KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As the Chicago Bears make their first NFL playoff appearance in five years while dangling the threat of moving to northwest Indiana, take a look westward to Kansas City where the Chiefs, failing to make the postseason for the first time in 11 years, have left their fans to ponder the team’s move across the border to Kansas in what will be one of the nation’s largest taxpayer-subsidized stadium deals in history.
“It’s 20 minutes east to go to Arrowhead. It’ll be 20 minutes west to go to the new stadium,” said Stephen Fanning, a bartender for more than 40 years at the 80-year-old Quaff Sports Bar & Grill in downtown Kansas City, Mo., representing minimized concerns over the move from the Chiefs’ current stadium.
“This is a metropolitan area, so whether you’re from Missouri or Kansas, both sides go back and forth and the whole area benefits,” he said. “Nobody here says they’re from Kansas City, Mo., or Kansas City, Kan. They say they’re from Kansas City.”
Unlike Chicago and northwest Indiana, which are not homogeneous regions, the Kansas City metroplex and its 2.4 million people are tightly intertwined across Missouri and Kansas, making a potential Bears move to Gary or Hammond very different from the Chiefs’ efforts. In the Kansas City area, game-day shoppers buying tailgating supplies often don’t realize they’ve crossed state lines until they go to a Kansas grocery store and find they can’t buy liquor there.
To be sure, there are critics of the Chiefs’ move. Officially called GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, but known simply as Arrowhead, the stadium opened in 1972 and has been renovated several times, becoming an iconic location for the National Football League team and a popular venue where its more than 76,000 seats offer clean sightlines.
“It’s not so much the going across state lines. That’s not a big deal,” said Michael Taylor of Clinton, Mo., who also has a residence in Kansas City, Mo.
“It’s just that historic nature of Arrowhead and it just being vacant. There’s some people who just absolutely hate it and are going to swear they’re never going to a Chiefs game again and throwing away all their Chiefs gear,” he said. “But they’re just passionate about Arrowhead. That’s much more about Arrowhead than moving across the state line.”
Even stoic Chiefs Coach Andy Reid, who has led the team to five Super Bowls and three wins since the 2019 season, dismissed the move to Kansas when it was announced last month.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s here or Kansas. We’re not moving to Florida or somewhere else. We’re right here,” Reid said. “We’ve always had Kansas people come here to the Missouri side and it will be likewise the other way. That’s the beautiful thing about it. Plus, it will be a beautiful facility and something the fans will be very proud of.”
But to James McIlvaine, who’s in his 40s and was born and raised in Kansas City, “They’re abandoning Arrowhead, the nostalgia factor and the tradition and history. For me growing up, that’s all I’ve ever known — the Truman Sports Complex with the Chiefs, with Kauffman (the MLB Royals baseball stadium) right next to each other for as long as I can remember.”
Still, McIlvaine said, “The flip side of that is eventually you’re going to need a new stadium, right? So how do you fund it? How do you come about it?”
That’s the quandary confronting the Bears, Illinois lawmakers and state taxpayers.
A 2024 plan to renovate the Soldier Field lakefront campus with a new $3.2 billion domed stadium, which would also require about $2.5 billion in taxpayer-supported financing, was quickly deemed a nonstarter by Gov. JB Pritzker and top lawmakers.
That came after the team’s 2023 purchase of the former Arlington International Racecourse and its 326 acres, which still appears to be the team’s primary focus for a $2 billion team-financed stadium.
But the Bears also are seeking state legislation and other guarantees that would provide the team with local property tax breaks and more than $800 million in taxpayer-financed infrastructure upgrades. The state has not ruled out highway improvements to access such a stadium but the property tax breaks have stalled in Springfield.
There’s also the $525 million in outstanding debt for the 2003 renovation of Soldier Field, the smallest stadium in the NFL. The Bears have maintained that the amount is a state debt and not the team’s.
The inaction prompted Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren to tell fans in a December letter that “our efforts have been met with no legislative partnership” and that northwest Indiana was in the mix. Warren assured, “This is not about leverage.”
But House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch criticized the team, estimated to be worth more than $8 billion, for wanting priority consideration in the upcoming spring legislative session.
“When folks say, ‘What’s your priorities going into the legislative session?’ we’re trying to bring down the cost of living,” Welch said at a City Club of Chicago event on Tuesday. “Talking about a brand-new Bears stadium when this one’s not even 25 years old, that’s insensitive to what real people are going through right now.”
In Kansas City, voters on the Missouri side had the opportunity to keep the Chiefs in a modernized Arrowhead last April but rejected the 40-year extension of a tax similar to the 3/8-cent sales tax that has been used to fund both the football and baseball stadium complex.
The vote became muddled when the baseball Royals said they wanted to move to downtown Kansas City’s Crossroads neighborhood, a popular area with a variety of small businesses that risked being displaced.
Opposition to the baseball stadium site, as well as what some say was a poor sales job to convince voters that they were merely extending a current tax and not paying a new one for the Royals, led to its defeat — and opened the door for Kansas to enter the picture.
“They wanted to put it down there by Union Station, by Crossroads. This little open space. There ain’t no parking. There ain’t no space,” said Kevin Thurman, 70, a volunteer at the American Jazz Museum, of the Royals’ stadium plans, which are still in flux.
A lifelong Kansas City resident, Thurman grew up blocks from the city’s original Municipal Stadium, home to the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues, and the previous home for the Kansas City Athletics and Royals and the Chiefs until 1971.
“People in Kansas been driving over here for years but they ain’t being paid for it, right? Now they will,” Thurman said.
In a Dec. 22 announcement, and with several details still to be finalized, the state of Kansas announced a commitment to issue nearly $2.8 billion in 30-year bonds backed by the state’s share of growth in sales taxes in a taxing district that could cover more than 300 square miles. Local municipalities within the district could also commit a share of their sales taxes, as well as provide property tax breaks.
The funding would be applied to a new domed stadium along with a nearby training facility in suburban Olathe, Kan. Additionally, a share of the state’s sports-betting fund would be used for stadium maintenance, as would the team’s $7 million annual rent.
The Hunt family, owners of the Chiefs, is expected to contribute about $1.6 billion toward the project.
But the sheer size and length of the sales tax diversion, and possible property tax breaks, have raised some concerns about whether municipal services will be affected in an area already facing rapid growth due to a new NASCAR track and a planned Mattel Adventure Park, featuring Barbie- and Hot Wheels-themed rides and exhibits, also being funded through Sales Tax and Revenue, or STAR, bonds.
Still, the big jump by Kansas raises questions about whether Indiana can raise the ante to attract the Bears.
State Rep. Kam Buckner, a Chicago Democrat whose district includes Soldier Field and who has been involved in stadium negotiations with the Bears, has his doubts.
“We are differently situated than the KC metro area and the situation that the Chiefs have,” he said. He also noted how much time and money the NFL, as a hugely successful business concern, put into bringing a football team and the league back to Los Angeles and that owners and their interest in revenue sharing would be unlikely to leave the nation’s third-largest media market, even if it’s just a few miles east of the Illinois-Indiana border.
“Nobody in America watches appointment television anymore, right? Everybody’s streaming and whatnot, except in the case of the National Football League, which is why the TV contracts are worth so much money,” he said. “That overhead shot coming in from the south side of Soldier Field and scooping around the lake and showing the rest of the skyline, it makes their product sellable, right? You can’t re-create that thing. The league knows it as well.”
Buckner said even if the Bears “can suck all the money they want out of Indiana and get new money for personal seat licenses and luxury suites and all of those things, at the end of the day, it does not pencil out, because they would be leaving the Chicago metro area or Chicago proper, or even just Cook County. I don’t love Arlington Heights but it makes more sense than Hammond, right? It does not work, it’s not going to put more money into the pots of the owners.”
The Illinois Republican Party has sought to play political football with the Bears’ consideration of Indiana, using social media to blame the state and Chicago’s Democratic leadership. But when asked what taxpayer-financed stadium deal should be offered to the Bears, there was no response.
In Kansas City, the Chiefs will continue to play in Arrowhead until their new stadium is opened in 2031. In the meantime, Arrowhead is undergoing some renovations as it plays host to six FIFA World Cup soccer matches from mid-June through mid-July, including a quarter-final game.
Grant Brunner, a 33-year-old bartender at The Blue Line, Kansas City’s hockey bar, is preparing for the international influx of fans.
“They just changed the law here for the two months that the people are going to be here. Bars and taverns can stay open 23 hours a day,” he said.
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