The committee holding the stadium petition has not met since March
A council committee takes up the Royals lease Tuesday morning, five days after it was introduced. The certified citizen petition that would put stadium subsidies to a public vote was referred on July 2 to a committee whose last meeting was March 23 — and which appears nowhere on the city's published calendar through June 2027.
At 9:30 Tuesday morning, on the 26th floor of City Hall, the Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee takes up Ordinance 260704.
It is fifth on a twenty-one item agenda. It authorizes the City Manager to execute a lease, a non-relocation agreement, a development agreement, a community impact partnership agreement and a funding agreement with the Kansas City Royals, for a new stadium, team offices and supporting infrastructure in the Washington Square Park and Crown Center area, along with intergovernmental cooperative agreements with the State of Missouri.
Mayor Quinton Lucas introduced it on Thursday, August 6. It was referred to committee the same day. It gets its hearing five days later.
There is a second ordinance in the city’s legislative record that concerns the same subject. It has been waiting since July 2.
Ordinance 260609
Its sponsor is listed as “Committee of Petitioners.” That is what the record calls a citizen initiative once it becomes a piece of legislation.
It would add a new Section 74-401 to Chapter 74 of the city code, prohibiting city officers, agents and employees from “implementing, advancing, furthering, or fostering” any plan to design or construct, with material support from the city, a stadium, arena or similar venue seating 2,500 or more for use by a for-profit business, or the ancillary development and infrastructure supporting it, except by ordinance submitted to and approved by the voters.
On Friday, June 5, a committee of petitioners filed 584 pages of signatures with the City Clerk. The clerk examined them and certified the petition as sufficient; the notice of that certification was received and filed by the council on July 2. The Beacon reported that roughly 4,500 signatures were gathered against a requirement of 2,068, five percent of the votes cast in the most recent mayoral election.
On that same July 2 agenda, at that same meeting, the council did three things. It received and filed the certification. It referred the petition ordinance to committee. It passed, 9 to 2, a separate ordinance declaring its intent to support negotiations and a tax increment financing plan for an expanded Kansas City Current stadium at Berkley Riverfront.
Which committee
The petition ordinance was referred to the Special Committee for Legal Review.
That committee’s last meeting was March 23, 2026, more than three months before the referral.
It has not met since. As of Monday, the city’s published meeting calendar extends to June 15, 2027, and contains no meeting of the Special Committee for Legal Review at any point on it.
In the same period, the full council met six times: July 2, July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30 and August 6. The Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee — the one hearing the Royals lease Tuesday — met on July 7, July 14, July 21, July 28 and August 4, and meets again Tuesday.
The petition ordinance has one line of action history. It reads: referred, July 2, 2026.
The clock
KCTV5 reported on July 2 that the 60-day clock started that day. Sixty days from July 2 is August 31. The council’s choices inside that window are to adopt the ordinance into the code or to put it on a ballot; if it does neither, the petitioners can go to the election board themselves.
Tuesday’s hearing on the Royals agreements falls twenty days before that date.
Lucas was direct on July 2 about how he read the petition, and about what he intended to do in the meantime.
“As I read that petition, it would apply to Starlight Municipal Auditorium, the Music Hall, the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts, the former Kemper Arena, Royals, Arrowhead, and Kauffman Stadium, whatever the heck we do with them in the future, right, all those sorts of things,” he said.
On the money, he drew a distinction: “The plan right now with the future Royal Stadium, much like the current, much like other projects, at least here in Kansas City proper, we look at, is not direct cash outlays that really fund the core of the stadium. Instead, it’s incentives in the same way of incentives that we’re talking about today in a number of different ways, like roads in South Kansas City and other projects we have, too.”
He said that if the question does go to voters, he expects the election in April 2027.
The agreements would be signed first.
How this council has voted on stadiums
The votes are recorded by name, so here they are.
On April 16, the council passed the ordinance directing the City Manager to negotiate and execute a term sheet, lease and development agreement with the Royals. Voting aye: Lucas, Kevin O’Neill, Lindsay French, Wes Rogers, Melissa Patterson Hazley, Melissa Robinson, Eric Bunch, Darrell Curls, Ryana Parks-Shaw, Andrea Bough and Johnathan Duncan. Nathan Willett voted nay. Crispin Rea abstained.
On July 2, on the Current stadium ordinance: aye from Lucas, O’Neill, Rogers, Patterson Hazley, Robinson, Rea, Curls, Parks-Shaw and Bough; nay from Willett and Duncan. French and Bunch were excused.
Tuesday’s item is different in kind from both. April’s ordinance authorized negotiating the agreements. This one authorizes executing them.
What this is not
The council is not required to hold a hearing on a certified initiative petition, and nothing in the record indicates it has broken a rule. A committee can be convened on short notice and does not have to appear on a calendar months ahead. An ordinance can be pulled out of committee to the full council. The council still has three weeks, and the outcome the petitioners want — a public vote — remains available to them by a route that does not require the council’s cooperation at all.
What the record establishes is narrower, and it is a matter of sequence. One stadium ordinance was introduced on a Thursday and is in committee the following Tuesday. The other has sat for thirty-nine days in a committee with no meetings behind it since March and none scheduled in front of it, while the body that referred it there met six times.
What we have not nailed down
The organization behind the petition drive is identified by KCTV5 as Missouri Workers Power, with leader Terrence Wise; the Beacon’s June coverage names a Missouri Workers Center. We have not resolved which is correct and have not used either as a fact above.
Also open: whether the Special Committee for Legal Review has been convened since March by a notice that does not appear in the published calendar; the city’s own reading of when the 60 days expires, which reporting has placed both at the end of August and “in September”; and the financial terms inside the agreements Tuesday’s ordinance would authorize, which we have not independently reviewed and have deliberately not characterized.
How we know
Every fact in this story that is not attributed to another outlet comes from Kansas City’s own legislative record, read directly through the city’s public interface: ordinance files 260704, 260609, 260580, 260554, 260565 and 260339, their action histories, their roll-call votes, and the committee calendar. Anyone can check it. The legislation search is at kansascity.legistar.com/Legislation.aspx and the meeting calendar at kansascity.legistar.com/Calendar.aspx; the file numbers above are the search terms.
We pulled the record on the morning of August 10 and again that afternoon. Ordinance 260704 was last modified at 2:06 p.m. that day.
Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com. Something we missed? tips.