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Wizards President: 'We're Moving To Kansas'

Kansas City, MO – The President of the Kansas City Wizards soccer team says work will start next week on a new stadium near the NASCAR track in Wyandotte County. That's bad news for Kansas City officials, who had, until recently, still hoped to lure the project back to the old Banister Mall area.

Wizards President Robb Heinemann says he's confident that nearly 150-million dollars in bonds backed by the state of Kansas can be sold. He says lots of details, like the final design of a 18,500 seat sodium, remain to be addressed but with the bond sales beginning, work will commence within days.

"All the agreements aren't signed, and we're going to have to work through a bunch of those in the coming weeks, but we're confident enough that, starting next week, you're going to see yellow machines out on site moving dirt around."

Heinemann says the team's goal of playing games at the new stadium by the middle of the 2011 season necessitates an aggressive schedule for site preparation.

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I’ve been at KCUR almost 30 years, working partly for NPR and splitting my time between local and national reporting. I work to bring extra attention to people in the Midwest, my home state of Kansas and of course Kansas City. What I love about this job is having a license to talk to interesting people and then crafting radio stories around their voices. It’s a big responsibility to uphold the truth of those stories while condensing them for lots of other people listening to the radio, and I take it seriously. Email me at frank@kcur.org or find me on Twitter @FrankNewsman.
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