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 new $2 billion park district in Kansas City’s Crossroads District. A new stadium would occupy the site of the old Kansas City Star building and have a capacity of 34,000 people. It would have an adjacent urbanization with offices, shops, apartments 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. designed with VIP experiences in mind, retail spaces and restrooms, an access tunnel, three new pedestrian bridges and a new parking deck, also at the current Kauffman Stadium site. The current stadium area is known for fans who arrive hours before games and who flock extensively on game days for both teams, such as smoking Kansas City barbecue in the parking lots of both stadiums.
Both teams support expanding the sales tax. Chiefs president Mark Donovan said in an interview distributed by teams that the sales tax extension “is better for everybody and keeps both teams in the region.”
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 architecture and engineering firm hired to design the two new stadiums known for its professional sports venue designs, said at a news conference that he believes it is no longer feasible to maintain 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, however, is not known for its expertise in forensic engineering, and Santee said Populous consulted with an independent structural engineer to evaluate the stadium, but did not name the firm involved.
“[The forensic firm] he went in and identified the first phase of what we call ASR (alkali-silica reaction)… it causes the concrete to fail at some point. All of this means that in 40 years it may fail, but it will fail at some point, so the ability to maintain the current structure is not really feasible,” Santee said.
Populous principal Sarah Dempster said her firm contracted with the Kansas City Royals and hired New York-based structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti for a review of the structural assessment portion of the report. recent, which was made in 2022 and which did not include concrete evidence. 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,” Dempster said. “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, were built in the same time frame of roughly 50 years, Jackson County Executive Frank White sent a letter to the sports authority of Jackson County, which leases the stadiums to the teams, questioning why Kauffman has what he called a “specific cancer” when Arrowhead does not. 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 MLB 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 the stadium Kauffman for the next 25-40 years as it would cost to build a new stadium. This is a business decision, which the team believes will provide a better game experience, be more efficient operationally and allow them different revenue streams.”
