The month began with the Chiefs’ failure to secure public funding for a renovation of Arrowhead Stadium. Speaking this week at the CAA World Congress of Sport, team president Mark Donovan reiterated that the Chiefs will be considering their options for the future.
“We’ve done this twice, and the last two times we’ve done it with either eight years or seven years left on a lease,” Donovan said, via Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal. “We’re down to six right now. We’ve got the World Cup in 2026. We’ve got to get through that. So it’s a bit of a tighter time frame, but we’ll look at options and we’ll create a good solution.”
Donovan’s comments follow an SBJ report that the failed Jackson County vote “was never about the Chiefs or team owner Clark Hunt,” but that it was “always about downtown baseball” for the Royals.
That report cites unnamed sources. If those sources were in any way tied to the Chiefs, the report is a little suspect and self-serving, frankly. The Chiefs have every reason to sell the idea that it wasn’t their fault that the vote failed — and that the defeat wasn’t a referendum on the team or Hunt.
Even if the team’s fingerprints aren’t on that reporting, they still look foolish for hitching their wagon to the Royals, and for trying to so hard to boost a measure that lost so badly.
As the Chiefs repeatedly said, they were simply seeking the extension of an existing sales tax. But it didn’t fail by a razor-thin margin. It was a landslide. And if the Chiefs believe they would have won if they’d broken themselves out from the baseball proposal, well, why didn’t they?
All around, the effort was a failure by the Chiefs. In every way. The sooner they accept it and learn from it, the better off they’ll be in whatever their next effort is to shake taxpayer dollars from the K.C. trees.