At long last, the Kansas City Royals’ half-decade search for a new stadium location is nearing a conclusion.

The Royals, in a press release Wednesday morning, announced their intentions to move to Crown Center, a sprawling, 85-acre mixed-use shopping district near downtown Kansas City as part of a joint partnership with Hallmark Cards.

Roughly an hour later, Royals Chairman and CEO John Sherman, standing alongside Mayor Quinton Lucas and Gov. Mike Kehoe, revealed the team’s plans during an event Wednesday morning at The American at Crown Center. The announcement was short on specifics, but revealed that the team plans to build a roughly $1.9 billion stadium inside a $3 billion project at Hallmark Cards headquarters in Crown Center.

The stadium footprint is not expected to sit in Washington Square Park, a remarkable shift in public perception of the stadium plans that a city official confirmed to The Star on Tuesday.

“Our founder Ewing Kauffman wanted the Royals to be Kansas City’s forever, and he wanted the team to benefit his hometown as much as possible,” Sherman said in the release. “Joining Hallmark with this project achieves both and extends the Hall family’s critical legacy of helping Kansas City grow.”

A top Hallmark official touted the stadium plan at Crown Center as “something proud” that would “come full circle.”

“The iconic Royals crown that Hallmark created will return to the very neighborhood where it was conceived,” said Don Hall Jr., the chair of the company’s board. “Every time a fan walks through the stadium doors, they’ll be standing in a place shaped by Kansas City and Hallmark’s creative spirit.”

Hall Jr., Lucas and Kehoe addressed the crowd at Wednesday’s event.

“Today we announce a change for Kansas City for the future,” Lucas said. “We are changing Kansas City for the better.”

The announcement came just days after city officials passed an ordinance authorizing city manager Mario Vasquez to negotiate a deal worth up to $600 million towards a new stadium in “the Washington Square Park/Crown Center area.”

The construction of the stadium and surrounding district — expected to cost roughly $1.9 billion — will rely on a public investment from Kansas City and the state of Missouri. Whether Jackson County officials will contribute is not certain.

The Royals and city officials are also poised to access a sweeping funding package Missouri lawmakers approved last summer in an attempt to keep both the Royals and Kansas City Chiefs inside state lines. The law allows Missouri to pay for up to 50% of a new stadium for the team, but it’s unclear how much money the state will actually contribute.

More than four years after the team publicly floated the idea of downtown baseball, the project has been defined more by its twists and turns than its resolutions — and included explorations outside downtown and even in Kansas. Those twists and turns exhausted political leadership, developers and even fans, but it will ultimately settle on a conclusion mirroring the team’s original vision.

A multi-year quest for a downtown stadium

The location near downtown — and the Royals have explored several — has long been the objective for Sherman, who bought the team in 2019. The Royals plan to build an entertainment district around the stadium to generate steady profits, though the depths of those plans are not yet clear.

For more than a year, city officials have touted Washington Square Park, situated near the city’s streetcar line, as the ideal home for the Royals. As of the press release Wednesday morning, the team has not said where, exactly, the stadium would be located within Crown Center. City officials have long hoped that the addition of a baseball stadium would connect the tourism-heavy Union Station and Crown Center district with the bustling Crossroads district, a key tie between two popular but distinct destinations.

There’s also a visual element. The downtown backdrop of a baseball stadium would provide fans with picturesque views of the city’s skyline, similar to Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis.

The former Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City building adjacent to the park is also expected to be part of the Royals’ plans.

Sherman reiterated his original vision earlier this year, telling reporters that he had a “soft spot” for downtown baseball.

“Just like in any business, you have to be willing to adapt and be flexible to achieve that ultimate goal,” Sherman said. “But I think if you have your druthers, I would love to see us kind of in the heart of the city, in the cultural part of the city, where we can enhance maybe some things that are already going on and make it better.”

They’re likely headed there, but they took an unconventional path — one that does not plan a public vote.

A fierce debate

Over the last four years, the prospect of the Royals leaving Kauffman Stadium has sparked fierce debate from both their fans and political leaders — including opposition from one politician in the team’s Hall of Fame who has since been ousted from office.

It upended politics on both sides of the state line and reignited an economic border war that officials had hoped would remain dormant. When the voters had their say on an April 2024 proposal, they rejected a clunky downtown baseball proposal in the Crossroads District.

Two years after Jackson County voters soundly rejected a stadium sales tax for the Chiefs and Royals, the Royals’ move to a new stadium location is not expected to require a public vote.

The stadium will instead likely rely on a constellation of local and state administrative tools, bypassing voter approval at the ballot box. Opponents have seized on that fact, framing the stadium deal as corporate welfare for rich team owners.

That resistance is magnified in the wake of Kansas’ recent effort to lure the Chiefs. Kansas officials and the Chiefs unveiled their plan in December without direct input from voters, sparking intense criticism, particularly from economists and professional sports stadium experts who point to decades of academic research showing that stadium projects are not major drivers of economic growth.

The pushback has been loud, and it’s likely not over, either. Any development and community benefits agreement plans must return to City Council for final approval, and Johnathan Duncan, councilman for the 6th District, told The Star on Tuesday he plans to hold the Royals to a standard of transparency.

“We are so far away from a done deal,” he said Tuesday, ahead of the announcement. “... We still need a development agreement. We need a TIF (tax increment financing) plan. We need a CID. And we need some type of actual plan from the Royals that says this is what we’re going to be using the $600 million of bonds for.”

Duncan has also continued to mention the possibility of attempting to force a public vote.

The Royals tried the path of a public vote two years ago. It failed.

In April 2024, in a combined Jackson County ballot measure with the Chiefs, the Royals proposed a downtown ballpark at the former Kansas City Star press pavilion in the Crossroads District. The county voters turned aside a rushed, murky proposal that switched sites weeks before the election, tinkered with the location just six days beforehand and left local businesses wondering what it meant for their future.

Two years after that vote sought to use the county as the lead funding source, the Royals will turn to a combination of sources led by a city that seemed evidently determined not to lose both of its professional sports franchises.

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