Clark Hunt Updates Chiefs’ Stadium Situation

The Kansas proposal

The concrete used to erect a $3 billion domed stadium in Kansas could vault the region to the front of the Super Bowl line. In both 2020 and 2021, NFL teams won Super Bowls in their home stadiums. The Chiefs could be the third team ever to accomplish that if the team ultimately moves westward across the state border.

Lawmakers in Kansas have already approved providing the cost for up to 70 percent of not only a new Chiefs stadium, but also a new facility for the Kansas City Royals. The proposed location, in Wyandotte County near the Kansas Speedway, is about 24 miles from Arrowhead Stadium.

The mixed-use development also would provide the Chiefs a replacement for their outdated training facility and an outdoor amphitheater to house concerts and other entertainment.

In Missouri...

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe, meanwhile, has rallied his state legislature with its own funding package to renovate Arrowhead Stadium. The facility, which opened in 1972, is the third-oldest in the NFL behind Chicago’s Soldier Field and Green Bay’s Lambeau Field.

The Chiefs are believed to control the next steps.

• “We’ve had more meetings, more discussions,” team president Mark Donovan told the Associated Press on July 22. “At this point it’s literally – you’re taking an agreement this long and whittling it down to this paragraph and this line, and we need an agreement on this, and we’re doing this on both sides. You’re in that process where you’re not sure which way it will go.”

• Both the Chiefs’ lease at Arrowhead Stadium and the Royals’ lease at adjacent Kauffman Stadium are set to expire in January 2031. The leases exist with Jackson County, where voters last year turned down a sales-tax extension that would’ve provided $800 million in Arrowhead renovations as well as a new $2 billion home for the Royals in downtown.