Kansas legislators approved a plan Tuesday aimed at luring the Kansas City's NFL team away from Missouri by helping to finance a new stadium for the Super Bowl champions.New stadiums for Kansas City's NFL team and Major League Baseball's Royals would be located on the Kansas side of their metropolitan area, which is split by the border with Missouri.
Korb Maxell, an attorney for the NFL team who lives on the Kansas side of the border, said the state's lawmakers were "embracing the possibility of the and the Royals" and can now make a "very compelling offer" to the NFL team. Kansas legislators see the two teams as in play because in April, voters on the Missouri side of the Kansas City metropolitan area refused to extend a sales tax used to keep up the teams' existing stadiums, which sit side by side.
"We definitely need to demonstrate that we're getting relief to our citizens," said Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican who backed the stadium-financing plan. "There are no blank checks," Tarwater told GOP colleagues during a briefing on the plan before the House began debating it.
"Most of the money that gets spent on the NFL team is money that would otherwise be spent on other entertainment projects," said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in central Massachusetts who has written multiple books about sports.