Two years ago, working people in Kansas City did something rare. They beat the billionaires.
In April 2024, Jackson County voters rejected a 3/8-cent sales tax that would have funneled $2 billion over 40 years to fund a new downtown baseball stadium for the Kansas City Royals and renovations to the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium.
The margin was decisive: 58% to 42%. Organizers with KC Tenants, Stand Up KC, the Missouri Workers Center, and a coalition of community groups knocked doors, rallied outside polling places, and carried a simple message into every precinct in the county: your tax dollars should not subsidize a billionaire’s playground.
“The largest transfer of public funds to private enterprises in our region’s history, $2 billion over 40 years. The people took on the billionaires. The people won,” KC Tenants declared in April 2024, after the results came in. “Nothing is inevitable if we organize.”
On April 16, the Kansas City Council proved them half right. Nothing is inevitable. Not even a democratic mandate.
In an 11-1-1 vote, the council passed a stadium financing ordinance, advancing the framework for up to $600 million in city-backed bonds for a proposed $1.9 billion Royals stadium project. The ordinance was introduced just one week before the vote.
No ballot. No public referendum. No permission from the people whose money is on the table.
The deal is not finalized. But the vote authorized the city to begin negotiating a lease, a development agreement, and a financing package with the Royals. The council still has to approve a final tax increment financing plan and other agreements before any money moves.
But the political direction is now unmistakable. Days after the vote, the Royals confirmed that they will build a new stadium at Crown Center, in partnership with Hallmark, as part of a broader $3 billion redevelopment plan.
The people who set it did so over the objections of hundreds of Kansas City residents who packed City Hall in red, who held banners reading “NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US,” and who testified for hours about housing, transit, schools, and every other need that has been told to wait.
KC Tenants, in their statement issued days after the vote, named those needs precisely.
“Rent and utilities continue to skyrocket, our bus system is chronically underfunded, our streets are riddled with potholes, and critical programs that support our neighbors remain neglected. Kansas Citians’ basic needs aren’t being met because our city’s elected officials continue to sell us out to the highest bidder.”
“They just steamrolled us in there,” said Terrence Wise, a leader with the Missouri Workers Center and Stand Up KC, after the vote.
The billionaire class lost at the ballot box. So they found another way in.
The 2024 stadium tax was a countywide sales tax that required a public vote. Voters rejected it. The mechanism that the city used on April 16, tax increment financing, does not require one. The city plans to borrow $600 million and repay it using new tax revenue generated by businesses and around the Crown Center stadium district. If that district generates enough revenue, the bonds get paid off. If they don’t, the city covers the difference out of its general fund, the same budget that pays for road repairs, trash pickup, and basic city services.
In other words, taxpayers are the backup plan for a billionaire’s ballpark.
This is not a hypothetical risk. Kansas City has lived this exact story before. When the Power and Light District opened in the late 2000s, officials promised the development would generate enough tax revenue to pay for itself. It didn’t. Through 2022, the city had paid more than $167 million from its general fund to cover the shortfall, an average of over $10 million a year. The city’s own spokesperson confirmed in 2025 that the city has had to step in to cover part of the debt every year since it started.
“Across the country, stadium developments drive up rents, accelerate displacement, and reshape neighborhoods for wealthier residents and tourists. They almost never have the return on investment that they predict.” – KC Tenants
Now, City Hall is asking Kansas City to make the same bet, at an even larger scale, on a project that voters already rejected.
What power looked like that day
The council chambers during the vote were a study in the architecture of power. On one side, members of the building trades unions, the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas City Sports Commission, and the Downtown Council. On the other, workers in red shirts who had taken time off jobs they could barely afford to miss.
Mellanie Gray, an organizer with KC Tenants who had knocked doors ahead of the 2024 vote, told the council that when she was canvassing two years ago, she met people who were struggling to afford basic needs. She pointed to the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s bus system, as an example of the city’s real priorities: transit riders are told to make do with less, while billionaire development gets urgency, creativity, and public backing at a massive scale.”
“When this council decides to put public dollars to tourist attractions and billionaires, they are making a strong and clear statement that the people’s needs do not matter,” Gray said.
Wise, who walked away from community benefits agreement negotiations with the Royals in 2024 after what he called “miserable” proposals from the team, was blunt about what the vote represented.
“We love the Royals, but not enough to sacrifice what our city should be,” Wise said. “Today, they seem focused on billionaires’ playgrounds and economic development over our people, and that ain’t right.”
Six days later, the Royals confirmed Crown Center as the site of the proposed stadium, bringing the stakes of the council’s vote into sharper focus. What residents were contesting was not an abstract financing framework, but a real redevelopment plan with major political and public consequences.
After the vote, opponents poured into the hallway outside the council chambers. Wise addressed the crowd.
“If that tax passed to fund the Royals stadium when we all went to the ballot box, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion,” Wise said. “They would not be inventing a way to circumvent the will of the people back then. Why are they doing it now?”
Who voted for this
Eleven council members voted yes. Council member Nathan Willett, who is running for Congress, was the only no vote. Council member Crispin Rea abstained.
Mayor Quinton Lucas, who had called the 2024 ballot result evidence that voters “rejected plans and processes they found inadequate,” led the push for the Royals’ ordinance. He and nine other council members co-sponsored it before a single public hearing had been held.
Council member Johnathan Duncan embodied the tension at the center of the vote. Duncan had been vocally opposed to the proposal. He publicly called it “subsidizing a billionaire’s private ballpark.” He had criticized the process as “doing it behind closed doors without a vote of the people.”
Then he voted yes.
Duncan secured an amendment requiring that future development agreements come back before the council for approval. He argued that the ordinance was likely to pass regardless and that securing an amendment was the best available way to slow the process and force additional public oversight.
“Without that amendment, the City Manager would have been able to execute a development agreement behind closed doors,” he said in a message to The Defender. “
For the people who packed City Hall in red, Duncan’s amendment may have added oversight, but his singular vote did and could not change the larger outcome: the subsidy framework still moved forward.
One week
Consider the timeline. The ordinance was introduced one week before the council voted on it. One week to introduce legislation that could commit the city to a $600 million financing framework. One week for the public to review, organize, and respond.
And one week later, the Royals confirmed Crown Center as the site of the proposed stadium project.
Kansas City families who have waited years for better bus service, for school buildings that aren’t falling apart, for housing they can actually afford, watched their city government move at a speed it has never shown for their needs. The urgency was always available. It was just never directed at them.
“We don’t need to solve child care with a new stadium. We don’t need to solve crime by building a new stadium,” Willett, the lone dissenter, said during committee hearings. “But I believe it should be up to the people on this.”
What happens now
The deal is not done. While the Royals have now publicly confirmed Crown Center as the site of the proposed stadium project, the city still has to approve a final TIF plan and other key agreements before any public money moves, and that process requires 45 days of public notice. A third-party financial analysis must also be completed. The state of Missouri, which passed the Show-Me Sports Investment Act in 2025, has not committed its share of funding. Mayor Lucas acknowledged that the state “is not kicking in 50%” to the Royals.
And there is another path. Council member Duncan estimated that roughly 2,200 petition signatures could force a citywide referendum on the stadium deal. Given Kansas City’s historically low voter turnout, that threshold is within reach. It is a narrow window, but it is open.
Stand Up KC and the Missouri Workers Center are planning a May Day action at Washington Square Park on May 1. The fight, as Wise put it, is not over.
“If you leave this space, you have the right to be angry,” Wise told the crowd after the April 16 vote.
He’s right. The anger is earned. Two years ago, the people of Kansas City were asked whether they wanted to spend their tax dollars on a billionaire’s stadium. They said no. On April 16, 11 people decided that the answer wasn’t good enough.
The question now is whether Kansas City remembers who those 11 people are. And whether the city’s petition process can do what the democratic process should have done all along: let the people decide.
The Kansas City Defender is a six-time national award-winning radical abolitionist Black nonprofit media organization. Follow us @kansascitydefender for the most important news across Missouri and Kansas.
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