Kansas City Chiefs, key cities and state officials endorse sports authority ownership of $3B stadium

Lt. Gov. David Toland, Gov. Laura Kelly and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt address an excited crowd of roughly 400 people on Dec. 22, 2025, announcing the largest economic deal in Kansas history. (Photo by Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — The mayor of Kansas City, Kansas, asked the Legislature to reward cities that invest heavily in bringing the Kansas City Chiefs across the state line by granting them voting rights on a new board that would own and oversee the NFL franchise’s $3 billion domed stadium and a separate training center and headquarters.

Christal Watson, mayor of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, and Olathe Mayor John Bacon could only qualify as nonvoting members of the Kansas Sports Facilities Authority in the current version of a House bill. This ex officio status could be secured only if the two municipal governments fulfilled commitments of divert millions of dollars in local tax revenue to projects essential to relocating the Chiefs.

“Representation is not valid if we don’t have a vote,” Watson said Tuesday during a joint meeting of the House and Senate commerce committees at the Capitol.

Bacon, however, expressed appreciation that the bill creating the Kansas sports authority recognized “the role of local communities by providing an ex officio seat at the table for participating cities.”

On Feb. 5, the Unified Government approved a STAR bond ordinance pledging up to $450 million in local tax revenue, including a 1% sales tax and 8% guest tax, for the stadium on a 235-acre site near the Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kansas. The Olathe City Council voted unanimously to offer local sales and hotel tax revenue to pay off bonds associated with a 165-acre development that included the Chiefs headquarters and training center in Olathe.

Rachel Willis, director of legislative affairs for the Kansas Department of Commerce, endorsed the House bill because the sports authority would serve as a watchdog for Kansas taxpayers.

She said the bill made the governor and six legislators responsible for appointing one person each as voting members of the authority’s nine-member board by Aug. 31. The two other board members with voting power would be the state commerce secretary and a person chosen by the Chiefs. All members of the board must be Kansas residents, but no other geographical requirements would apply to selection of those individuals.

“We ask that the mayors of the cities who make their local sales tax increment pledge become voting members,” Willis said.

David Johnston, county administrator of the Unified Government, said there was heartburn that House Bill 2793, the sports authority legislation, didn’t automatically grant the two mayors voting privileges. At the same time, he said, members of the Unified Government shared “a lot of consternation” with lack of clarity from the state Department of Commerce about boundaries of the business district that would be tapped to generate revenue to repay STAR bond debt.

“I want to address what some may believe is an elephant in the room,” Johnston said. “In a typical STAR bond project, the district is known before the local governing body is asked to pass an ordinance pledging its local increment.”

He said the Department of Commerce released a map showing all of Wyandotte County would be in the STAR bond district for the stadium. A map consuming all of Wyandotte County could prevent the Unified Government from launching another STAR bond project for decades, he said.

The state of Kansas agreed to issue $1.8 billion in STAR bonds for the stadium, which would be paid off with sales tax revenue generated by the state.

Plans called for the sports authority to own the stadium, headquarters and practice facility that would be leased to the Chiefs. The Chiefs would be responsible for day-to-day management of those properties. The sports authority’s debts would not be considered debts of the state and the authority’s administrative costs would be funded through rent paid by the Chiefs.

If the Chiefs relocated, the sports authority could compel the team to assume all costs, including property taxes, for those facilities or require the franchise to pay the cost of demolishing buildings. The authority’s board would be subject to the Kansas Open Records Act and the Kansas Open Meetings Act. Under the House bill, the authority would be exempt from property and sales taxes. It would have power to acquire and dispose of property.

Rep. Sean Tarwater, a Stilwell Republican and chairman of the House commerce committee, said the goal was for his committee to consider adjustments to the sports authority bill Wednesday but that meeting was called off.

The bill was endorsed by a representative of the Chiefs and the Department of Commerce. Pressure to quickly secure Gov. Laura Kelly’s signature on HB 2793 was associated with a realization that state ownership of the sports facilities was necessary so construction bonds wouldn’t be subject to federal income tax. The clock is ticking on the Legislature as lawmakers anticipate ending the annual legislative session in late March.

“We need to get going on this facility to have it open by 2031,” said Korb Maxwell, an attorney representing the Chiefs.

Maxwell said the governance structure proposed in the House bill, which obligated the sports authority to oversight rather than operational management, wasn’t unusual. Twenty-six of 30 NFL stadiums in the United States were publicly owned, he said.

Joseph Taylor, an Overland Park resident, was the lone opponent of the sports authority bill. He said advocates of the project inflated the number of construction jobs and offered business growth forecasts that assumed no cannibalization of businesses elsewhere in the Kansas City area.

“There have been no credible publicly available cost-benefit analysis and so it is impossible to have certainty that this project will be anything other than a sinkhole for Kansas taxpayers,” he said. “What is the evidence that it serves a public purpose?”

He said the Department of Commerce released the executive summary of a feasibility study on bringing the Chiefs from Missouri to Kansas, but that the full text of the report was withheld. He said the executive summary was described by economists as “laughable, insane.”

Lt. Gov. David Toland, who serves as secretary of the Department of Commerce, has said “we’ve done an extensive economic impact study that shows this is a huge net positive for the state of Kansas.” The agency said the NFL stadium, headquarters and mixed-use developments in Olathe and Kansas City, Kansas, could generate $4.3 billion in economic impact.