Here’s the soonest a Kansas City Royals downtown stadium measure could appear on ballot
As the 2023 baseball season opens, the Kansas City Royals continue to cast eyes on the future ... and a downtown ballpark.
Royals owner and CEO John Sherman confirmed a recent story in The Star that the club’s ownership group is considering a menu of possible sites that includes an area in the East Village and another where the former Kansas City Star printing pavilion now sits on 16th Street.
“I would confirm that East Village has been talked about,” Sherman said. “We’ve probably done the most work on that site.”
As for The Star’s former printing press building that’s currently owned by the Privitera family — a glass structure just across Interstate 70 from T-Mobile Center — Sherman had this to say: “That’s one of the sites I’d say that has not been eliminated.
“The owners of that property have creative ideas, but there are some challenges.”
Among them is land acquisition surrounding the old Star property.
“That would be a really cool place to have a stadium, to be next to the Power & Light and T-Mobile Center,” Sherman said. “But that’s really the biggest issue. You have one owner of the Star (building) itself, but there are a lot of things around it and it wouldn’t be as efficient to buy the land.”
Those two sites are among the 14 the Royals say they originally considered. The project will likely seek hundreds of millions in taxpayer money, and the earliest any ballot measure could appear in Jackson County is Aug. 8 of this year, or perhaps April 2024.
If the Royals are going to be in a new ballpark by 2027 or 2028, Sherman said they would need voter approval of an extension to the current three-eights-of-a-cent sales tax in Jackson County. That tax as it currently exists was part of a 2006 ballot measure to fund renovations of Kauffman and Arrowhead stadiums.
“We’ve having discussions with political leaders about what the ballot language would be,” Sherman said.
Recently, Jackson County taxpayers were polled for a second time about the idea of a downtown ballpark. Sherman said the results were “pretty good when asked the simple question about extension of the tax. We’d just be redeploying the same money we’d use to maintain old buildings.
“I love Kauffman Stadium, but this is an old building.”
But it will be the Royals home for at least the next few seasons, and Sherman said he’s currently more focused on seeing the team progress under new manager Matt Quartaro.
“When I get up in the morning,” Sherman said, ”I’m thinking a lot more of how were going to play then where we’re going to play four or five years from now.”
