On July 30, 2026, while guest hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey spoke with Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway about her office’s lawsuit against Kansas City over its race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences.

Listen to more from KCMO Talk Radio here.

The post Missouri AG Catherine Hanaway Discusses the State’s Lawsuit Against Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On July 30, 2026, while guest hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, spoke with Susan Pendergrass, the Institute’s Director of Research, about declining school enrollment in Missouri. Pendergrass walks through the demographic data behind the decline, why it isn’t a pandemic-related blip, and what it means for school funding, staffing, and building use going forward.

Listen to more from KCMO Talk Radio here.

The post Declining School Enrollment with Susan Pendergrass appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Listen to the full segment here. 

On July 30, 2026, while guest hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey spoke with Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas about the city’s race- and sex-conscious contracting program. The city’s own consultants recently told the council it lacks the factual basis to continue the program.

The post Does Kansas City Still Need Race- and Sex-Conscious Contracting Preferences? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On July 22, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed a lawsuit against Kansas City for violating anti-discrimination laws. A copy of the suit is available here.

For some background, I recommend you read my June 18 column for The Kansas City Star. In short, I detail a city council session in which the city’s own consultants report that after reviewing seven years of contracting data, they could find no evidence to support the need for the city’s race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences. In fact, the consultancy’s director of research told the council bluntly, “You just don’t have the factual predicate” required to continue such set-asides.

What that really means is that the city has no defense against a lawsuit.

Members of the council were not pleased with the report’s findings. They could have viewed this as a huge victory for Kansas City—having reached a point where such discriminatory programs were no longer necessary. Instead, council members chose to question the results and the methodology. Mayor Lucas even offered a novel legal theory: “The courts suck.”

We know that column, the only reporting I have been able to find about the consultants’ report, played a role in Hanaway’s suit because she tells us so. Not only does the lawsuit track with what I wrote, including Lucas’s petulance, but she explicitly cites the column in the suit’s footnotes.

Following up on my column, on June 26, I spoke with Lee’s Summit–based civil rights attorney Jonathan Whitehead on KCMO Talk Radio’s Mundo in the Morning. Whitehead details the legal history regarding race- and sex-based discrimination, the rules it put in place for allowing such programs, and how the findings in Kansas City may put the city in legal jeopardy.

As with the Star column, you won’t find any such in-depth interviews on the topic anywhere else.

The post Show-Me Institute Shines Light on Kansas City’s Discrimination Policies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to the Kansas City Business Journal, the revived program could help finance an expansion of CPKC Stadium, a possible new Royals ballpark, and billions of dollars in additional development connected to Kansas City’s Power & Light District and St. Louis’s Ballpark Village.

There are other provisions in the bill, including incentives for converting vacant office buildings into housing and programs tied to designated “innovation zones.” But the return of MODESA deserves particular attention because Missouri taxpayers already have some experience with the program. In Kansas City, that experience includes the Power & Light District.

Kansas City helped champion the original MODESA program in 2003, when downtown was struggling and city leaders were looking for ways to encourage investment. The program allowed new state tax revenues generated by qualifying developments to help finance projects, including public infrastructure associated with Power & Light.

The new version could be even more generous. The Business Journal reports that MODESA could redirect 50% of incremental state sales and employee income taxes generated by qualifying projects for as long as 30 years. For certain projects, that figure could rise to 70%. Local governments also would be required to provide substantial matching incentives.

Supporters believe the program can unlock investments that otherwise might not happen. The Cordish Companies, for example, says the legislation could help support $2.5 billion in new investment in Missouri, including an expansion that could “basically double” the size of the Power & Light District.

Perhaps. But before Missouri helps double the size of Power & Light, it is worth looking at how the financing of the original project has worked.

The district undoubtedly helped change the face of downtown Kansas City. It brought restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues to an area that badly needed investment. But it didn’t create new investment—it merely redirected economic activity at bars and restaurants from elsewhere in the city to downtown.

We know this because data provided by the city’s Regulated Industries Division shows us that the number of liquor licenses and employee cards required of bartenders and waitstaff remained flat after Power & Light opened. Despite new shops downtown, there was no growth citywide.

To make matters worse, the district has not generated enough revenue for Cordish to cover its debts. Because then-Mayor Kay Barnes was foolish enough to put taxpayers on the hook for debt payments, Kansas Citians have been paying out about $12 million each year over and above the tax revenue we divert back to the developer.

Kansas City is considering using the revived MODESA program as part of financing packages for an 18,000-seat expansion of CPKC Stadium and potentially a $3 billion Royals ballpark development at Crown Center. The city already has signaled its willingness to consider as much as $235 million in local incentives associated with the current project and $600 million for the Royals.

The state incentives are not insignificant, either. According to the Business Journal, the fiscal note for HB 3231 estimates the legislation will cost Missouri more than $62 million annually once fully implemented in 2034.

As Missouri leaders take on the task of cutting spending so that they may reduce and eventually eliminate the state income tax, these types of subsidies are not a sign of fiscal seriousness.

We’ve been here before. The effort failed. Why are we doubling down?

The post Missouri Doubles Down on Failed Economic Development Scheme appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Economic development incentives are usually sold as investments. The state offers tax credits, cash grants, or other subsidies to persuade a company to expand or relocate. If the deal works, supporters claim, taxpayers get jobs and the state or local economy is strengthened.

I’m skeptical of those claims. Back in 2017, I wrote:

What’s more, studies in Missouri and across the country have noted that these programs do not help create jobs or spur neighborhood investment in the aggregate. Often they simply enrich political cronies.

A new study concludes that some other beneficiaries of large incentive programs are lobbyists.

Instead of asking whether subsidies create jobs, the authors ask what happens to businesses’ behavior after states begin offering exceptionally large incentive packages. Their answer is striking, if not surprising: Businesses appear to devote more resources to lobbying government.

The study, recently published in Small Business Economics, examines more than 40,000 state economic development awards made between 1997 and 2019. The researchers identified the point at which a state first awarded what they call an “extraordinarily large” incentive—defined as more than 3,500 times larger than that state’s historical median award—and then compared those states with similar states that had not yet crossed that threshold.

Rather than counting announced jobs or measuring state economic output, they looked at employment in the lobbying industry.

The reasoning comes from economist William Baumol’s distinction between productive and unproductive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are talented at recognizing opportunities. Sometimes those opportunities involve creating new products or better ways of serving customers. Sometimes they involve obtaining advantages through government. Public policy can influence which of those activities becomes more profitable.

The authors found that after states began offering these unusually large subsidies, employment at lobbying firms increased by roughly 3.6%. Those gains were concentrated in state capital counties, where lobbying activity is naturally centered. They also found lobbying employment became more geographically concentrated around state capitals after these awards.

The study is not claiming that lobbying is improper. Businesses have every right to petition government. Instead, the paper documents something more modest—and perhaps more important. When governments begin offering extraordinarily valuable subsidies, businesses respond by investing more heavily in political activity.

Several Show-Me Institute researchers reached a similar conclusion in 2018 when they examined the relationship between subsidy awards and political contributions in Kansas City.

If winning a government incentive can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, devoting additional resources to influencing government becomes a rational business decision.

That makes perfect sense if you’re running a business. But is it where we want to invest our resources as a state or community? Shouldn’t that entrepreneurial energy be going toward making our lives better rather than thinking up new ways to squeeze tax dollars out of government?

In politics, we often argue about how best to solve problems. That is good. It is when we ask how government can best solve problems that we invite all sorts of additional problems. This study tells us what we likely already know: When you start handing out lots of money, you encourage more people to ask for it. We may be creating jobs—but it’s likely not the jobs you were hoping for.

The post What Happens after States Hand Out Massive Corporate Subsidies? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the items vetoed was $2 million for Missouri’s Violent Crime Clearance Grant Program. That was a disappointment. I’ve written previously about why improving violent crime clearance rates is one of the smartest public safety investments Missouri can make.

Even so, I understand why it was vetoed. Missouri cannot continue expanding government..

Spending restraint means worthwhile programs will sometimes be cut. The question isn’t whether every veto was perfect. No governor gets every decision right. The question is whether Missouri is finally willing to reverse a spending trajectory that accelerated during the years of extraordinary federal COVID aid and continued even after those dollars disappeared.

I hope lawmakers and the governor revisit the Violent Crime Clearance Grant Program when Missouri’s finances allow. Public safety is government’s first responsibility, and I continue to believe this is a high-return investment.

But spending restraint only works if programs with genuine merit are still subject to scrutiny. If every worthwhile program receives an exemption, then spending never declines. The test of fiscal reform is whether Missouri begins living within its means and creates the conditions necessary to reduce the tax burden on its citizens over the long term.

The post A Disappointing Veto, but the Right Fiscal Direction appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Kansas City Chiefs just released a two-page statement with numerous claims about the benefits of a new stadium, practice facility, and team headquarters in Kansas. There are reasons to be skeptical.

First, the press release includes some findings from an economic impact analysis that was conducted by a consultant the team hired. We don’t have the full report itself—just these selected highlights the Chiefs chose to share.

The consultant, Econsult Solutions, appears to be using standard economic impact methods. My concern isn’t who performed the study; it’s that these models are only as good as the assumptions that go into them, and those assumptions haven’t yet been made public.

The full report should be released so we can see and evaluate the assumptions. For example, I’d like to know how the authors calculated visitor spending, how they calculated multiplier effects, and how much of this projected economic activity is actually new to Kansas.

These studies are often flawed in their analysis and assumptions. Academic economists caution that these studies can overstate the benefits of publicly subsidized projects by measuring gross economic activity rather than net new economic activity. The ongoing debate over the World Cup’s promised economic benefits illustrates why those assumptions deserve careful scrutiny.

A $4.5 billion project will undoubtedly generate billions of dollars in economic activity. The question isn’t whether activity occurs; it’s whether that activity is genuinely new to Kansas and whether it generates tax revenue to justify the public subsidy.

Also, what exactly is included in the $1.2 billion in ancillary development the press release mentions? Hotels? Housing? Entertainment? And how much of that development is expected because of the stadium, rather than development that would have occurred anyway? Recall that the STAR bond district captures all additional tax revenue, regardless of whether it is due to the Chiefs’ developments.

As a result, this selected summary of the report doesn’t tell us if the deal is worthwhile for taxpayers.

There are some things in the report that should be of note to taxpayers. For example, the release has the capital investment increased by about 12% from what we were told in December, but the projected construction impact increased by nearly 90%. That raises an obvious question about what changed between the two projections.

One answer may be that the press release measures impacts across the greater Kansas City region, not just Kansas. Kansas taxpayers, who are paying for this thing, should ask about the benefits to them specifically.

A skeptic might wonder if the authors included areas outside Kansas to inflate the economic impact number.

The press release tells us about new tax revenue—but not how much it will cost taxpayers to get that revenue. Every salesman wants to focus on the benefits of what they are selling. Kansans need to be mindful of the costs.

Regarding costs, in the December 2025 announcement, Kansas leaders were adamant that the Chiefs deal paid for itself through future revenues, required no funds from the state budget, and would require no new taxes.

Is that still the case?

We’re still waiting to learn the size of the STAR district—almost 300 square miles in past statements—and the baseline year for determining the amount to be given to the Chiefs. Those details matter because they determine whether the projected tax revenues actually exceed the public commitment. Until those questions are answered, it’s impossible to know whether the project pays for itself.

We just don’t know.

And again, this is all based on a two-page statement from the Chiefs about an economic impact study they haven’t released. The team owes taxpayers more information and more transparency.

The post More Noise than Signal from Latest Chiefs Release appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Listen to the full show: www.kcmotalkradio.com/

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Interview Transcript

Patrick Tuohey (00:00)
Good morning, Kansas City. This is Patrick Tuohey, Kansas City’s second favorite Patrick, sitting in on the Pete Mundo Show for the whole morning. If you have read anything in the Kansas City papers about either the Royals Stadium or the Chiefs Stadium, the chances are that you are familiar with my next guest. J.C. Bradbury, a professor of economics at Kennesaw State University, has been studying the economic impacts of building stadiums, tearing down stadiums, getting teams, and losing teams. He’s got a book coming out at the end of next month called This One Will Be Different. I’ll get to the book in a second, JC, but my first question is: why do you hate baseball?

J.C. Bradbury (00:43)
Hi Patrick, thanks for having me on. I get that question a lot because I bring a lot of bad news, or uncomfortable truths, let’s say, about baseball. But I study these things because I love baseball. I’m a huge fan. I grew up an Atlanta Braves fan, but I follow baseball generally and all sorts of sports. I was an Atlanta United season ticket holder for many years. That’s why I do this — because I enjoy it.

Patrick Tuohey (01:09)
It’s funny — years ago somebody recommended Moneyball. It’s a fantastic book. The movie is just as good. I rewatched it the other day, and if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in years, it really holds up. I think of that because baseball claims to be so statistics driven that you’d think fans would be more amenable to the kind of economic analysis you’re doing. But maybe it’s just love of the game and fandom that clouds their reason.

J.C. Bradbury (01:44)
There’s some of that. There are many people who are baseball fans, sports fans, who understand what I’m arguing — and I’d argue it’s more than you’d realize. But most of the people vocally speaking out about stadium issues and public finance are largely blinded by their own fandom. I deal with people on social media all the time who respond to things I say about stadiums and tell me I don’t understand the public finance — and they’re just totally incorrect. They don’t even bother to check it. It’s religion to some people. I say most people would give up their religion before they’d give up their subsidies to their sports teams.

Patrick Tuohey (02:27)
If you don’t already follow J.C. Bradbury on Twitter, I recommend it — JC underscore Bradbury. If you’re a fan of baseball, economics, or The Simpsons, you’ll love his account. So JC, tell me about your book, This One Will Be Different, which comes out at the end of July.

J.C. Bradbury (02:44)
I’ve been studying stadium subsidies and publicly funded stadiums for a very long time. I fell into it accidentally because the Atlanta Braves Stadium opened in Cobb County, a few miles from where I live — just outside Atlanta, where my family has been for generations. I had a lot of interest in how the stadium was built and funded, with three hundred million dollars in subsidies. I was familiar with a lot of the economics behind stadiums, and when I tried to share this research with other people, I was heavily rebuffed. So I began to study the issue more, and before I knew it, I had a very long book about the economics of stadiums. My idea was to explain public finance issues in stadiums using simpler methods. I use sound research methods, but I try to explain it through the narrative story of the Braves coming to Cobb County — here’s what happened, here’s what people argued, here’s what actually happened, let’s look at some of the financial numbers, and let’s understand the general intuition of why stadiums get built even though economists say they’re a bad deal. I look at the politics of it too. And one of the things I find is that these stadiums are mostly built by insider coalitions — chamber of commerce types, folks who are going to sit in the owner’s box and enjoy cocktails, or people with season tickets. They’re the large beneficiaries of the subsidy. They push these advocacy campaigns and try to get them passed as quickly as possible without going to voters if they can. That’s why we get these deals.

Patrick Tuohey (04:35)
One of the things that frustrates me about this whole issue — and I’d be curious if you agree, though I hate when TV and radio hosts make a statement and then ask the guest if they agree, and here I am — is that when St. Louis was considering funding a Major League Soccer stadium, or here in Kansas City with the Royals or the Chiefs, what I wish they would do is just say, “Hey everybody, we are a sports town. We think it’s important to have a sports team here, so we’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build something.” And just leave it at that. It would be a defensible argument. You could argue whether it’s worth the expenditure, but at least everybody would be honest. But they don’t do that. They go the extra step and say, “And we’re going to make money doing it.” That’s where they mess everything up. That’s where they get the numbers wrong. Is it as simple as that, or am I missing something?

J.C. Bradbury (05:31)
Absolutely. I wish there was some honesty in these debates. The reality is that a lot of people who argue these things don’t actually believe the phony economic impact studies they put out. They do it for a couple of reasons. Number one, politically, it’s a winning issue — if you tell someone it’s good for them economically, they’re more likely to support it. But also, if you just argue it’s good for the community and we’re a sports town — okay, how much does it cost? A billion dollars. How much does that increase taxes? Three hundred dollars. Well, hold on, we’re not that much of a sports town. Think about how you make your own decisions. What kind of car do you want to drive? I want a Ferrari. Great. But to drive a Ferrari, you’d need to move into a two-bedroom apartment, never travel again, and eat ramen noodles. You know what — I’ll get the base model sedan. People make those kinds of decisions, and that’s one of the reasons they use false economic benefits — because once you start talking about social benefits, people look at the costs more closely, and it makes a lot less sense.

Patrick Tuohey (06:40)
I had your colleague Victor Matheson on a few weeks ago and we talked about this, specifically with the World Cup. I’ve also asked Neil Damas this question. In your experience, how good are journalists at reaching out to you and your colleagues to vet the numbers they’re being told by chambers of commerce or the city? Where are we now, and are we getting better?

J.C. Bradbury (07:14)
I think the situation is getting worse, and a lot of it is accidental. Newsrooms have gotten smaller and younger, so there’s less institutional knowledge. People don’t remember the last stadium being built, and they’re told to go cover this stadium story. They call a few local sources — who of course are members of the local chamber — and those people say it’s great. At best, they call a local economist who says it’s bad, and it ends up being a tie. But often they don’t even call the economist. That’s part of the nature of the news business, which is one of the reasons I think it’s so important to use social media and other mediums to get the word out. Even journalists trying to do their best often fall short. And journalists deserve some blame here — when I reach out to try to help them, they often get very defensive, and I think that needs to stop. I’m not just angry at journalists. Both my parents were journalists, and my first job was in a newsroom. I understand what’s going on.

Patrick Tuohey (08:19)
The previous segment, I talked about World Cup reporting. Local people put out outrageous economic development claims a year and a half ago, nobody questioned them, and journalists just repeated them — even though past experience hadn’t lived up to those claims. So what can we do to encourage journalists to reach out, or maybe just give them a primer on what economic impact studies look like and where the flaws are? Whether I’m looking in St. Louis, Kansas City, or around the country, they are all flawed in the same way.

J.C. Bradbury (08:56)
It’s important to always speak up. It’s easy to get tired and think you can’t keep doing it. When someone asks me to look through one of these studies, I tell them it’s not a real study — it’s a fake study. I try to spread that message. Part of the problem is that the big number is the story, and that’s what they want out there. The fact that it’s wrong later doesn’t matter. And sometimes people get mad at me because I’ll call out bad reporting. I do it not because I dislike journalists, but every time I’ve tried to be nice about it, I get told I don’t know what I’m talking about or that they don’t want to tell their boss they need a correction. I think it’s important for journalists to know that if they get it wrong, they’re going to get called on it — not to be mean, but to set the standard.

Patrick Tuohey (09:54)
And do a better job because policymakers and business owners are making decisions based on the numbers you’re putting out there. We see this with the World Cup — people were expecting much bigger crowds than they got. It’s not just a matter of being right. It’s a matter of being right so that people make decisions based on real information, not just projections. JC, I’m grateful for your time this morning. Thank you so much. We’ve been talking to J.C. Bradbury of Kennesaw State University. His book, This One Will Be Different, comes out at the end of July. We’ll be right back.

The post Why Stadium Deals Don’t Add Up with J.C. Bradbury appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The city is suffering under a $55 million operating deficit. The mayor pointed out in a 2023 budget letter that “The demands of a City this size in square miles and infrastructure age far exceed affordable options for residents and available resources.”

What to do? The answer is obvious: dedicate more public tax dollars to private corporations. And not just baseball, but women’s soccer, too!

Kansas City leaders are once again proposing public subsidies for a sports facility. This time, the beneficiary is the Kansas City Current and the continued development of the Berkley Riverfront.

According to reporting by The Kansas City Star, the city may create a new tax-increment financing (TIF) district and issue up to $235 million in bonds to support expansion of CPKC Stadium and surrounding development. The project would increase stadium capacity from 11,500 to 18,000 seats and add parking, retail, and mixed-use development to the riverfront.

Why? Why is it the responsibility of taxpayers to fund this? Projects like this can be good. They can even be great! But it’s not on par with, say, public safety or infrastructure, or education—which will all lose money because of the subsidy.

Supporters of the proposal point to the team’s success. Lucas told Fox4 that Kansas City must position itself for future events such as a potential Women’s World Cup and noted that there are limits to what an 11,500-seat stadium can host. He also emphasized that the proposed financing would not come from the city’s general revenue fund.

Let’s be careful about that last point. TIF does not create money out of thin air. Without a deal, the Current owners would pay taxes on their development—just like you and me. The proposal is to change that and let them keep that money. Money that we are told the city doesn’t have enough of.

Perhaps the most revealing thing is that Lucas can’t even be bothered to make a coherent defense of this spending. When asked about public subsidies for the Current, he told Fox4, “We’ve been through this before with another professional team that plays in Kansas City.”

But in an April 17, 2026, live interview with the Kansas City Stack Substack, Lucas said about public financing for a Royals ballpark: “this is like the incentive arrangements that we’ve done in other places. Probably the most stadium-like discussion is the stadium we built on the riverfront for the Kansas City Current. That, of course, was an incentive arrangement where you had votes at city council at one of our incentive agencies, that being the Port Authority, and you had state participation. I expect that to be the same.” [3:36 mark]

In other words, we’re giving public money to the Current because we’re giving money to the Royals because we gave money to the Current. That’s his argument.

I was reminded recently of other reporting from Fox4 in which Lucas defended himself for accepting secret gifts from the Royals, among others, to pay for tuxedos and trips to the Super Bowl. He said, “my goal is always to save taxpayer dollars.”

Lucas may have lots of reasons for accepting gifts. But given his willingness to spend public funds on stadiums, it’s hard to believe he cares about saving taxpayer dollars.

The post Kansas City Mayor’s Circular Reasoning on Stadium Subsidies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Kansas City Star recently published a story examining the city’s gun violence problem as Kansas City hosts matches during the World Cup.

The article raises a legitimate concern. Kansas City, Missouri, suffers from far too much violence. Recent shootings have again drawn national attention to a problem local leaders have struggled to address for years.

The Star largely frames that problem through the lens of Missouri’s gun laws. Missouri allows permit-less carry. It broadly preempts local firearm regulations. Legislative efforts to tighten gun restrictions have gone nowhere, even after highly publicized tragedies such as the Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally shooting.

Reasonable people can conclude that these policies contribute to violence.

But if we are serious about understanding why Kansas City experiences so much violence, there is an obvious question that deserves attention:

What about Kansas? The state line is not hundreds of miles away. It is literally a road.

Kansas has permit-less carry. Kansas does not require firearm registration. Kansas does not impose waiting periods. Kansas does not require universal background checks for private firearm sales. Kansas broadly preempts local governments from adopting their own firearm regulations.

In other words, Kansas and Missouri have remarkably similar firearm laws, yet the outcomes on violence are very different.

The Star notes that Kansas City, Missouri, averages roughly 30 homicides during June and July, compared with four in Kansas City, Kansas. That is a remarkable difference. Accounting for population, Kansas City, Missouri, still experiences roughly twice the homicide rate of Kansas City, Kansas.

If neighboring jurisdictions with similar firearm laws experience dramatically different homicide rates, serious observers should be interested in what else might explain the difference. They should certainly acknowledge it.

The question is not whether gun laws matter. The question is whether they are sufficient to explain the difference in homicide numbers. The Star asks the first question. It largely ignores the second.

The post If Gun Laws Explain Kansas City’s Violence, What Explains Kansas? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let’s say this is an April election. What happens in the initial petition process is not that the City Council just sits around and twiddles its thumbs, right? We can pass ordinances just like broadly the public can through an initiative petition process. All of these words I’m saying is, no, this will not thwart development of Kansas City Royals stadium.

We’ve actually thought about all of this. We’re going to get the necessary deals done expeditiously to make sure that the Royals can be prepared to open the stadium by opening day of 2030. That requires, I think, dirt moving really by the end of this year at least on the demolition process or very early in 2027. And if you’re looking at it, it takes about 30 days to the election authorities anyway to get the election certified. So, you know, this is not a threat to that.

He made similar comments to The Beacon. It seemed weird to me that, once a petition has been validated, a legislative body like the council could just rush through all sorts of things before the vote, and then tell petitioners, “Hey, sorry. You’re too late.” I’m not alone in thinking this; Dave Helling wrote something similar on the Kansas City Stack.

And, if one cares about the Missouri Supreme Court, the court thinks similar conduct at the state level is weird, too. The Supreme Court didn’t just find it weird—it found it unconstitutional!

In February 2015, the court ruled in Earth Island Inst. v. Union Elec. Co. that the state legislature cannot tweak things to effectively eviscerate a pending vote. They wrote:

The only issue is whether the legislature may negate in advance an initiative petition that has been approved for circulation but prior to the time it is adopted by the people at an election.  It may not.  If a proposed initiative is adopted by the people at an election, then a statute enacted by the legislature during the interim between the initiative’s approval for circulation and its passage is impliedly repealed to the extent of any conflict between the two measures.

It would seem that if such a petition can repeal “a statute enacted by the legislature during the interim between the initiative’s approval for circulation and its passage,” then won’t it repeal a contract or financial agreement enacted by a city council in the same circumstance?

That same decision cited an earlier 1922 Missouri Supreme Court case, State ex rel. Drain v. Becker:

There, while the proposed referendum was pending but before it had been voted on by the people, the legislature purported to repeal the legislation that was the subject of the referendum and to enact a new statute that retained the essential terms of the former legislation. It then argued that this new statute could take effect, regardless of what the people voted on the matter referred, because it was later adopted and was not itself subject to the referendum.

This Court properly rejected this attempt at an end run around the referendum. It held that, once the right of referendum has been invoked, the legislature “is divested of all power in regard to the matter referred until the action of the people has been exercised by a vote upon same.”

That last sentence is the kicker. The court has held that, pending a vote of the people, the legislative body is powerless on that particular matter. So yes, Mayor Lucas, the council may be twiddling its thumbs while the petition process plays out.

The real impact of the petition, however, may not be on the council. I can easily imagine an attorney for a builder, lender, or investor advising their client to steer clear of the project until the petition matter is resolved either by a vote of the people or by months or years of litigation. What company wants to find itself attached to a financing package that voters may yet reject? And the city would be foolish to sign contracts that it may not be able to live up to because of the results of a vote.

It would not surprise me if, despite his dismissive language now, Lucas and the current council vote to put the petition on the ballot themselves, arguing that any delay will just add to the cost of the project. They’ll count on the Royals and their supporters to fund another political campaign. The question then becomes: Are John Sherman and the Royals ownership willing to risk another election defeat?

The post No, Kansas City Cannot Rush Royals Financing to Beat a Petition Vote appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to The Kansas City Star, the city has not yet formally applied for funding under Missouri’s Show-Me Sports Investment Act. State participation is a central piece of the financing plan, and city officials are already considering ways to secure up to $600 million in local support.

Negotiations of this scale are complicated. City, state, and team officials may simply still be working through the details. But the delay raises an obvious question. If the public financing package is as straightforward as supporters suggest, why are the numbers still unavailable? (The same could be asked of the Chiefs deal in Kansas.)

One possibility is that the arithmetic is becoming more difficult as officials move from press announcement to actual financing plans.

When the stadium was announced, the Royals indicated that roughly 60% of the project’s estimated $1.9 billion cost would come from public sources. That implies well over $1 billion in taxpayer support. Yet the Show-Me Sports Investment Act places meaningful limits on state assistance. As I noted previously, available estimates suggest the state’s contribution may be closer to $250 million than the much larger figures that have circulated publicly.

If state support is lower than hoped, the remaining public contribution would need to come from Kansas City taxpayers through various tax diversions and subsidies. It won’t be cheap.

The political environment may become even more challenging if voters get a chance to weigh in. Opponents of the project have submitted signatures seeking a public vote on the city’s participation. That effort remains uncertain, but financing proposals acceptable to elected officials may not be acceptable to the public—as we learned in 2024.

To make matters more confusing, the Star previously reported:

Mayor Quinton Lucas told reporters that the city has projections for how much tax revenue a new stadium could generate based on what Kauffman Stadium in the Truman Sports Complex produces now — which city officials say is roughly $5 million a year.

That $5 million is currently going into the city’s coffers and used to fund police, infrastructure, and other public goods. Moving the team downtown and then returning that money to the Royals is not a wash—it’s a $5 million hit to the budget each year. And that does not include the cost to the city if the stadium fails to generate enough money to cover the bond payments—because the city will issue the bonds and back them up.

This project is bad for taxpayers and bad for the city. The delay from the city and the state in providing financing details suggests that elected leaders are beginning to understand exactly how bad it will be.

The post Kansas City Mum on Royals Ransom appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When Missouri and Kansas agreed to a border war truce in 2019, the agreement was widely celebrated as the end of an expensive and counterproductive competition.

After spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars moving jobs back and forth across State Line Road, both states agreed to stop subsidizing the relocation of existing employers within the Kansas City region.

The agreement, which consisted of legislation on the Missouri side (which sunset last year) and an executive order from the Kansas side, was a good idea. But I argued at the time that Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s executive order contained a glaring weakness. Specifically, I questioned how Kansas would define “net new jobs” and whether companies could continue receiving incentives by combining a relocation with a modest expansion.

Seven years later, Governor Kelly has provided the answer.

Defending Kansas’s $125 million incentive package for Lockton’s new headquarters in Leawood, Kelly argued the deal does not violate the border war truce because “We will not incentivize the move of current jobs. If a company is going to move and expand, we’ll talk.”

That is almost precisely the scenario I described in 2019: “Could a growing Missouri firm already planning to make a few new hires take that plan to Kansas and seek incentives—using those ‘net new jobs’ as leverage?”

The company is expected to move roughly 1,500 existing jobs from Missouri to Kansas while adding approximately 500 new positions. Under Governor Kelly’s interpretation, those additional jobs are enough to distinguish the project from the type of incentive-fueled relocation the truce was intended to prevent.

But the transaction looks familiar. Thousands of jobs move across the state line. Taxpayers provide substantial subsidies. Public officials attend a groundbreaking and celebrate job creation.

The fundamental question is whether those additional jobs would have been created anyway. It is a difficult question to answer from the outside, yet the system incentivizes businesses to claim the growth is due to the incentive.

A real economic border war truce is worth crafting. But unfortunately, the 2019 truce isn’t that.

The post The Border War Truce’s Predictable (and Predicted) Problem appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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While guest-hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey is joined by Elias Tsapelas to discuss the Missouri legislature’s effort to begin eliminating the income tax. They break down why Missouri’s tax climate is holding back economic and population growth, how a gradual phase-out could work, and why concerns about sales tax rates may be overblown.

The post Missouri’s Path to Eliminating the Income Tax with Elias Tsapelas appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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On June 5, Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, guest-hosted Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, where Terrence Wise of the Missouri Workers Center announced the organization had collected over 4,500 signatures, more than double the roughly 2,000 required, to force a public vote on any taxpayer subsidy of the proposed downtown Royals ballpark. The city clerk has 10 days to validate the signatures, after which the city council has 60 days to act, with a public vote expected in November.

Listen to the full show here. 

The post Kansas City Voters May Get a Say on the Royals Downtown Stadium appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the most common mistakes in public policy is assuming that because one event follows another, the first event must have caused the second. Crime declines after a new program is launched, so the program gets credit. Crime rises after a policy change, so the policy gets blamed. Often, the evidence for either conclusion amounts to little more than timing.

The KSHB story quotes Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson, who said she believes SAVE KC is playing “a real role in the success that we are seeing.” Perhaps it is. The problem is that belief is not evidence.

Violence rises and falls for many reasons: gang conflicts, police deployment, prosecution decisions, demographics, economic conditions, and the churn of individual offenders. A before-and-after comparison cannot isolate any one cause.

That is why researchers do not determine whether a program works by simply comparing crime rates before and after implementation. They look for evidence that the intervention itself produced measurable changes that would not otherwise have occurred. Jackson County’s COMBAT program has long suffered from this same problem: public claims of success without rigorous evaluation.

To its credit, SAVE KC has been careful to acknowledge on its website that multiple factors influence violence trends; it does not claim sole responsibility for recent declines. That’s a welcome departure from what we’ve seen before. But public officials are already drawing connections between the program and declining violence. That may ultimately prove justified. But Kansas City has heard similar claims before.

The Kansas City No Violence Alliance (KC NoVA) offers a warning. KC NoVA was once praised as an innovative violent-crime strategy. But a U.S. Department of Justice review found no statistically significant effect on homicides, group-member homicides, or aggravated assaults after two years.

In 2014, city leaders were celebrating the lowest number of homicides since 1972. Public officials were quick to claim credit. “We’re making progress,” proclaimed then-Mayor Sly James, citing targeted police work, community engagement, and anti-crime initiatives for the decline. But after homicides continued to rise in subsequent years, Mayor James’s confidence disappeared.

The lesson is not that violence-reduction initiatives never work. The lesson is that confidence should follow evidence, not precede it.

Rather than asking whether a new program coincides with lower crime, reporters should ask what evidence exists that the program caused the decline. Has an independent evaluation been conducted? Are outcomes being measured against comparable groups? What metrics are being tracked? How will success be defined? What would constitute failure?

Lower homicide numbers are worth celebrating. But celebration is not evaluation. Before officials claim victory, and before reporters repeat the claim, Kansas City deserves evidence that the program worked.

The post Crime Is Down in Kansas City. That Doesn’t Prove SAVE KC Worked appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Even after reinstating fares, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) is warning of route reductions because the agency says city funding will fall short of maintaining current service levels. KCATA estimates it needs more than $100 million to preserve existing operations, well above the city’s proposed contribution.

The immediate concern is fewer routes and longer waits for riders. But the larger issue is institutional: KCATA is confronting the long-term consequences of policy decisions that weakened its financial position and eroded confidence among regional partners.

Those problems did not emerge overnight. For years, KCATA relied on temporary funding, emergency appropriations, and optimistic revenue assumptions. Pandemic-era federal aid masked those weaknesses but did not resolve the structural imbalance between operating costs and recurring revenue.

The clearest example was KCATA’s heavily promoted fare-free transit initiative. Supporters argued eliminating fares would improve mobility and reduce barriers for low-income riders. But even at the time, research and the experience of other cities suggested the policy was financially unsustainable.

Fare-free transit eliminated one of the system’s few direct revenue streams while increasing dependence on taxpayer subsidies. Transit fares rarely cover operating costs, but they still provide revenue and impose some fiscal discipline. When federal pandemic aid expired, KCATA faced familiar financial pressures with even fewer tools available to address them.

Acknowledging that reality, KCATA recently announced fares will return next month. Restoring fares amounts to an acknowledgment that the model was not sustainable.

The consequences extend beyond Kansas City itself. Regional transit systems depend on trust among local governments—trust that erodes when the central agency faces recurring fiscal problems.

Some regional governments have already moved to retain greater operational control over their own transit services. In 2022, Johnson County, Kansas, ended KCATA management oversight of its transit operations while continuing limited coordination through the RideKC brand. More recently, several suburban municipalities—including Gladstone, Grandview, and Raytown—have reduced or ended participation in RideKC service.

Obviously, public transit serves a purpose. Many Kansas City residents still rely on buses to reach work, school, and appointments. Like transit agencies nationwide, KCATA is operating in a difficult post-pandemic environment shaped by inflation, labor shortages and changing ridership patterns.

But those challenges make competent governance more important, not less. Municipalities are hesitant to rely on an agency caught in recurring fiscal crises driven by its own policy failures. Fare-free transit generated national attention, but reality eventually intervened.

KCATA’s budget problems are not simply the result of this year’s funding gap. They are the cumulative consequence of years of policy decisions that weakened the authority’s financial position and damaged its credibility.

The post KCATA Is Still Paying for the Fare-Free Experiment appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I’ve argued for years that Kansas City’s lavish subsidies distort the market while failing to deliver on economic promises. New reporting from the Kansas City Business Journal suggests the process itself may be just as broken.

Reporter Thomas Friestad reconstructed negotiations among Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS), PortKC, and Gillon Property Group over incentives tied to Country Club Plaza. The emails, obtained through an open-records request, depict a rushed and opaque decision-making process worthy of public distrust.

The original proposal reportedly included roughly $309 million in incentives over 30 years. KCPS officials objected not only to the size of the package, but also to shifting valuation methods that obscured the true public cost. The district also sought protection for voter-approved bond revenues and more time to evaluate major revisions before approval by PortKC.

That timeline is the real story.

The emails show negotiations continuing until the night before a scheduled PortKC meeting. KCPS officials argued they were being asked to evaluate a substantially revised proposal in just two business days. One consultant for the district described the timeline as “concerning even with the highest level of independent analysis.”

This is a recurring problem in Kansas City’s incentive culture. Complex tax arrangements are negotiated behind closed doors and then presented to affected taxing jurisdictions with little time for meaningful scrutiny. The result is confusion over the true public cost and distrust among taxpayers expected to finance these deals.

Kansas City has seen this pattern before. Similar concerns surrounded the Power & Light District and continue to emerge in discussions over a proposed downtown ballpark. Political machinations routinely take precedence over transparency and accountability.

Notably, KCPS did not oppose subsidies outright. District officials simply asked for clear terms, accurate projections, and adequate time to evaluate a deal that could affect school finances for decades. The fact that negotiators appeared unwilling to provide sufficient time to evaluate the deal speaks volumes.

Kansas Citians have grown understandably skeptical of these taxpayer-funded deals. Too many projects promised economic transformation and delivered little beyond long-term public cost. The Country Club Plaza negotiations are, at best, an example of rushed incompetence. At worst, they suggest an effort to push a massive subsidy package through before taxpayers and public schools could fully evaluate it.

The post Country Club Plaza Subsidy Deal Reveals What’s Broken in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.