Super Bowl parade costs for Chiefs going up, but who is paying isn’t always clear

As the price of eggs and just about everything else has gone up, so has the cost of victory parades.

With a budget of roughly $3.5 million, Wednesday’s celebration of the Chiefs’ 2023 Super Bowl win promises to be the most expensive of any similar parade in Kansas City.

How much more is hard to tell. And judging by the spotty public record on the costs of each of the four championship parades that preceded it over the past half century of KC sports glory, it’s doubtful we’ll ever know the true cost of this one, either.

For instance, the 2015 Royals victory parade was said at the time to have cost $350,000, with private donors picking up most of the tab. But was that really how much it cost, or an initial estimate?

Neither officials nor the news media ever pinned it down. That figure also did not include the bump Kansas City cops got in their paychecks that year for working the parade beyond their normally scheduled hours.

Police overtime costs back in 1985, when the Royals won their first championship, were right around $180,000 in today’s dollars, according to The Star’s reporting at the time. At a recent committee hearing, Mayor Quinton Lucas estimated the OT might be as much as $1.5 million for Wednesday’s parade.

Where will that money come from? At this point, it’s not clear.

It will not come out of the $750,000 the City Council appropriated earlier this month for parade-related expenses. (That’s about $150,000 more than in 2020, Lucas thought.) The money is being spent with the understanding that the Kansas City Sports Commission had or would add another $1 million in private donations.

The city’s portion will go to pay for “decorations, parking, equipment rental, printing, security, part of an interpreter and catering,” deputy city manager Kimiko Gilmore told a city council committee this month.

The city money is coming out of reserves set aside for special occasions out of the Neighborhood Tourist Development Fund. Forest Decker, director of the Neighborhood Services Department, said the Super Bowl parade appropriation would not reduce support for the smaller events that normally depend on that funding mechanism.

The city sets aside 10% of that fund each year for big special events that might come up. Like celebrating Sunday’s 38-35 win over the Eagles.

Kansas City asked Jackson County government to help out and hoped to get as much as $400,000 from county funds. But on Tuesday afternoon the county legislature voted to spend far less: $75,000. That’s still $25,000 more than the county kicked in for the 2020 Chiefs victory parade.

A spokesman for the Kansas City Sports Commission & Foundation, the parade planner, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

There is almost no reliable data available on the cost of the parade and rally at the Liberty Memorial on Jan. 12, 1970, to celebrate the Chiefs’ win of the fourth Super Bowl .

Nor is there a whole lot more financial information to be had about the city’s next professional sports championship in 1985. As with the Chiefs parade 15 years earlier, the celebration of the Royals’ first World Series championship was a ticker tape parade of the sort New York City was long known for when there was such a thing as ticker tape piling up on Wall Street.

Back in 1985, a city public works foreman told The Star it would cost $30,000 ($85,000 in today’s dollars) to pick up the tens of thousands of pounds of shredded paper that showered down from buildings in downtown Kansas City along the parade route to commemorate the Royals’ first title.

But it’s unclear whether anyone kept a record of what the actual cost was of picking up all that confetti.

Or what were the dollar damages to the vintage cars that George Brett and the other ballplayers were riding in when they caught fire. There was so much paper in that parade that it balled up under the cars and burst into flames from the heat of the vehicles’ exhaust systems.

A police motorcycle was destroyed. Other cop cars were damaged.

Whatever the mess cost, the lesson learned that day was priceless, which is why confetti is no longer thrown in such great quantities during victory parades in Kansas City.

“I’m sure that it provided a particular mood to the event, but I’d advise against it,” then-police chief Larry Joiner quipped several weeks after the fires were put out, adding, “I advised against it the first time.”