KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In promoting his bill to fund professional sports stadiums, Missouri Republican state Sen. Kurtis Gregory warned about the potential hit to jobs and tax revenues if the state were to lose a team.
But on the floor of the Senate this month, he acknowledged that pride was also a prime motivator in his efforts to make hundreds of millions of dollars available to the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and MLB’s Kansas City Royals, both of which are being courted to move several miles away into neighboring Kansas.
A former University of Missouri football player, Gregory pointed to the Missouri-Kansas rivalry that dates back to the Civil War and characterized Kansas as “kind of an archrival.”
“We just let the state of Kansas poach, you know, really the pride and joy of the western side of the state, and I would say the entire state of Missouri?” he said in his floor speech. “And then I would also say, what’s next? What’s the next thing the state of Kansas is going to try and take from us?”
Days after the 2025 legislative session ended in May, Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe called a special session for lawmakers to consider stadium funding and disaster relief bills. During the session, the state Senate approved Gregory’s stadium incentives bill in the middle of the night by a 19-13 vote. On June 4, the state House approved the measure by a 90-58 vote, sending it to the governor’s desk.