Is downtown Kansas City baseball worth it? Good luck finding out the real price tag

Sports fans know numbers: batting averages, yards per carry, field goal percentage. And final scores. It’s all right there, on the sports page, in very small print.

Somehow, though, when the chat turns to plans for building new sports stadiums, or rebuilding old ones, numbers turn to mush.

Kansas City has talked about downtown baseball for at least 30 years. There are pictures and diagrams and wouldn’t-it-be-nice studies on every shelf. Yet if you ask how much a stadium would actually cost — and who would pay for it — the mumbling begins.

This is not a minor error. It’s a basic, fatal flaw in any downtown baseball discussion. Kansas City cannot possibly know if downtown baseball is a good idea until they have some reasonable estimate of cost and financing.

Voters, for example, strongly supported a new terminal at Kansas City International Airport. So did this newspaper. But the terminal proposal was always fundamentally linked with its airline-user financing, just as hydrogen and oxygen produce water.

We would have almost certainly opposed the project had Kansas City taxpayers been on the hook for it, which they weren’t.

So knowing the cost and financing of a stadium is a critical threshold question. But it isn’t the only question, because the other part of the equation is value: Assuming you could find the money, are new stadiums the best way to spend it?

New stadiums for both teams will easily cost $1 billion to $2 billion. Do not ignore the Chiefs, who will want what the Royals get. Any discussion of new or refurbished facilities will have to include both clubs.

A half-cent sales tax in Jackson County and Johnson County, collected for 30 years, would probably generate enough cash, with significant league and team contributions, to build new stadiums.

If you have $1 billion or $2 billion in public dollars to spend, though, would you spend it on ballparks? Or would you spend it on transportation, or housing, or health care, or public safety, or education, or higher education, or something else? Or would you give Kansas City’s overtaxed poor some relief?

All of the above isn’t an answer. Tax dollars are finite. To govern is to choose.

Did you know: Less than half of the original $102 million bond issue that built the Truman Sports Complex actually went for the stadiums. The rest was spent on flood control, street improvements — and funding for a public hospital. Then, as now, there were other important needs.

Downtown stadium boosters hope voters won’t think too much about this. Instead, the same people who promised you pro sports at the downtown arena will soon promise an avalanche of community benefits from a downtown ballpark.

Development hasn’t happened at the Truman Sports Complex, of course, and the Power & Light District will require a taxpayer subsidy for decades. The net financial effect of the downtown arena is murky.

Does Kansas City’s downtown really need more help? In the previous decades, taxpayers have incentivized or subsidized an arena, the Performing Arts Center, the Power & Light District, three high-rise apartment complexes, the streetcar, a major convention hotel, other hotels, a civic mall near a new federal courthouse, Bartle Hall, The Star’s Press Pavilion and several office buildings. When will enough be enough?

Now is the time to focus on these questions. Stadium boosters say the discussion now is merely conceptual, but pay close attention: More than one local politico thinks it’s a done deal. Even now, Mayor Quinton Lucas is edging away from all the downtown stadium=Maserati talk.

We can’t be distracted by the pictures, or wishful thinking. A vote could come in 2024. The region deserves a sober conversation about downtown baseball, and our other needs. So far, we have zero facts, which is the most important number of all.