In coaxing the Chiefs across the state line, Kansas makes a reckless gamble. Let’s call time out.
A commemorative, encased football signed by Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, Lt. Gov. David Toland, House Speaker Dan Hawkins and Senate President Ty Masterson was given to Kansas City Chiefs CEO and chairman Clark Hunt. (Photo by Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)
The deal to lure the Kansas City Chiefs across the state line to Kansas, announced by Gov. Laura Kelly with glee just a few days before Christmas, may represent the largest public subsidy in the history of American professional sports.
Is it a wise investment?
No, but it follows a recent Kansas trend of abandoning caution and reaching for shiny objects. Photos of Kelly clutching a Chiefs jersey were reminiscent of her plunking down $15 to place the first legalized sports bet in 2022. Sports betting came to Kansas following a lavishly obscene campaign by lobbyists to woo lawmakers, as documented by The New York Times. Kelly bet on the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl. They did, six months later, and Kelly donated her $165 winnings to charity.
She’d better hope that luck holds.
That Kansas has given its official blessing to sports and gambling – and has now committed billions of dollars of public debt to build a stadium where you can watch football while gambling on your phone – would have scandalized earlier generations of Sunflower State leaders. It should still scandalize us today, but we have become so inured to the soft sins that it feels like we are living in a Phillip K. Dick version of the reality we once knew.
Just as “The Man in the High Castle” is set in an alternate timeline where the Allies don’t win World War II, today’s Kansas is at once familiar and alien. Dorothy is still here, but she’s feeding slot machines at the local casino. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em have mortgaged the farm to build a stadium for the Wamego Munchkins. The Tin Man is assembling a nuclear reactor in his time off from the battery plant, and the Cowardly Lion is working for ICE. The Scarecrow? He burned up a long time ago in a grass fire out west. About the only vice still prohibited in this version of Kansas is marijuana, which will still get you thrown in the cooler if you’re caught by the Winkie Guards coming back from the Emerald City on I-70.
Okay, I’m sorry for not referring to the correct Wamego High School mascot. But I just couldn’t. They are the “Red Raiders.” While we’re on the subject, the Kansas City Chiefs will tell you that their name is an homage to former Kansas City, Missouri, mayor H. Roe Bartle, who was instrumental in bringing the team from Dallas in 1963. This is one of those “yes, but” explanations; Bartle did have the nickname “Chief,” but it wasn’t because of his municipal experience. Bartle had a long association with the Boy Scouts of America, in which he claimed to have been inducted into an Arapaho tribe and used the name, “Chief Lone Bear.” It should be noted that the Kansas City Chiefs now prohibit headdresses and face paint on game day and took instruction from a Native American working group on cultural sensitivity.
The Chiefs began as the Dallas Texans in 1959, owned by Lamar Hunt, and the team was a charter member of the American Football League. In 1966, the NFL and the AFL merged, and that year’s championship game between the two leagues was called the “Super Bowl” by Hunt.
Hunt’s brothers, Nelson and Herbert, tried to corner the world’s silver market in 1980. They failed and lost a billion dollars (about $4 billion in today’s money) in the process. But a consortium of U.S. banks bailed them out and, after various lawsuits and a Chapter 11 reorganization, the family fortune remained more or less intact. The Hunt family, whose net worth was valued at $25 billion by Forbes magazine, also owns one of Kansas City’s strangest features, SubTropolis, the world’s largest underground office complex carved out of the limestone bluffs north of the Missouri River.
Lamar Hunt died in 2006, aged 74. His son Clark was appointed chair of the Kansas City Chiefs.
It was Clark Hunt who appeared with Gov. Kelly on Dec. 22, announcing the Chiefs would move to a new stadium across the state line by 2031. Since 1972, the Chiefs’ home has been Arrowhead Stadium, part of the Truman Sports Complex. It includes Kaufmann Stadium, home of the Royals baseball team. The facilities are near the I-70 and 435 interchange in Kansas City, Missouri.
Although the location for the Kansas stadium has not been revealed, it’s expected to be near the Legends outlet mall in Kansas City, Kansas. That would place it just 23 miles from Arrowhead, perhaps the shortest relocation in NFL history.
Kansas had tried for years to poach the Chiefs from Missouri, and officials finally achieved the goal by offering to finance most of a $4 billion project for a new stadium, training complex, and team headquarters. Under the state’s STAR bond program, no public vote was needed, just the agreement of Kansas lawmakers and the billionaire Hunt family.
The deal blows up a 2019 border wars truce that prevented Missouri and Kansas from attempting to steal businesses from the other side of the state line in the Kansas City metro area. Kelly has denied breaking the truce, saying sports teams are different than corporations. The deal also follows a 2024 special election in which Jackson County, Missouri, voters soundly rejected a 3/8 cent sales tax to renovate stadiums for the Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals.
Kansas has used STAR bonds – for Sales Tax and Revenue – for a number of projects already, but none of the magnitude called for in the Chiefs agreement. The bonds allow state or local governments to develop projects to enhance Kansas tourism and economic development while paying off the project through sales tax revenue for the area served. In preparation for the Chiefs deal, Kansas lawmakers voted to remove the STAR bond prohibition on paying for more than 50% of a project and extended the repayment period from 20 years to 30. While there will be no referendum for state voters on whether the project is a good idea, local municipalities would have to vote to increase local sales taxes to help pay for the deal.
Past developments have ranged from the Kansas Speedway in Wyandotte County to the Flint Hills Discovery Center at Manhattan. Most projects have been successful, but two – an $83 million bond for the Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City and $10 million bond for the Heartland Motorsports Park at Topeka – have failed. Both are now closed.
The deal offered the Chiefs is likely the largest public subsidy in the history of professional sports, according to reporting by the Kansas City Star. With debt service and facility maintenance, the deal may top $6 billion, with the state on the hook for 60% of that amount. The bond district could include much of Wyandotte and Johnson counties, including the city of Olathe, although boundaries and sales tax amounts have not yet been set.
Kelly, who said the Chiefs announcement was the biggest and most historic of her tenure, has defended the deal by saying it will bring more jobs and economic opportunity to Kansas and help define the state as receptive to business. She also claimed the deal would be paid for by revenue generated by the project, and not with “new taxes.” But it’s difficult to see how Kansas is anything but a chump in handing the Hunt family, which has more than enough money to build its own stadium, the keys to a $3 billion state-of-the-art domed facility in Wyandotte County and s $1 billion headquarters and a training camp in Johnson County. How does creating a massive sales tax district, encompassing much of the Kansas City, Kansas, metro area, amount to anything except new taxes?
At least Missourians got to vote on the sales tax.
Kansans had no such opportunity.
“The growth argument is nonsense because the economic impact from stadiums is mostly an illusion,” according to a recent Washington Post editorial. “When people are at the stadium, it’s a happening place with lots of activity. But there are only eight or nine NFL home games per year.” NFL stadiums spend most of the time empty, the Post noted, and they serve about as many customers in a year as a single American grocery store.
I couldn’t help but wince when I read the analogy to a grocery store. Holy Knute Rockne, no wonder Kansas showered the Hunt family with money. Our lawmakers are known for their fondness for any scheme including real or imagined grocery stores.
Seriously, the comparison to the Beneficient saga of a “pawn shop for the rich” in Hesston is a good one. In both cases, you had somebody who doesn’t need the money receiving concessions they don’t deserve for something hidden behind a curtain.
The Chiefs deal is further proof that Kansas government, on both sides of the lopsided aisle, serves the rich at the expense of everybody else. What kind of sales tax will be required to service the debt on a $4 billion stadium and accessories package? More than working families can bear. The cheapest seats at the beginning of the 2025 season were $160. Those living in the special district who could never afford to attend a Chiefs game must still buy staples and put gas in the car. Any sales tax increase will hit them harder than anyone else, because it is the most regressive of taxes. The argument that the bond district will generate enough revenue to pay for itself is disturbingly similar to some of the trickle-down rhetoric that came from Sam Brownback and company during his failed tax “experiment.”
Putting aside for a moment the question of whether it’s wise to give a $4 billion subsidy to a franchise owned by a single wealthy family, consider what else Kansas could fund with that kind of dough. My list would include libraries, art museums, history centers, concert halls, elementary schools, public parks, community health centers and homes for the unhoused.
Unrealistic?
Perhaps. But no more unrealistic than relocating a sports franchise 23 miles from its traditional location and expecting an economic miracle. Instead, what you get is economic sleight-of-hand where dollars spent on one side of an arbitrary line are now spent on the other. This might be good for a while, but once you’ve ignited an economic war you may lose something of greater value later. Think United Parcel Service or the Amazon Fulfillment Center, which combined employ more than 5,000. There are no signs that either is considering moving now, but with the truce broken and the state’s integrity shot, anything could happen.
There is also the issue that some longtime Chiefs fans are angry.
Rudi Keller, writing for the Missouri Independent, swears he will never root for the Chiefs again.
“The Kansas Chiefs are dead to me,” Keller declared.
Keller noted that after a spectacular run – and winning the Super Bowl in 2020, 2023, and 2024 – the team’s luck seems to have changed this year. They won’t even make it to the playoffs.
Some diehard Chiefs fans expressed concern over the move at a tailgater before the last home game of the season, according to KMBC television. In addition to losing the tradition of the Chiefs at Arrowhead, some questioned whether they would be able to afford tickets at a new venue.
The new Kansas stadium would seat 10,000 fewer fans than Arrowhead, according to the 33-page agreement, which might indicate more expensive seating. The Chiefs will also have the right to keep 100% of the proceeds, after paying a relatively paltry $7 million annually in rent to the state. It will also hold naming rights to the facility – and the ability to sell those rights to a third party. My guess is the Chiefs won’t take the high road and christen it the Eisenhower Sports Complex.
What Kansas gets from the deal are bragging rights – and most of the debt.
Despite the certainty with which Kelly announced the move, the deal is not yet final. Scattered throughout that 33-page document are conditions that have to be met before the move begins, including the acquisition by the Chiefs of the stadium site and NFL approval by Oct. 31.
Let’s all hope for a Halloween reprieve.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.