The team has nine years left on its Jackson County, Missouri lease.
In the it’s never too late to start planning ahead for a new stadium department, Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman still has a desire to move his baseball business to downtown Kansas City. Sherman, looking for stadium money from taxpayers recently said, “so these are really valuable assets for a community. So why shouldn’t we want to optimize the value of this asset on behalf of our community. I’m kind of interested in how the community wants to. A lot of its engagement with different parts of the community. We’re doing the work around real estate, sites and architecture and financing and those types of things trying to understand. I look at this as it ultimately will be a public-private partnership. We’ll be big investors in that partnership.”
In September, 2021 Sherman confirmed he was looking into moving his franchise to downtown Kansas City. This story started a couple years ago. In 2019, a national real estate company had the location picked out for Sherman’s business, Kansas City’s East Village district. The Royals stadium opened in 1973 and underwent a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of extensive renovations between 2006 and 2010. There was some push to move the baseball business downtown in 2004 and 2005 when it was decided that the then three-decades old facility was too ancient to be useful. Eventually Jackson County, Missouri did put together a deal with Royals ownership and the NFL’s Chiefs ownership to fix up the baseball and football stadiums which are side by side in the Truman Sports Complex. On April 4th, 2006, Jackson County, Missouri voters approved a sales tax increase to fund the renovation of the sports complex. Sherman’s stadium will be outdated when his lease ends in 2031 which is why he is looking for money now.
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