The Royals agreement gives Washington Square Park two paragraphs

The National Weather Service office in Pleasant Hill issued its extreme heat warning at 7:36 p.m. on Thursday, September 3, and ran it through 8 p.m. the following Tuesday. Dangerously hot conditions, the warning said, with heat index values up to 105.

Kansas City Irish Fest opened at Crown Center the next evening, its 24th year, and ran into it.

The festival’s answer to the heat was shade, and the shade is in a public park. “A large part of our footprint is in Washington Square Park,” organizer Erin Gabert told KCUR. “It is very shady and very breezy. We really encourage people to take time, spend in the shade. There’s going to be plenty to do in those shady areas.” Executive director Kelly O’Neill Wenzel described the water: one large station on the square, another in the park, and a roaming bike you have to find. Fans and misters throughout. Tented day stages.

It did not end on schedule. Before 8 p.m. Sunday, with severe thunderstorms moving through downtown, the festival posted that it was closing: “For your safety, we’re closing the festival and will not reopen. Please continue to shelter in place, and if you do exit, please exit parking garages safely.” About 35,000 Evergy customers lost power across the metro that night, per KSHB 41.

Fifteen days before the festival opened, on August 20, the City Council passed Committee Substitute for Ordinance No. 260704. It authorizes the City Manager to execute a lease, 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 ordinance says, “the Washington Square Park/Crown Center area.”

What the ordinance does

The enacted substitute establishes Fund No. 3459, the Special Obligation Downtown Stadium Bond Fund, and appropriates $20,000,000.00 in bond proceeds “for the purpose of providing a portion of the City’s contribution to the Project.” Section 8 reaffirms the City’s intent “to provide funding totaling $600,000,000.00 toward the Project,” a figure the Council first set in an earlier ordinance, 260339. Section 7 directs the City Manager to use the convention and tourism tax (the food and beverage portion) for debt service on the bonds. Section 3 authorizes the City Manager to negotiate and execute a non-relocation agreement “for a term of at least thirty (30) years.”

It also waives things. The ordinance reaffirms “the Council’s intent to waive the contract solicitation and Article IV, Chapter 3, requirements otherwise set out in the Code of Ordinances as to the agreements authorized in this Ordinance.” It waives “the requirements of Section 88-586-01 through 88-586-07.” It waives “the requirements of Ordinance No. 60321 with respect to the Project.” The ordinance does not describe what any of those provisions require, and a reader of the ordinance alone cannot tell.

What the agreement says about the park

Washington Square Park appears in exactly one of the four agreements. It is not in the stadium lease, which runs 57 pages. It is not in the 64-page development agreement. Neither contains the phrase at all.

It is in the Community Impact Partnership Agreement, twice.

Section 4(g), “Washington Square Park Benefit,” commits the club to build: “the Club shall, at its sole cost and expense, design, construct, and complete improvements to Washington Square Park (the ‘Park Improvements’), substantially consistent with plans jointly approved by the Club and the City.” Those improvements “shall be designed to enhance the park’s safety, accessibility, appearance, functionality, and long-term public use, and may include landscaping, lighting, pedestrian pathways, seating, public gathering spaces, irrigation, utilities, public art, signage, and other improvements as approved by the Club and the City.”

Section 6(d), “Washington Square Park Activation,” is the other one, and it is two sentences long: “The Club shall partner with the City’s Parks Department to support year-round activations in Washington Square Park to be accessible to the public free of charge. The Club shall fund the maintenance and operations of all Park Improvements.”

That is the entirety of it.

What it does not say

The word “Irish” does not appear in the Community Impact Partnership Agreement. It does not appear in the version attached to the ordinance file, and it does not appear in the City-revised final dated August 20 that the Council adopted. It does not appear in the lease, the development agreement, or the ordinance. No festival is named. No event is named.

That absence is worth stating carefully, because it is not evidence that anything is being taken away.

“Year-round activations in Washington Square Park to be accessible to the public free of charge” is a real commitment, and it is broader than any one festival: a promise about the park rather than about a tenant. Nobody in this record has said Irish Fest is losing its home. When the Royals announced the Crown Center location in April, the festival’s own statement was optimistic: it was “hopeful and confident that Irish Fest will remain a part of this reimagined space,” and looked forward to working with John Sherman, Don Hall Jr., and city leadership so that the tradition “continues to be woven into this community’s fabric for years to come.” Construction is not scheduled to begin until 2027.

One clarification about the surrounding coverage, because the distinction matters. KSHB 41 reported in August that the Royals were “poised to largely take control of the maintenance and operations at Washington Square Park.” The enacted language is narrower than that: the club funds “the maintenance and operations of all Park Improvements” — the things it builds and pays for — and partners with the Parks Department on activations. Washington Square Park remains a municipal park. The same story offered an illustration of what those activations might include, “traditional events, like Art in the Park during the Kansas City Irish Fest.” That example is not in the agreement, in any version.

The number that is missing

The Community Impact Partnership Agreement is eleven pages, and it is not a vague document. It knows how to write a figure when it wants one.

The club shall contribute $14.0 million over the term to the City’s Public Art Fund. Not less than $5.0 million to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum’s capital fund. Not less than $5.0 million to the Gateway Project, as a contribution to the City’s Housing Trust Fund, “with advisory board and City Council guidance.” The stadium shall be built to LEED Gold or similar. Prevailing wages on construction. Construction updates at least every two weeks, posted to a dedicated project website. Construction limited before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m., by commercially reasonable efforts.

The agreement also knows how to write an escape hatch. On the 65-foot World Cup heart sculpture, now named KC Heart Gateway, the club agrees to incorporate it into the stadium plans or into Washington Square Park — and then, in the next breath: “City and Club may mutually consider and agree upon alternatives to the incorporation of KC Heart Gateway or its replacement.”

Against all of that, “year-round activations” carries no number. No minimum count of events, no calendar, no season, no named beneficiary, and no definition of what an activation is. The Park Improvements themselves are to be “substantially consistent with plans jointly approved by the Club and the City,” and those plans do not exist publicly yet.

None of that is a scandal. It is a blank, in a document full of filled-in lines, and the filling-in happens later. Section 2 of the ordinance is where the public gets to watch it happen: additional agreements are “subject to review and approval of City Council.”

What is already measurable

Section 4(i) of the same agreement commits the club, pursuant to Ordinance 260339, to “collaborate with small and existing businesses in the affected area in developing continuity plans to mitigate the construction impact on their operations, offering solutions such as alternative access routes, signage for customer navigation, and promotional activities.”

One Crown Center tenant is already gone. Unforked closed its Crown Center location on September 1, keeping its Westport and Overland Park rooms; per The Pitch, citing FOX4, the decision not to renew turned on uncertainty about reduced foot traffic during a stadium construction phase. Construction has not started.

Washington Square Park is also, per KSHB 41, a key distribution site for homelessness outreach, which is the plainest reason to read the phrase “safety, accessibility, appearance” slowly. The improvements are to be designed for “long-term public use.” Who the public is understood to be, in a park being redesigned in part for appearance, is a question the jointly approved plans will answer and the agreement does not.

Next Labor Day weekend would be the festival’s 25th. Construction is tentatively scheduled to begin the same year. That is the first honest test of what “accessible to the public free of charge” buys, and it will be settled by documents that have not been written yet.

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Sources: Committee Substitute for Ordinance No. 260704, passed August 20, 2026, and the Community Impact Partnership Agreement, baseball stadium lease, and development agreement attached to its Legistar file; National Weather Service Kansas City/Pleasant Hill extreme heat warning issued September 3; KCUR, KCTV5, and KSHB 41 reporting on the festival weekend. Corrections: corrections@kcstare.com.