KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County, including Independence. Share your story idea with Tod.
—
There doesn’t seem to be a consensus about Kansas City’s plan to put a new baseball stadium at Washington Square Park, but that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Even support for the existing stadiums was never more than a slightly weighted coin flip.
As the old adage goes, “you can’t please all the people all the time,” and that was always going to be the case no matter how the stadium conversation shook out.
KSHB 41 News has heard from people who don’t like the location but many others who are thrilled, because it cleans up an area where they feel unsafe and makes use of an underutilized area.
In the end, it was probably the best of the remaining options, and realistically, the only remaining feasible option.
Since Kansas closed its doors on Dec. 31, I think the team and the city always knew how this would end.
While the KCMO City Council has approved an ordinance Thursday “to negotiate and execute a term sheet, lease and development agreement with the Kansas City Royals” for “a new stadium, team offices and supporting infrastructure in the Washington Square Park/Crown Center area,” that doesn’t mean residents and fans don’t have questions.
Here’s a sampling:
Q: The city has said there is plenty of parking downtown. How many of the 19,000 parking places are regularly unoccupied?
A: I will never fully understand Kansas City’s fascination with parking. As a regular visitor downtown, who used to work at the maze-like brick former Kansas City Star headquarters, I’ve never had any issue finding parking downtown.
I don’t love getting in and out of the Downtown Loop, and I despise the parking garages that ring the T-Mobile Center, so I avoid both at all costs when possible. But I can still get from my seat in the T-Mobile Center to my driveway in eastern Jackson County in 25 minutes.
Sure, you may have to walk a few blocks, but let's not pretend like there’s no walking involved in getting inside Kauffman Stadium as it is. Besides, that’s true in literally any downtown anywhere. It’s true in New York, St. Louis, Chicago, London and Paris. It’s also true in Liberty, Lee’s Summit, Lenexa, Olathe and Independence.
Savvy visitors to the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex have learned expedited ways to and from the stadium, hacks for finding a clever tailgating spot and developed preferences through the years. The same will happen at the new stadiums — for both the Royals and Chiefs, though I suspect traffic for the latter will fuel my nightmares.
I digress: The key to any stadium location downtown, in my opinion, is proximity to the KC Streetcar line along Main Street, because that opens up the entire spine of the city from the Berkley Riverfront to UMKC and the Country Club Plaza.
The Washington Square Park site offers ideal streetcar access, which means it also offers a massively wider range of parking options than the current setup.
Aside from rideshares, driving and parking is the only option for attending games at Kauffman Stadium, but there will be myriad options for ingress/egress at Washington Square Park.
The parking apprehension never fails to puzzle me. That said ...
Q: What will happen to our tailgating culture? [We heard this from a lot of people]
A: There are a couple spots within a 1/2-mile walking distance where tailgating might still be possible, but it definitely will be diminished.
Some nearby bars and restaurants with outdoor patios will offer cornhole, but it obviously will change. But change doesn’t always mean bad.
Friends will be able to meet for dinner at any number of places, and I still think there will be a neighborhood feel. As much as I love a good tailgate, it’s the people that create the neighborhood feel — and the people will remain.
Q: John Sherman has been dragging this on for years. He also was supposed to make a decision years ago and I'm sure many, many fans are extremely irritated and annoyed.
A: Listen, that’s valid. It has been a lengthy, messy and frustrating process to cover, so I get the frustration fans feel. I’ve at least been able to talk to people who know morsels on information, but the public has often felt as if they’ve been left in the dark and strung along.
That said, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to lay everything at the feet of Sherman, the Royals CEO and chairman.
The downtown stadium conversation predates him. He’s just the owner who pushed forward with the idea, believing it was necessary for the club’s future.
For the first year, the Royals seemed dead set on building a stadium at the East Village site.
They explored other options, flirting with North Kansas City and the idea of an 18th & Vine site, but all signs pointed to East Village as the apple of the club’s eye.
I never fully believed in the NKC site — not because it wasn’t a great option, but because I never believed Clay County voters would sign off on the significant sales-tax hike it would have required.
Besides, downtown was the vision, right?
Ultimately, the East Village site had flaws — ingress/egress inside the Downtown Loop, especially from the east, would have been borderline impossible; it was deceptively far (and mostly uphill) from the streetcar line; it would have been redundant with Power & Light, possibly leaving both to underperform among other issues.
Eventually, the chance to catalyze Roy Blunt Luminary Park, the park/cap over Interstate 670, proved alluring.
Former County Executive Frank White Jr.’s office never got on board with any plan.
White, who was recalled from office in September 2025, raised a few good points and won a few concessions, getting the teams to agree to pay for demolishing Kauffman Stadium and agreeing to pay their own property insurance, but he and his office also undermined any serious effort to make a deal.
City leaders, who helped force the pivot from East Village to the northeast corner of the Crossroads Arts District, were slow to endorse the plan publicly as citizen groups lined up in opposition.
There are a lot of boxes to check when undertaking such massive developments and the messy political process hampered efforts to dot I’s and cross T’s, which turned a coin flip into a landslide at the polls in April 2024.
That also unleashed Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s ambition to use STAR Bonds to poach a couple Missouri businesses, a move that massively increased the price tag in terms of public money.
The Chiefs were never getting $2.8 billion in public funding from Missouri, so it’s possible the team’s plan was to create a bidding war all along — and it obviously worked.
But none of that — the political messiness, the Chiefs’ naked ambition to move to Kansas, the backdrop of citizen anger and unhappiness amid escalating property taxes, and an affordability crisis — is Sherman’s fault.
Everything that happened after — the indecisiveness and cold feet, and lack of transparency or answers — yeah, the Royals should own at least some of that.
Battered and embarrassed after the failure at the polls, the Royals flirted with Aspiria, even buying the mortgage on the property, but faced too many headwinds to make that location a reality.
With STAR Bonds no longer an option after the Chiefs’ move and the machinations in south Johnson County, Washington Square Park became the focus again entering 2026. Finally, the dam broke after three and a half years of conversation and speculation.
Q: Why are taxpayers being asked to finance the construction of a billionaire businessman's baseball stadium?
A: I suppose you are looking for a more nuanced answer than — for the same reasons taxpayers have been asked/forced to foot the bill for virtually every development in recent decades.
I get that stadiums and the discussion around them are highly visible, generate endless headlines and stir unceasing emotional debates. But I wish people kept up the same energy for housing developments of half-million dollar homes, sprawling (or towering) luxury apartment complexes, redevelopment deals for underperforming retail areas that already received favorable deals before failing, and — worst of all — state-line crossing corporate headquarters.
You and I will never get to spend a year enjoying the views from the penthouse at One Light, Two Light, Red Light, Blue Light, but I just want to make sure the people mad about the stadiums are shouting just as loud about those deals and are enraged by Lockton’s deal to uproot its headquarters from KCMO to Leawood.
The juice certainly wasn’t worth the squeeze for the Crackerneck Creek TIF District in Independence, where I live a few miles from an underperforming Bass Pro Shops-anchored development that remains an anchor around residents’ necks.
Originally conceived as a way to spur redevelopment in areas where it wouldn’t be attempted or possible without it, virtually every millionaire and billionaire developer from coast to coast takes advantage of the situation now. Almost no project happens without an overture to local government with a hand out asking for tax dollars to get diverted from schools and local governments.
I wish we lived in a world where tax abatements, TIF financing and STAR Bonds didn’t exist — or, at the very least, I wish we lived in a world where there was an exceptionally high bar that included a robust and necessary public benefit before any consideration.
I wish we lived in a world where there was a moratorium on gifting people who already have more than they could ever need.
Instead, we live in a world where it’s become an expectation for any development project, so I am not shocked a pair of multi-billion dollar businesses — the Royals and Chiefs — who are used to operating on public subsidies that massively sweeten their bottom lines, don’t want them to go away.
It’s true that there has been, generally, a trend pushing back against public financing for stadiums.
CPKC Stadium, home of the Kansas City Current, was privately financed, and we’ve seen it with recent announcements in Denver with the Broncos and Chicago with the Fire.
But that hasn’t been a universal shift and obviously isn’t here.
It’s pretty clear that stadium investments don’t actually deliver the lofty economic benefits promised, but that’s true of a lot of things in a world that’s increasingly hard on the working class.
I don’t have a good answer beyond the need for wholesale reform nationwide with respect to corporate welfare and giveaways in the name of job creation.
Q: What about the Irish Fest?
A: I have no idea, but it’s also a little early to know that. The funding isn’t in place, the development agreement isn’t in place and we’re a year from construction even possibly starting.
The Royals have yet to definitively, or at least publicly, acknowledge that their future lies at the northeast corner of Main Street and Pershing Road. I’m not sure any official communication from the club has ever included the words Washington Square Park in that order.
But eventually it will and that will set in motion getting a host of other things ironed out.
The George Washington statue will get moved. The Korean War Veterans Memorial will find a suitable and respectable home. I have faith in that, but those answers may be a year or more away from being decided.
—
