KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
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The Royals aren’t the only team that might have an interest in moving to North Kansas City, but in the case of the Chiefs, it wouldn’t be for a new stadium.
Team officials met with Clay County leaders late last year to discuss the possibility of moving the NFL team’s practice facility to NKC.
“We’ve had one meeting with the Chiefs about their practice facility and that was before Christmas or Thanksgiving ... last year, end of last year,” Clay County Commissioner Jason Withington said.
City officials with North Kansas City also confirmed Friday that a preliminary meeting late last year with the Chiefs about possible interest in building a new complex.
The Royals have been considering a 90-acre site, which is located south of Armour Road to 16th Street and west of Interstate 29 to Erie Street, in North Kansas City for a new stadium and ballpark district, but the projects aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
“My understanding is that there is ample room to do both — that we could have a Royals stadium here as well as the Chiefs headquarters and training facility,” State Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, who represents Clay County in the Missouri legislature, said.
The Chiefs also would move the franchise’s world headquarters to the Northland under the concept.
“It would definitely be a world headquarters, team offices, practice facility and then, yeah, they’d have a mixed-use development around it,” Withington said. “Tthink of dallas; they have ‘The Star.’ Something similar to that.”
The Cowboys’ 91-acre development, which is in partnership with Frisco, Texas, includes a training facility, two practice fields, a hotel, a health and sports medicine complex, retail and office space, and a 12,000-seat stadium.
“The Big 12 had their thing (football media days) down there, so I heard about how great it is,” Chiefs season ticket member Steve Phelps said, “the new atmosphere for bringing everybody together to watch sports.”
Phelps met his family Friday at the Iron District in NKC just south of the proposed site. He works downtown and his wife and children stopped by the Rabbit hOle before lunch.
Chiefs coach Andy Reid loves getting the team away from town for training camp, which has been at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph since 2010. The team recently signed a multi-year extension with the school, but the recent NFL trend has been to shift preseason camp to the team facility — an idea Phelps said he loved.
“Nothing against St. Joe, but I think for the whole city it would be a little bit nicer,” he said. “We do go up to St. Joe every once in a while, love the college feel on their campus, but here in North Kansas City — that’s why we’re having lunch here with my family right now, because it’s an awesome spot. ... If they were to put something like Dallas has for their sporting activities, I think this would be a great neighborhood, great location for everybody in the city.”
The Chiefs report for training camp ahead of the 2025 season on Sunday.
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a bill July 11 authorizing the creation of the Clay County Sports Complex Authority — a governor-appointed state board similar to the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority, which operates the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex — last Friday.
Combined with the Show-Me Sports Investment Act, which passed during a special session last month, it paves the way for a stadium-development project in North Kansas City, but the new state tax-redirection funding mechanism couldn’t be used for a project that didn’t include a stadium.
That means Clay County taxpayers would foot more of the bill if the Chiefs sought a world headquarters and practice facility in NKC without a Royals stadium included.
“No matter where these two teams stay, there will be a local investment needed to be made,” Kehoe said.
That would require voter approval of a new sales tax in Clay County.
“There would have to be a sales tax in place that we would have to go to the voters on,” Withington said. “... We would only put something on the ballot if we have a deal in place with the Royals or the Chiefs.”
With an August deadline to put something on the November ballot, and no deal imminent with either team, next April is the earliest Withington realistically expected such a vote could happen.
Jackson County voters rejected an extension of the 3/8-cent sales tax extension in April 2024, which would have built a new Royals stadium downtown and renovated GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, so any vote in Clay County faces an equally uncertain future.
“We’re really going to have to sell it to the northern part of Clay County,” Nurrebern said. “Now, whether that is providing some other incentives with that tax, whether it’s a rural road fund or public safety fund, I think that we can be really creative and make sure that whatever we’re asking of voters serves the entire county well.”
KCMO Mayor Quinton Lucas said he wasn’t opposed to the idea of the Chiefs’ headquarters and practice facility in North Kansas City.
“I, of course, am the mayor of the largest city in Clay County as well, so I welcome discussion as to how do we think we can build out the most attractive possible collaboration of all of the jurisdictions involved,” he said. “Certainly, (I’m) very familiar with some of the Clay County opportunities. That is not something that out of a whole cloth we reject necessarily.”
But Lucas still has designs on keeping the Royals in KCMO city limits and the Chiefs at Arrowhead.
Asked for details of the billion-dollar proposal he’s touted for a new baseball stadium, Lucas said, “It's not a new sales tax, it's not new general-fund dollars, but what it is is largely built on redirections, other infrastructure dollars that the city already has in its system and, broadly, that sort of incentive approach to how we can entice and create what would be a strong deal long term.”
Lucas suggested that Port KC, which helped build CPKC Stadium and transform the Berkley Riverfront, could help with bonding for the project or the city could try to cobble together funding options through the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority, or PIEA, or the Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, Commission. Broader details about those funding sources and how much the city could offer remain unclear.
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