It’s official: the Chiefs are moving to Kansas.
Pick your sports metaphor to describe it. State and local officials certainly did Monday, trumpeting the announcement.
“A game changer,” said Olathe Mayor John Bacon, whose city will now be home to a future team headquarters and practice facility.
“A significant win,” said Johnson County Chair Mike Kelly, in a statement following the announcement.
Gov. Laura Kelly took more pointed aim at out-of-staters who may consider Kansas “flyover” country when she said the deal makes Kansas a “touchdown state.”
Beyond those qualitative comments, however, there are plenty of quantitative figures to digest and begin to parse.
After the press conference Monday, the Kansas Department of Commerce released more details about the deal that enticed the Chiefs over the state line, including a term sheet for the STAR bond package that will finance the new stadium and practice facility and an analysis of the economic development impact that development is expected to bring.
Here are some key numbers from the state’s documents:
$3 billion and $1.8 billion
The first number is the projected price tag for a new “state-of-the-art” domed stadium that will be built in Wyandotte County, near The Legends complex at the confluence of I-70 and I-435.
The second number is the estimated amount of projected public taxpayer funds that will be raised to help finance it, through state-backed Sales and Tax Revenue, or STAR, bonds.
The deal for the Chiefs to build a new stadium and practice facility in Kansas will be paid for mostly through public dollars, 60% of the total cost, according to the commerce department, with the team picking up the other 40% of the tab.
STAR bonds are a special form of tax increment financing created by Kansas state law that allows governments to issue bonds to finance developments that are then paid for by sales tax revenues generated within a project’s designated boundaries.
About those boundaries…
3 cities in JoCo
Three Johnson County cities — Lenexa, Olathe and Shawnee — appear to be included in the state’s preliminary STAR bond district established for the financing of the Chiefs project.
A map included in the commerce department materials posted to its website after Monday’s press conference shows the lines of the district encompassing all of Wyandotte County and a good portion of western Johnson County, including chunks of those three cities, mostly west of I-435.
The official announcement Monday did not specify where exactly in Olathe the team’s practice facility will be, but the STAR bond district map puts the marker for it near Kansas Highway 10 and Ridgeview Road, which would be near the Garmin Soccer Complex and Olathe Conference Center.
A commerce department fact sheet says STAR bond revenues raised for the Chiefs project within the designated STAR bond district will have two components:
- local sales taxes generated by the developments in Wyandotte County and Olathe that those governments can designate a portion of to help pay for the project,
- as well as “new state sales tax revenues generated by this project in neighboring
communities” that can be designated by the state to go towards the project.
$700 million
That’s the “value added” economic benefit projected to occur annually in Wyandotte County and Olathe with $1 billion worth of mixed-use “entertainment districts” planned around the new stadium and team headquarters, respectively.
A term sheet included in the commerce department’s materials says these mixed-use developments could include an entertainment venue, hotels, apartments, retail shops, restaurants, medical facilities and community parks.
Along with this ongoing impact, state officials said Monday the Chiefs project will lead to 20,000 new jobs in the region during construction, as well as 4,000 new permanent jobs at both sites.
But some economists dispute the idea that new sports stadiums spur the type of economic growth often touted by backers in the immediate aftermath of a deal’s announcement.
A study that looked into the per capita growth impacts of professional sports stadiums in the U.S. between the late 1960s and early 2010s found “the effect of sports franchises and stadium and arena construction on local economies is weak or nonexistent.”
Another study that examined 130 stadium projects between 1974 and 2022 found that local economies were largely unaffected by new stadiums, and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits.”
5 years
That’s how long we have here in Johnson County before any of this becomes a final reality.
The Chiefs’ current lease at the Truman Sports Complex in Jackson County, Missouri, ends in 2030.
The team and state officials said on Monday that a new stadium and practice facility in Kansas would be ready in time for the 2031-2032 season.
In other words, the year Patrick Mahomes will turn 36.
