KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Late June or early July, that’s around the time that the Kansas City Royals hope to have some certainty about their future.
“It's our objective, by mid-year, to be prepared to talk about it,” Royals Chairman and CEO John Sherman said Saturday as the club hosted its annual Royals Rally at Kauffman Stadium.
The team’s days there are numbered.
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The Royals plan to have a new home by the time their lease at Kauffman Stadium expires after the 2030 season — but no future site has been selected yet.
“We're having serious discussions here,” he said. “This is big economic-development work, and discretion and confidentiality are paramount to those discussions. Certainly, (we’re) hopeful that before too long, we'll be able to tell you a lot more — but not a lot to say right now.”
The Royals hoped to build a new stadium downtown in the northeast corner of the Crossroads Art District, but voters soundly rejected a sales-tax extension proposal in April 2024 that centered on that idea and renovations to GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium for the Chiefs.
“We did a lot of postmortems,” Sherman said. “We would have done some things differently. But the result of that is it's been a wake-up call — not just for us in terms of our preparation, but it's been a wake-up call to the community.”
Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. led the charge to scuttle the sales-tax extension, opening the door for one or both teams to leave Jackson County — the only county either has called home in the Kansas City area.
“We had made a decision back then to approach our historical partner (Jackson County) with a simple extension of the tax,” Sherman said. “Certainly, I wish we'd have had more time on the site. That's probably the one thing I’d wish. I wish we would have had more time, but the teams were going together and there was an interest in going in April.”
Despite announcing a North Kansas City site as one of two finalists during the ramp up to the vote, Sherman acknowledged that the Royals were solely focused on a new stadium in Jackson County ahead of the April 2024 vote.
“It's just so different than what we're doing right now,” he said. “We had gone to one kind of one counterpart. Even though we evaluated others, we made a decision that we were going to try to stay here with a simple, what we thought was a simple, proposal. Now, it's about just serious negotiations.”
The sales-tax question failed with 58% of the vote, triggering an economic-development bidding war after the Kansas legislature voted to allow STAR Bonds to cover up to 70% of any proposed stadium project for the Chiefs or Royals.
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Missouri does not have an economic-development tool similar to STAR Bonds, but the teams and state are continuing to discuss ways to keep the teams in the Show-Me State.
“I would just say that we're talking to Missouri,” Sherman said. “They're very engaged, and I think that remains to be seen how it's done. But they're very engaged and are working very hard to keep both of these teams on this side of the state (line). ... I would say that there's a concerted effort, but these conversations now are going on on both sides of the state line.”
The Royals had preliminary talks about a handful of suburban sites — including two in Johnson County, at the old Sprint Campus site and the Brookridge Country Club site, that have driven recent headlines — before settling on the Crossroads idea ahead of the doomed vote.
That site, which included the former Kansas City Star printing press, is now under lease as a data center, so the Royals have pivoted and are re-examining locations they’d moved on from in past years.
Sherman didn’t deny that the team was evaluating a proposed site at Washington Square Park — just north of Crown Center and east of Union Station along the KC Streetcar line — but he didn’t confirm it either.
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“I don't want to really talk site-specific at all, but we have engaged a number of experts in real estate, in finance — public finance, private finance — lobbyists,” he said. “We have a lot of people trying to help us with this. We're certainly studying some of the things that have gone on in new ballparks.”
That included examining how Atlanta, which moved from downtown to a suburban ballpark in 2017, and Nashville, Tennessee, where the Titans’ new stadium is expected to catapult them from the bottom of the NFL in revenue to near the top, he said.
“There's a lot of people in this community that recognize how important these teams are to the region,” Sherman said. “There's going to be some good options on the table, so, net, net, net, I think that — as painful as it was — the result is that it's benefiting us.”
Sherman, who turns 70 in April, reiterated that this is a half-century decision for the Royals, one that will have ramifications long after his stewardship of the franchise has ended.
“It's about community, but it's also about making sure that this franchise will thrive here for the next 50 years and we can hopefully be more aggressive with the Carlos Estévezs and make sure that we can build a team that's competitive year in and year out.”
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