KANSAS CITY, Mo. — FOX4 obtained a new document showing a “corrected number” for how much a new Kansas City Royals stadium would cost Jackson County over a 40-year time period.
The corrected number is $5.13 billion on the high end. October’s document that was leaked to the media showed, on the high end, a new Royals stadium could cost the county as much as $6.41 billion. The difference between October’s number and this month’s number is $1.28 billion.
“It was just a formula error. That’s all it was,” County Administrator Troy Schulte said in an interview with FOX4 Monday.
“It doesn’t change anything about the magnitude of what we’re still spending a lot of resources for 40 years on those two facilities.”
“Pretty basic addition there that they needed to figure out,” Democratic Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca said.
Abarca’s the chair of the Stadium Improvements Committee. The group was supposed to meet Monday, but the meeting was canceled because his son is sick. FOX4 talked to him before he left the Jackson County Courthouse.
“I think these numbers were inflated to scare voters,” he said of the October document. “I think that that’s part of, again, why this stadium committee needs to exist to create the realities of what is fact and what is fiction.
“There’s one thing to say, ‘We’re going to voters.’ It’s another to say that, ‘We’re trying to persuade voters against or for,’ and the facts should dictate that, not anything else, right? So, these facts matter, and that’s why I called out the billion-dollar error.”
Abarca said it may help the Chiefs if they start saying what kind of renovation they’d like at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.
“I’ve been in some pretty interesting conversations that make me believe that there are other opportunities for them to come forward, and the voters deserve to know what that may be,” Abarca said.
“We deserve to know what that may be so that we can weigh these options, and as quickly as they’re asking us to consider these timelines, we should know sooner rather than later.”
“Certainly an option,” Abarca said when asked if that sounded like the Chiefs had an option of moving to Kansas.
In July, Chiefs President Mark Donovan said his group would be ready for a sales tax extension vote in April of 2024.
Abarca said it was his understanding Chiefs and Royals representatives may have showed up at the Jackson County Courthouse on Monday had the meeting not been canceled.
Neither team would comment on Monday’s developments, but the Royals still haven’t decided whether they want to build their new stadium in Jackson or Clay County.