Kansas City Star. March 6, 2024.

Editorial: What we need to know before saying yes to Royals, Chiefs stadiums

We know firsthand that the Crossroads site where The Star used to be located, and where the Kansas City Royals want to build a new stadium, is a great spot. 1601 McGee would be a fun place to watch a ballgame.

But then, so is The K.

If team owner John Sherman wanted to build a new downtownish ballpark at his own expense, that would be fine.

But after two years of talk about this new stadium, he has still not given us any reason to want to help a guy out with that.

That’s especially true given that it would take properties valued at $33 million off the tax rolls.

The Royals say they’re going to help those businesses they’d be putting under, but how, exactly? Like everything else about this deal, it’s TBA.

The promised economic benefits have not materialized in many other cities where taxpayers have underwritten new ballparks.

The Royals plus the Chiefs, who are at the last minute asking us to also help them pay for a $800 million renovation of Arrowhead Stadium, are still negotiating a community benefits agreement.

A CBA would hopefully lock in all kinds of worker guarantees, including hiring from specific ZIP codes.

But who would vote to write a check without all of this already in place?

Promises are one thing, and contracts another; right now, we’re being asked to accept so much on faith that it seems like bad faith.

When the Royals say they will not play at The K beyond the current lease term, that sounds to us like vote yes or else.

Question 1 on the April 2 ballot asks Jackson County voters whether they want to repeal and replace the current 3/8-cent stadiums sales tax for the sports complex with a new 3/8-cent tax that would support the Chiefs and Royals for 40 years.

Absentee voting has already started, and the team owners seem to think that goodwill for the Super Bowl-winning Chiefs plus our love of even losing Royals teams means we’ll say yes without thinking too much about what we’re agreeing to.

In this scenario, voters overwhelmed with emotion will say, “Yes, I will spend the next 40 years with you!”

But this would lock taxpayers into a 40-year obligation without any guarantees that the teams would even stay in Kansas City that long.

The “Vote yes on Question 1” TV commercial, of course featuring Patrick Mahomes, says we’d be saying yes to keeping the teams here, yes to good-paying jobs and yes to small local businesses. But we don’t have commitments yet on any of that.

As we said, this conversation has been going on for years, and at every step has been mishandled.

So as of right now, we see no reason to support another subsidy for billionaires.

Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said his family would spend $300 million on Arrowhead upgrades, with the other $500 million to come from elsewhere.

The Royals have said they would spend more than $1 billion and we’d pick up the tab for the other $1 billion.

The teams had said leases would be public by March 1, but that hasn’t happened. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson said recently that there is no money in this year’s proposed budget to fund the stadium projects. What the city is going to do we have no idea, either.

These teams give us one of the few ways we can come together any more, and that’s worth something.

But who is paying for what? Is this the best possible way to spend these tax dollars? What’s the breakout of costs and responsibilities?

By all means, gentlemen, get back to us with some answers, and with Election Day less than a month away, now would be good. Surely you aren’t trying to wait until the last minute to minimize scrutiny of the details. To get voters to yes, they need not just a feel-good ad campaign, but facts.

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch. March 11, 2024.

Editorial: Missouri’s lawyer is again misusing his power. It’s time for a running list.

How cynical, craven and politically abusive is Andrew Bailey with his authority as Missouri’s attorney general?

Let us count the ways. Literally.

The Post-Dispatch Editorial Board today introduces The Bailey Tally: a running count of the many instances in which the state’s official lawyer has abused the legal process, has refused to do his job and/or has engaged in blatant conflicts of interest, all in service to an extremist right-wing agenda.

We’ve tried to keep up via individual editorials. Truly, we have. But with the count of Bailey’s more newsworthy outrages now approaching a dozen during his mere 14 months in office, we decided it was time to take a more comprehensive approach.

Space prohibits recounting each of Bailey’s numerous ideological stunts in one editorial. So we will outline some of them here, then list all of them in an running tally on the opinion section of the Post-Dispatch’s website.

In the latest entry, Bailey last month filed a remarkable suit alleging Planned Parenthood has engaged in human “trafficking” of a child to obtain an out-of-state abortion. The suit is based on a staged video from the widely discredited right-wing activist group Project Veritas.

The “victim” is (read this part carefully) a non-existent girl.

If that sounds like the kind of case that won’t last a minute before an actual judge … it is. The very premise is so outlandish that it’s clear Bailey — who does, after all, have a law degree — knows full well it will ultimately fail in court.

The point isn’t to win on behalf of the taxpayers funding the suit, but to harass Planned Parenthood, while demonstrating Bailey’s political extremism to Republican primary voters as he attempts this year to get elected to the office he was appointed to in late 2022.

This strategy — a textbook example of the legal offense of “abuse of process” — is a recurring theme with Bailey.

Last year, for example, in a brazen attempt to stall efforts to put an abortion rights referendum on the statewide ballot, Bailey refused to sign off on the state auditor’s modest official cost estimate of the measure. He claimed instead, ludicrously, that it would cost the state billions of dollars in lost tax revenue from unborn Missourians.

As the state Supreme Court would ultimately, unanimously find in a scathing ruling, Bailey never had legal authority to even weigh on the question. But by forcing it into the court system anyway, he managed to stall the referendum process by months, possibly endangering its success. Mission accomplished.

Bailey last year employed a similar strategy to help derail a now-defunct effort to put a gun-safety referendum on the statewide ballot: He sued based on the upside-down argument that fewer guns on the streets would cost Missouri hundreds of millions of dollars in “increased crime costs.”

There is no reliable data backing that argument. But states with loose laws like Missouri’s generally do have significantly higher gun death rates than states like Illinois, that have stronger gun laws.

Thankfully, not all of Bailey’s strongarm tactics are so successful. Last year, he created an emergency rule to effectively ban transgender hormone therapy not just for kids but also for adults. He withdrew it only after even his fellow Republicans deemed it too extreme.

In addition to lawsuits and emergency rules, Bailey’s arsenal of abuse includes cease-and-desist letters — written threats that can cow jittery targets like school districts to back down even from shaky legal allegations.

The Webster Groves school district alone has fielded at least two such official threats from Bailey so far this year, for teaching sex-education curriculum in which some parents might not have gotten the required opt-out form, and for announcing a goal of hiring a more racially diverse teaching staff to reflect the diversity of its students.

If it seems like the state’s top legal official should be focused on more urgent matters, Bailey has, in fairness, taken action on criminal cases like the manslaughter conviction of a white Kansas City cop in the shooting death of a Black man in his own driveway.

But in an unusual twist, Bailey — who as attorney general would normally be tasked with defending the cop’s conviction — instead filed a motion seeking to overturn it, second-guessing (and infuriating) the local prosecutors who actually handled the case.

Admittedly, not every move Bailey makes is in obvious service to right-wing pandering. Sometimes his official actions look more like traditional pay-to-play politics.

As when he farmed out his office’s responsibility in a suit involving Missouri’s unregulated, arguably illegal video gaming industry after his campaign had accepted more than $25,000 in donations from that industry or its lobbyists.

There’s more — lots of it — but you get the idea.

Bailey has repeatedly, consistently used and abused his office to promote his culture-war agenda while failing to carry out responsibilities that are clearly his. He’s hoping Republican Missouri voters will reward him in August with nomination to a full term.

Before they do, they should keep an eye on our Bailey Tally. It will be posted at STLToday.com/opinion this Sunday, and will be updated and re-posted as needed to accompany future editorials about Missouri’s chief lawyer. Unfortunately, we are confident he will continue to regularly provide fodder for new entries.

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