Voters in Jackson County, Missouri, will go to the polls on April 2 with a proposal to extend the current 3/8th-sales tax cents to help pay for the demolition and replacement of 51-year-old Kauffman Stadium, home of the Kansas City Royals, and to fund the renovation of its neighbor, Arrowhead Stadium, where the Kansas City Kings play City Chiefs, Super Bowl winners.
Major League Baseball’s Royals want to create a $2 billion park district in the Crossroads District. A new stadium, with capacity for 34,000 people, would occupy the site of the old Kansas City Star building. It would feature an adjacent development with offices, residential and commercial space and a hotel.
The Chiefs’ plan, however, is an $800 million renovation of Arrowhead Stadium, which includes a turf field with tailgate areas and an indoor entertainment center built on the current site of Kauffman Stadium. a new upper concourse connecting bridge, new stadium facilities. , commercial premises and toilets, an access tunnel, three new pedestrian bridges and a new parking deck.
Both teams support expanding the sales tax. The sales tax extension “is better for everybody and keeps both teams in the region,” Chiefs president Mark Donovan said in a distributed interview.
The Royals, who have played at Kauffman since 1973, say a new stadium is needed because the concrete at Kauffman is deteriorating and cannot be rehabilitated.
Earl Santee, senior director of Populous, the Kansas City architect and engineer hired to design the two stadiums, said at a news conference that he believes it is no longer feasible to keep Kauffman Stadium.
“I’ve been working at the K since the 1990s,” he said. “We have renovated it. We have kept it. We have sustained it. But renewing the K in the future is not feasible. It’s not realistic.”
Populous consulted with a structural engineer to evaluate Kauffman Stadium, but Santee did not name the firm.
“[The forensic firm] went in and identified the first phase” of the alkali-silica reaction that causes concrete to fail at some point, Santee says. It might take 40 years, but concrete “is going to fail at some point, so the ability to keep the current The structure is not really feasible,” adds Santee.
New York City structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti reviewed the structural assessment portion of the most recent report, which was done in 2022, and did not include concrete testing, says Sarah Dempster, director of Populous. A separate assessment in 2007 provided evidence of specific materials by a different consulting group.
“This report indicated alkali-silica reaction (ASR) in 57 of the 59 cores examined, with the majority of the structure characterized as having moderate ASR difficulty,” says Dempster. “Mitigation was attempted and unsuccessful.”
ASR is a chemical reaction that occurs between the reactive particles in the silica aggregate and the hydroxyl ions in the hardened concrete pore solution. He added that the 2007 report estimated that the concrete would last 10 to 20 years before distress accelerated to the point where replacement would become necessary.
Noting that the stadiums, which are part of the Truman Sports Complex, are roughly the same age, Jackson County Executive Frank White sent a letter to the Jackson County Sports Authority, which leases the stadiums to teams, wondering why Kauffman has what he had. called “specific cancer” when Arrowhead doesn’t. He also called for a more detailed assessment of the conditions at the two stadiums.
“This statement [of concrete cancer] raises important questions, especially since the Jackson County Sports Authority’s annual facilities report made no mention of ASR or construction-related concerns,” White wrote.
Although the Royals maintain that ASR is a problem, the sports authority contracted with Burns & McDonnell between 2014 and 2022 to annually assess conditions at both stadiums. The most recent report from 2022 found Kauffman to be in “satisfactory conditions” compatible with a first-class major league baseball stadium.
Burns & McDonnell declined to comment on the report.
In a letter responding to White’s concerns, Shawn Foster, president of the sports authority, noted that the Kansas City Royals made a cost/value business decision that it would cost the same amount of money to maintain and renovate Kauffman Stadium for the next 25. to 40 years, as it would cost to build a new stadium. “This is a business decision, which the team believes will provide a better gaming experience, be more operationally efficient and allow them different revenue streams,” Foster said.
