanted things to go faster and it didn’t work out. Now that they have no choice but to spend more time on their projects, they should use that time to really flesh out their plans so that people can be confident they know what will happen with the money the next time this or any other tax measure comes to the ballot.
I think, all else being equal, almost everyone would agree that they would rather have major sports franchises in their city than not. The Royals and Chiefs however, seemed to believe that that would be sufficient to win them the day. It wasn’t. It doesn’t take much to treat people as if they matter and both teams need to bring a little humility with them and accept that Jackson County Citizens will not simply roll over and give them whatever they want, the teams are going to have to bring something other than the existence sports franchises to the table if they want to take something away.
The Royals went on a “listening tour “ as part of their campaign to get their yes votes on this tax, but an extremely common complaint both with community organizations and with potentially affected businesses and residents in all three areas the Royals considered felt that there was a very bad disconnect between them and the team. It seemed like the Royals weren’t telling people as much as they could have and that the Royals weren’t listening to the things the people wanted.
You may scoff at the effectiveness of the vote no campaigns which spent a fraction of what the teams put behind the vote yes campaigns, but it was widely reported about on a variety of news sites, including this one. It may be that they were outspent but they knew how to spend their money better. The Royals can not only get them to stop campaigning against the team but to campaign for them at the very small cost of agreeing to a Community Benefits Agreement that will affect them very little, directly.
If they promise to set a reasonable wage floor, enforce labor peace, and set aside some percentage of housing in their new district to be affordable they instantly turn a certain number of no votes into yes votes. And that’s before people who aren’t directly involved with organizations like The Missouri Workers Center and the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom start asking people to vote yes. To say nothing of the fact that minimum wage raises have proven to be very popular on ballots in recent years even among people who might just listen to the Royals’ own press on the matter and ignore such campaigns.
There are already rumors swirling that Kansas is trying to get the Chiefs to move to their side of the state line. It’s unclear how real those rumors are or how real the negotiations would be if the rumors were real. The fact remains that the Chiefs, like the Royals, have a lease in Jackson County until 2031. If they want renovations or new digs before then, they have two options: stay in Jackson County or sacrifice a lot of time, credibility, effort, and money to break their current lease and likely still remain in the metro area for the reasons outlined above.
The Royals made it clear they were set on making this happen quickly when even after the late switch from East Village to the Crossroads, they insisted a ballot measure end up in the April 2 election. The Chiefs made it clear they would like things to move quickly when they attached themselves to the Royals’ slipshod plans and rushed to get a proposal out.
The Chiefs still seem to be in less of a hurry than the Royals, they didn’t put nearly as much effort into the campaign as you’d expect from a team that truly cared about the outcome, but that just means that the two teams should probably split. Then the Royals can negotiate in earnest, and give up more to make things happen faster. That will leave more time to negotiate with the Chiefs and hopefully still find a reasonable agreement.
For what it's worth, when discussing the labor issues the Royals and SEIU Local 1 were having last summer, I was told that the Chiefs always negotiated less contentiously with the union. This leads me to believe they’ll be easier to work with even though the county will have less leverage over them for a variety of reasons.
I know you all think that no matter what happens, I’ll rail against the teams. It’s true that, as a general principle, I’m opposed to tax funding for billionaires to get stadiums built. However, I’ve already showed that I’m willing to find the silver linings in such deals when I can see them. Contrary to what some of you believe, I’d rather the teams stay in Kansas City. And I understand why many of you would want that, too.
I just want Kansas City to get more out of it than they have been, and I think there’s a real opportunity to make that happen.
