Why the Chiefs and Royals couldn’t convince Kansas City voters to foot the bill for their stadiums
Why the Chiefs and Royals couldn’t convince Kansas City voters to foot the bill for their stadiums
It turns out that handing over taxpayer dollars to billionaire owners tends to be far less popular among regular citizens than among well-connected government officials.
Tldr: when these initiatives are decided by politicians they get wine and dine vip treatment, swaying their decision. When it's decided by voters and ballot initiatives, it tends to be shot down - the jig is up, many voters don't believe investing in stadiums helps local economies enough. Ultimately the electorate is tired of footing the bill for private business and billionaire profits. Shocking.
The billionaire team owners can pay for it if they want it so bad.
Most of the renovations only helped the wealthy. They want to convert normal seats to more boxes, and add vip entrances. Paid for by local blue collar workers while a billionaire keeps the profit.
KC voters are smarter than the money people thought.
Best of both worlds for KCMO, really. Don't have to get bent over a barrel by the Hunts, but the region will keep its team. There's a hard to quantify benefit to being a "major league" metro area, but the exact municipality usually gets screwed. If KCK or Overland Park wants to play dress up, then I'm sure everyone east of the state line will say to let 'em.
The Royals have had maybe 10 winning seasons in the past 40 years, and the games aren’t locally televised. I’m all for the downtown stadium, but if they want public funding they should address those 2 issues first. Chiefs made a huge mistake tying their fate to a garbage franchise like the Royals.
Genuine question--why are you all for the public paying for a business venture to help the already wealthy extract more wealth from the local population? Not trying to come off like a dick, I'm genuinely curious why anyone would thing the public funding private business ventures like this is a good thing.
Not for it, and not a resident of KCMO so doesn’t matter much to me. With that said downtown KC has been a wasteland till very recently, and adding a stadium would be the final step to bringing it back to life after the interstate highway system destroyed it. The stadium would increase foot traffic and make it a much more vibrant place. Don’t really care how it gets done, just that it gets done.
The TV thing was something I mentioned to my mom. Like it's really hard to give a shit about the Royals, or baseball in general, because you can't watch any games without some crazy cable package. Add in that the Royals are trash most of the time and it's an even harder sell.
The Chiefs are a solid element and the TV part helps a lot. Of course winning helps a lot too. Because I remember the bad years but they were still at least on TV (usually).
Arrowhead is honestly just okay. There’s nothing nearby and it is wide open to the elements, which, as we saw during the playoffs, can be very unforgiving. The wind chill there is rough.