Royals and Chiefs broke KC record with campaign spending on failed stadium tax vote

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It will go down in Kansas City history as the most expensive ballot campaign ever: $6 million and counting.

The Committee to Keep the Chiefs and Royals spent at least $5.7 million of that to promote the stadium tax ballot measure that suffered a crushing defeat on April 2, newly released campaign finance reports show.

That’s nearly twice the teams’ previously reported contributions to the campaign, making it the most ever spent in support of a local ballot issue in the Kansas City area.

The previous record was set in 2004, when the teams spent roughly $5.2 million in inflation-adjusted dollars in an effort to pass the unsuccessful Bi-State II sales tax campaign to benefit the Chiefs, Royals and the arts community.

The report filed Monday covers the period that ended March 31, so the final tab for the unsuccessful campaign will almost certainly be higher, if only because the period does not cover Election Day. That night teams hosted an election results watch party at J. Rieger & Co. distillery.

Question 1 lost 58% to 42%. For each of the losing side’s 56,606 “yes” votes, the campaign committee spent a little more than $100.

That does not count the $260,000 that the Royals contributed separately to Freedom Inc. and four other campaign committees, three of which are tied to county legislator and Freedom Inc. board member DaRon McGee for advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. Records show that $20,000 of that was contributed to two McGee-affiliated committees two days after the election.

When that quarter million dollars is added in, the cost of the vote-yes effort climbs to just under $6 million, or about $105 per vote. The opposition didn’t even come close in their spending.

The two organized groups that opposed Question 1 – the citywide tenants union KC Tenants and the Committee Against New Royals Stadium Taxes – spent roughly $150,000 between them, with KC Tenants accounting for at least $132,400 of that.

That averages out to about $1.90 for each of the 78,350 no votes.

Neither team has disclosed what their plans are now. Their leases don’t expire until January 2031. Both the Chiefs and Royals say they are evaluating all their options, including whether to leave Jackson County at the end of those leases or come back with another proposal.

Kansas City Manager Brian Platt said Monday on radio station KCUR that the city is in talks with both teams and will take the lead on future negotiations, displacing Jackson County government from that role.

Platt suggested that the next deal for a downtown ballpark might not require a public vote and said he still favors the East Crossroads site because of its proximity to other downtown attractions and the streetcar.

Campaign finance records released Monday show that the teams spent big throughout a six-week campaign, but especially in the final days before the election.

Their goal was to convince Jackson County voters to repeal the current 3/8th-cent sales tax that supports the stadiums at the Truman Sports Complex and replace it with a new tax of the same amount that would have run for 40 years.

Revenues from that tax would have paid for the county’s share of a new $1 billion-plus downtown baseball park – about $350 million – and roughly the same amount to pay for the county’s share of an $800 million renovation of Arrowhead Stadium for the Chiefs.

But the ballot measure faced stiff opposition from voters for a variety of reasons. Many felt they didn’t get enough information on which to make a decision. Key financial questions went unanswered, including the amount of money that would come from state and city government.

Others opposed a downtown stadium because they want the Royals to stay at Kauffman Stadium. Still others worried about businesses being displaced in the Crossroads. Many also felt the process had been rushed and were put off by the teams’ implied threat – as reflected in the name of the campaign committee and its advertising – that they would leave the county and perhaps the Kansas City area entirely, if the tax was not approved.

To try and overcome that, The Committee to Keep The Chiefs and Royals spent than $2 million on political consultants, including more than $300,000 to companies owned by Jeff Roe’s Kansas City-base Axiom Strategies and $1.6 million to Dewey Square Group in Washington, D.C.

They bought tons of ad time on TV, social media and radio. As of the end of March, the campaign still owed another DC-based political campaign shop, GMMB Inc., $498,225 for commercials that ran in the last week of the campaign and $156,000 to Dewey Square for canvassing costs, on top of what it had already paid the firm. y April 12, they had cont

A fuller accounting of the campaign will come later this month in subsequent reports.