Kansas lawmakers approve plan to lure Kansas City's NFL team by helping finance stadium

Kansas legislators approved a plan Tuesday aimed at luring the Kansas City's NFL team away from Missouri by helping to finance a new stadium for the Super Bowl champions.

The bill passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and sent to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly would allow Kansas to issue bonds to cover up to 70% of the costs of a new stadium in the state for the NFL team and another for Major League Baseball's Kansas City Royals.

The state would pay off its bonds over 30 years with revenues from sports betting, Kansas Lottery ticket sales and new sales and alcohol taxes collected from shopping and entertainment districts around the sites for the new stadiums.

Kelly has not said whether she will sign the bill. But her chief of staff told lawmakers Monday that she had seen nothing in the version that passed that would make her veto it.

Kansas legislators see the two teams as in play because in April, voters on the Missouri side of the Kansas City metropolitan area refused to extend a sales tax used to keep up the teams' existing stadiums, which sit side by side.

Top Republicans in the GOP-controlled Legislature had promised that the stadium proposal wouldn't be debated until the Legislature approved a plan that would cut income and property taxes by a total of $1.23 billion US over the next three years. Many lawmakers argued that voters would be angry if the state helped finance new stadiums without cutting taxes.

"We definitely need to demonstrate that we're getting relief to our citizens," said Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican who backed the stadium-financing plan.

Kelly called the special session to have lawmakers consider reducing taxes after she vetoed three tax-cutting plans before