Experts say Chiefs, Royals CBAs leave much to be desired: ‘More like a press release’

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At long last, the Royals and Chiefs reached community benefits agreements, they declared Wednesday, calling their $266 million pledges “historic” in nature. And just in time, right? With less than two weeks before an April 2 vote on their stadium projects, they finally supplied the pacts that many of us have been seeking.

Except not entirely.

At the top here, some full disclosure: These two stadium proposals — the Royals attempting to move to the East Crossroads District and the Chiefs renovating Arrowhead Stadium, the plans subject to a 3/8th-cent countywide sales tax vote — have provided my first foray into studying the finer details of a community benefits agreement.

But that’s the thing. The information released to the public doesn’t require you read the fine print.

There is no fine print to read. Not yet.

The announcements came with summaries of “historic” future agreements, but oddly not the historic agreements themselves. And when it comes to CBAs, the experts’ first instruction is to comb through the details.

Here, they ask: Where are they?

“This letter is more like a press release than anything approaching a CBA,” said Julian Gross, a lawyer in California who has taken part in more than two dozen CBA negotiations over the last quarter-century. “The whole idea is the public can access the full community benefits guarantees of a project.

“So fundamentally, out of the gate, this isn’t what it purports to be — at least until they show us an agreement.”

Manny Abarca, a Jackson County legislator for the 1st District and one of the negotiators at the table, told The Star that the parties will indeed have more detailed CBA documents than those he posted to his social media account, which mirror letters of intent.

The teams consider those letters to be binding. In them, the Royals pledge to contribute $3.5 million annually over the duration of the proposed 40-year lease. The Chiefs’ contribution — $2 million annually initially — escalates after 10 years. The fund would be overseen by a committee.

The who, what, when and how? To be announced.

The Royals’ fuller CBA was being passed across the table as recently as Thursday, and it’s actually ahead of the projected timeline for the Chiefs’ agreement. They are not apparently ready for the limelight. Maybe they arrive in my inbox (or, better yet, all of our inboxes) minutes after this column posts. The voters deserve the fullest possible picture, and if the agreements are truly historic, the teams are certainly eager to show them off.

Until they do, while the financial commitments and minority and women business enterprise goals are public, and are steps in the right direction, we remain in the dark about many of the specifics — though we did learn that some key items will be left out altogether.

Emphasis on key.

This is a situation in which we ought to let those with experience do most of the talking. So after the teams made their announcements, I called John Goldstein, the founder of Community Benefits Resources and someone who has not only been consulted on CBAs but created an online database to track them. To be clear, like Gross, he works on the side of the community, not the developers of the projects.

In that vein, within a CBA, his top-of-mind search is for three things:

Is it specific?

Is it measurable?

Is it enforceable?

What we’ve seen thus far is quite clearly a “no” on the first two items. We’ll cross our fingers that changes when the fuller forms become public. They still could, but we wait.

In their letter, the Royals characterized the yet-to-be-publicized agreement as “in the top tier of community benefits agreements across all professional sports.”

I noted that remark to Goldstein, after he read the CBA summaries.

“That’s unthinkable to say that, because there are a number of CBAs that deal specifically with community issues and made a real difference in a host of cities across the country,” he replied.

Such as?

“Housing and jobs are among the leading issues that could really make a difference in communities,” Goldstein said.

Oh, yeah. The jobs.

That’s one of those key items I referenced above.

What are the Royals’ assurances on high-quality jobs in their proposed $1 billion entertainment district that will require the displacement of businesses? After all, that’s fundamental to a strong CBA, a recent study concluded.

That’s absent from their CBAs. No living wage floors. No assurance of union jobs in that entertainment development.

Those items won’t appear in any private CBA in which the Royals have taken part. Nor will it appear in the full CBA once it’s released either, Abarca said.

“Those are exactly the kinds of specific, measurable community benefits one would hope to see in an agreement,” Goldstein said. “... This is missing the boat.”

The two teams are tied at the hip at the ballot box on April 2, but the spirit of the measure is actually a separation. The Royals’ project, a move to a Crossroads District that is already populated with businesses, has placed them front and center of CBA talks at multiple tables — or at least what was once multiple tables.

You’ll recall, if you stumbled into this space a couple of weeks ago, that The Good Jobs and Affordable Housing for All Coalition, comprised of local labor and housing groups, sought a few major items, both at the countywide negotiations that produced the agreements announced by the teams Wednesday, and at a separate table they initiated more than a year ago

We can debate what teams’ obligations in a CBA should include and whether it’s possible to please all involved — that’s at least part of what we’ll be doing on April 2 — but each of us should enter the booth in a week and a half with the same understanding of what this particular agreement does include.

And what it doesn’t.

The former: The annual cash contribution. The MBE and WBE goals, which Abarca said are understood to be requirements by all parties.

The latter: There will be no guarantee of union jobs in the proposed $1 billion entertainment district surrounding the new Royals park, and no wage floor for those employees, either. Those topped the list in the coalition’s demands — they have the highest impact on those most in need of it. There is actual recent research to prove that, by the way.

But it’s missing from the historic CBA.

The Royals have pointed out their stadium employees have a union and recently re-upped their contract. That union said it is “cautiously optimistic” about the prospects for reaching a separate workforce agreement with the Royals. The team has also has support for the construction of their project and therefore the ballot measure. The construction itself will create jobs.

The Good Jobs Coalition, though, in their private and countywide talks, has focused on the district jobs that stick around for the long haul — just as, you know, the sales tax will be here for the long haul.

I’ll say what I did two weeks ago: Some of the requests are quite expensive. The coalition initially sought $100 million in an up-front injection of money for affordable housing. The teams offered $5 million, they said.

Regarding the union jobs for the entertainment district and the living wage floor, the Royals did not return a counter, the coalition said. Instead, a flat rejection.

“This CBA does not benefit the community on the two most important things we need — good jobs and affordable housing,” said Gina Chiala, an attorney and executive director for Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom. She was part of the bargaining team for the coalition, until it left the table last Friday, citing a lack of progress.

“There’s nothing more important than good jobs and affordable housing. It solves crises for these workers and would materially change their lives. We needed those things, and we didn’t get them.”

Others have. Laura Dresser, the associate director for High Road Strategy Center, has analyzed the real benefits of CBAs in other markets, most notably what they deem an ideal example in Milwaukee.

It’s only reinforced her conclusion.

“The model in Milwaukee is really attending to the question of what’s going on with service sector jobs and how we build a strategy that is self-reinforcing, that raises the standards in jobs that so many Black and brown workers hold with bad hours and bad benefits,” Dresser said. “The Milwaukee CBA attended to this question of how are tax dollars being used in an economic development engine to raise the floor of jobs that are of such poor quality that people can work hard and still never get out of poverty.

“That’s part of the CBA in Milwaukee. There was that same opportunity here, and I don’t really see that showing up in here.”

Well, it does kind of.

Employment benefits and workforce assistance are among the many umbrella items listed in the box of community investment options. Will they receive a sizable chunk — or any chunk — of the money in any given year? That’s to be determined on an annual basis. An oversight committee with both county and team representation will make those decisions.

“We are confident this money will be allocated appropriately and have impact on the community,” Chiefs team president Mark Donovan said. “We will absolutely have safeguards and controls to ensure that.”

The recipients will change, and that’s by design, Abarca said, noting that “what we need now might not be what we need 40 years from now.”

That’s probably true, some of the experts told me.

For now, though, it’s one more to-be-determined element of an announcement that lacks complete details. Which leaves us still reliant not on the specifics in writing, but something a bit less comfortable just 11 days shy of voting day.

Trust.