Downtown Crown: Kansas City approves agreements to bring Royals stadium to Crown Center

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County, including Independence. Share your story idea with Tod.

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The proposal to build a new Royals stadium that would anchor a $3 billion redevelopment of Hallmark’s Crown Center passed its biggest hurdle to date Thursday and is poised to become reality as soon as March 2030.

The Kansas City, Missouri, City Council voted 11–2 to approve Ordinance No. 260704; Council members Johnathan Duncan and Nathan Willett voted no.

The ordinance authorizes City Manager Mario Vasquez to execute previously negotiated lease, development, funding and community benefits agreements with the Major League Baseball team and its partners.

After a contentious committee meeting Tuesday — when the city’s Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee advanced the ordinance with a do-pass recommendation — there was no public comment during the full council meeting.

However, members of the crowd loudly cheered and snapped as Duncan (6th District) shared his concerns. He said there is only one opportunity to get the deal right, and he wants better negotiations. Duncan feels the Royals are getting everything, but the city is getting nearly nothing.

Outbursts of opposition and “let us vote” rang out after the vote.

Overall, those in attendance were much less disruptive than during the July 27 public meeting on rezoning, which was shut down after about an hour.

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By signing off on the agreements, the city has taken a massive step toward keeping the Royals in town and building a downtown stadium, but it’s not the final step.

Still, Royals Chairman and CEO John Sherman thanked the mayor, city manager and city council for their work in a "major step forward for our team, our fans and for the hometown we love."

A separate ordinance on the rezoning application, which passed out of the City Planning Commission on Aug. 5, will be heard at the Sept. 3 council meeting.

The council is expected to discuss the boundaries of the Impact Area TIF District, which is the area from which incremental tax-revenue gains will be redirected to pay off the city-backed bond, later in September.

Now that a local funding source has been identified, which triggers state incentives via the Show-Me Sports Investment Act, Kansas City and the Royals also can begin working with Missouri on additional funding.

The first phase of the project — which the team hopes to begin in early 2027— would include a $1.2 billion stadium, $500 million in on- and off-site infrastructure, and $200 million for a new Royals team office. The total cost of $1.9 billion includes $1.14 billion in public money and $760 million in private funding.

The roughly $1.1 billion entertainment district planned around the stadium, which would be built in the decade after the first phase wrapped up, would be privately funded, according to the agreement.

The project has drawn opposition from working-class activist groups. They are angry that so much public money is going to a billionaire ownership group when the city has cut services in some areas, and they believe residents should have the final say on the project at the polls.

Residents at the San Francisco Tower, which is not part of the rezoning plan but would be deeply impacted as the closest neighbors to the stadium, also have concerns about the project and don’t believe the Royals or Crown Center have engaged in substantive dialogue to address those issues. They have retained counsel and are weighing a lawsuit.

The Royals have been working with the city for nearly four years to find a new home after announcing plans in November 2022 to leave Kauffman Stadium at the end of the current lease, which runs through the 2030 season.

After narrowing a list of finalist locations to two, East Village inside the Downtown Loop and across the Missouri River from downtown in North Kansas City, the Royals ultimately put forth a proposed stadium in the Crossroads Art District as part of a sales-tax extension vote in April 2024.

Voters rejected that effort, setting the stage for the Chiefs to leave for Kansas and leaving the Royals skittish to put another development plan to voters, multiple sources familiar with the years-long negotiations told KSHB 41.

KCMO faces an Aug. 31 deadline to decide whether to put a resident-led initiative, which would require this and all future stadium projects to a public vote, on the April 2027 ballot.

It has led to allegations that the city is trying to fast-track the agreements to beat that deadline, an assertion Mayor Quinton Lucas has rankled at when asked whether the city was rushing the plans after recent committee meetings.

“The city does not have a deadline or a timeline, at least as to how it would act on any ordinances either before us or in the future relating to the baseball stadium,” he said.

Lucas also said he wouldn’t pause “important economic development work” before the city.

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