Initial thoughts on Kansas City’s deal with the Royals

First, the documents themselves.

• Ordinance 260704: the authorizing ordinance.
• Stadium Funding Agreement. 
• Stadium Development Agreement.
• The Lease Agreement. 
• The Community Impact Partnership Agreement (CIPA) often called a community benefits agreement.

Second: the bigger picture on these deals. Stadium deals like this one follow a well-studied script, and the research consistently reaches the same conclusion regardless of the city.

• A 2022 survey of more than 130 studies since 1974 by economists J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys found local economic activity is largely unaffected by professional sports venues, and that subsidy levels “typically far exceed” any measurable benefit. (SSRN)
• The University of Chicago’s Kent Clark Center (formerly IGM Forum) polled leading economists on whether “in general, sports subsidies cost taxpayers more than they generate in benefits for residents”. The panel agreed by a wide margin. (Kent Clark Center)
• A 2025 paper by Sidney Johnson, Rodney Fort and Mark Rosentraub pushed back on that consensus with a case-by-case defense of some subsidies. A genuine academic dispute, not a settled question, though the majority position still runs against deals like this one. (Journal of Sport Management)
• Kansas City’s own history offers a cautionary example already: the Power & Light District, where roughly $295 million in city-guaranteed debt was issued on revenue projections then-City Auditor Mark Funkhouser warned weren’t supported by the underlying data. (Next City)
• A 2014 Show-Me Institute paper found Kansas City’s tax-increment-financing tools have historically subsidized already-thriving areas rather than the blighted ones they’re intended for. That’s directly relevant, since the Royals’ Crown Center site isn’t blighted. (Show-Me Institute)

What’s unclear about this deal specifically. Beyond the general research, a direct reading of the filed agreements raises questions that haven’t been publicly answered.

• The Royals get a full sales-tax exemption on construction, maintenance and future upgrades on top of the $600 million headline figure. Field of Schemes estimates the exemption could be worth $500 million or more on its own, pushing total public cost toward $1.5–2 billion once every tax break is counted. (Field of Schemes)
• The city gets 5% of “non-baseball net profit” from the stadium, but the Royals operate the building and control event economics. Economist Geoffrey Propheter, quoted by Field of Schemes, notes that share could easily net to zero if non-baseball events are structured to show no profit.
• A direct reading of the Funding Agreement finds its own contingency deadline — the date by which funding conditions must be satisfied — left blank in the version filed with the clerk. (Funding Agreement, clerk.kcmo.gov)
• Major League Baseball’s own sign-off on the deal isn’t due until September 30, a month after Thursday’s vote and after the Aug. 31 deadline the city is racing to beat on a separate petition question (below). (Development Agreement)
• The Lease, Development Agreement and Funding Agreement each define what happens if litigation voids the deal differently: one treats a successful legal challenge as a pause, one lets either side simply terminate, and one doesn’t clearly address litigation as a triggering event at all. The three signed documents don’t agree with each other on the single most consequential open legal question in the deal. That comparison comes from a direct reading of the three signed agreements, not from outside reporting.
• The Development Agreement’s own budget, construction schedule and list of “Minimum Required Project Elements”—all made contractually binding by its own text—are blank placeholder pages in the copy filed with the city clerk.
• The CIPA, which memorializes the Royals’ $55 million community-benefits commitment, gives the city no remedy for a breach except a lawsuit for specific performance, after a cure period of up to 180 days—no damages, no default trigger into the Lease. Compliance reporting is essentially self-certified, once a year. (CIPA, kansascity.legistar.com)
• Dave Helling has compared the city-backed bond structure here to the financing Kansas used for the Chiefs’ stadium proposal across the state line, noting Kansas’s approach doesn’t put the state’s own credit behind the bonds the way Kansas City’s does here—a structural difference that makes Kansas City’s version more expensive if revenue falls short. (Kansas City Stack)

How the city got here. The process itself—not just the deal’s terms—has drawn scrutiny.

• Missouri Workers Power gathered roughly 4,500 certified petition signatures to force a public vote on any stadium subsidy; the city has until Aug. 31 to adopt the petition’s ordinance or schedule a vote, and appears to be finalizing the agreements before that deadline specifically to avoid one.
• A Show-Me Institute analysis argues that racing to finalize the deal ahead of a certified petition is the same maneuver the Missouri Supreme Court rejected in Earth Island Institute v. Union Electric Co. (2015)—once a petition is certified, a legislative body is “powerless” to act on the underlying matter while the vote is pending. (Show-Me Institute)
• Dave Helling’s reporting flagged the irony directly: Mayor Quinton Lucas, once a City Council critic of a “secret” 2017 airport financing deal for lacking public detail, is now pushing this stadium package through committee on a compressed timeline with limited public financial detail of his own. (Kansas City Stack)
• Voters already rejected an earlier version of this deal once, at the ballot box, in April 2024, a Jackson County sales-tax measure that failed 58% to 42%.
• The enabling ordinance waives several of the city’s own standard procurement and oversight rules specifically for this project: competitive solicitation for the architect (Populous, Inc., sole-sourced) and general contractor, the city’s Certified Small Business Enterprise Code provisions (replaced with lower, custom goals), Historic Preservation Commission review of pre-1976 building demolition, and the city’s construction-workforce ordinance.

What taxpayers are actually exposed to. Some of this exposure is stated plainly in the contracts; some of it isn’t quantified anywhere public.

• The city’s $600 million commitment is described as “unconditional… to the fullest extent permitted by Missouri law” in multiple places in the Funding Agreement, even though it’s funded through annual appropriation rather than a single up-front bond. That means skipping a year’s appropriation wouldn’t be illegal but would damage the city’s own credit rating.
• The city waived sovereign and governmental immunity for breach-of-contract claims in all three of its core agreements with the Royals. A court fight the city loses could expose taxpayers to money damages on top of whatever else is at stake.
• If the city, rather than the Royals, is found in default, the Lease requires it to reimburse the team’s private construction spending, allows the Royals to collect money damages on top of that reimbursement, and grants the Royals a rent-free “Holdover Tenancy” until a replacement facility is arranged—with no cap identified anywhere in the filed documents.
• A “Targeted Tax” clause in the Lease means that if the city itself ever imposes a tax that functions as targeting the stadium or team, that alone triggers a City default. That’s a real constraint on the city’s own future taxing authority written into a 30-year contract.
• Field of Schemes notes the $55 million in community benefits, paid out over 30 years and capped at 2% annual inflation growth, is worth meaningfully less in today’s dollars than the $55 million headline figure suggests.
• In the final years of the lease, the Royals’ obligation to maintain the building drops sharply—capped at the lesser of $1 million per item or half the prior five years’ average maintenance spending—which Field of Schemes flags as building in the argument for the next stadium subsidy request when this one expires.

Bottom line: a $1.9 billion stadium deal generates plenty of coverage but not much documentation council members can point to when a constituent asks a hard question. The material above already exists, in public records, published research and independent reporting. What’s missing is making officials answer it before the vote, not after.