Kansas City residents will see a question on the April 6, 2027 ballot asking if they should have a say in whether the city should fund certain stadiums or arenas, after city councilmembers voted, 11 to 1, to put the question up for a vote Thursday.
If voters pass the measure, residents would have to approve future stadium projects before the city agrees to fund them.
City council members have already greenlit $600 million in public funding for the new $3 billion Royals ballpark district at Crown Center.
“We'll continue to bind the city to a number of different obligations in a world of areas, including, of course, the Kansas City Royals project,” Mayor Quinton Lucas told KCUR last month.
Lucas has consistently defended the new stadium as a way to revitalize the city’s downtown area, and said the long-term gains will be worth it.
Critics have argued the new stadium will leave the city with a wobbly financial future, and is a bad deal for the city but a great one for the Royals’ billionaire CEO.
Missouri Workers Power, a low-wage worker organizing group opposed to city funding for the new stadium, gathered more than 4,500 signatures in favor of the ballot measure. Their goal is for Kansas Citians to have the final say on the stadium.
Lucas and Missouri Workers Power disagree on whether the ballot measure could affect the new Royals’ stadium.
“(The City Council’s) vote puts the question of the city's commitment of up to $600 million in public financing, and more than $1.5 billion over 30 years once state incentives are counted, in front of the people who pay for it,” a spokeswoman for Missouri Workers Power said in a statement Thursday.
That builds on an August letter from the group to city council that said city councilmembers’ passage of the ordinance to put stadiums to a vote would mean “any further steps taken by city officials to advance this Royals stadium project — any new contracts signed, any new appropriations made, any new bonds issued — will be a violation of the law, absent a public vote.”
By contrast, when asked last month whether approval of the measure in April would meaningfully change the process of developing the new stadium, Lucas responded with a swift “no.”
In 2024, Kansas Citians resoundingly told the city they weren’t interested in funding a new Royals stadium with taxpayer money, with a 58% majority rejecting the proposed tax extension to fund it.
The city’s recent efforts to build a new Royals stadium downtown circumvented the need for a citywide vote by using new methods of funding.
The current Kansas City Chiefs and Royals stadiums are off Interstate 70 on the city's southeastern edge and opened in the 1970s. Their leases expire in 2031, and neither team wants to stay in its aging stadium.
Kansas and Missouri both courted the Kansas City Chiefs with massive state-funded incentives, but the Chiefs went with Kansas’s offer, which means the Chiefs are moving to Kansas.
KCUR’s Celisa Calacal contributed to this report.
