The Royals want your trust. Have they earned it?

The Royals are asking for a lot of money but are offering very little in the way of details about how they’ll spend it.

Ordinarily in this space, you’d be reading right now A Noted Non-Overreactor’s over-reactions to Opening Day. I could be talking about how Cole Ragans is going to win the Cy Young and Maikel Garcia is going to be a huge breakout star this year and all manner of other more fun topics. Instead, the Royals are asking you to vote to give them more than a billion dollars in public funding to build a new stadium tomorrow, and since you come here for your Royals news, it falls on me to educate you as best I can.

If your best friend came up to you and asked to borrow $500 I think, if you’re like most people, your first question would be what the money was for. Maybe you wouldn’t particularly care, but you’d still ask. If they couldn’t give you a definite answer, you might be a little suspicious.

If a stranger, or a vague acquaintance, came up to you and asked to borrow $500, you’d definitely ask what the money was for, and you almost certainly wouldn’t give it without a detailed understanding of what it was for.

But John Sherman, a man who almost none of us have ever met, is asking us for hundreds of millions of dollars and we’re supposed to just trust that he will absolutely spend that in a way that we will appreciate and will totally benefit us.

How much trust are the Royals asking for, exactly?

• Kauffman Stadium is dying of concrete cancer. Can we see the study that proves it? No! Trust them!
• A new downtown stadium will bring economic benefits for everyone! Can we see the study that proves it? No! Trust them!
• It’s going to be in the absolute best place downtown. Can we know where that is? No! Trust them!
• The team is going to do charitable giving if we let them move! Can we have guarantees that it's not going to go right back to the Royals? No! Trust them!

Royals fans are very familiar with one of Dayton Moore’s most beloved mantras, “Trust the process.”

Now, sure, Dayton Moore’s process led to back-to-back World Series appearances in 2014 and 2015. But it also led to three different 100-loss seasons - yes, I’m putting last year on him, too - and only one other season where the team won more games than it lost. I don’t like those odds!

I’m somewhat famous among those who know me for being a very trusting and even optimistic person. Even as a Royals fan, I was hugely trusting for a very long time. When Joe Posnanski used to write for the Kansas City Star he would have an article every year around Opening Day that would talk about how the team could have a winning season. Even last year, I thought they might be better than people expected. This year, I had the most faith in the team, picking them to bring home more wins than any other Royals Review writer.

I am generally opposed to public funding for private businesses and wealthy people. However, at the start of this process, I was fully prepared to accept that John Sherman was going to get SOME money for his stadium and it would be irritating and disappointing but probably not the end of the world.

I have written at length on the subject since then, so I don’t want to spend any more time going over things we’ve already covered, but since last week, when the team announced they had reached an agreement on a Community Benefits Agreement, I have gotten my hands on the official, 31-page document along with the separately negotiated Workforce Benefits Agreement.

If you want the short, to-the-point version, I condensed the research as best I could for a video I posted on social media last week. You can view it here:

But there is more to this than I could fit in the 2:20 limit allowed by Twitter; this is an incredibly complex topic that defies easy explanation, so the video simply could not address everything. Some of what you’re about to read will cover the same ground but with added context. As always, if you’ve got questions about what else can be found in the documents, I am active in the comment section and on Twitter.

Why this isn’t a Community Benefits Agreement

In discussing the matter with various community representatives since the article went up last week I learned a few more details about what this CBA in particular can and cannot do and what one in general should and should not be. I also found the official documents for the CBAs used in Milwaukee and Nashville that community members tried to use as templates in Kansas City.

In reading through the three CBA documents, I discovered the first, fatal flaw in the Royals’ so-called CBA. As I wrote last week, a CBA is supposed to be negotiated with Community Members. This is especially true in Jackson County because there is a 2017 Missouri Law that preempts any attempt at a local municipality to enforce employment terms.

One of the primary goals of the Good Jobs Coalition at the negotiating table was to ensure both labor peace and a wage floor in the Royals’ new district, which cannot happen in any negotiation with the county because of the aforementioned law. But the Royals still insisted on negotiating with the county and presenting their document to the county for signatures, instead of to the community groups.

The second flaw is that the Royals, after choosing to negotiate in a way that precluded that, continued by completely ignoring all of those requests or demands and instead made an agreement that simply provides $3.5 million per year for 40 years to be donated to allegedly charitable causes - more on that in a minute.

Charitable donations are all well and good, but they are not Community Benefits Agreements. The Royals proposal to the county doesn’t come close to addressing any of the things the Good Jobs Coalition was asking for. So to see the Royals attempt to tout the historic nature of this agreement is incredibly frustrating.

The checks on the Royals are so weak as to not exist

Many people noted that the original presentations by the teams and by Manny Abarca lacked details. Some people assumed that there would be more detailed documents which would make everyone who was complaining about the agreement look stupid. However, I can assure you, after having read the final document, despite its length it’s no more detailed, except in ways that make the situation even worse. Not only is this not a Community Benefits Agreement, it’s an incredibly weak document even for what it says it's trying to do.

Despite being 31 pages long, there is less than a single page dedicated to how the yearly $3.5 million must be distributed. Compare that to the nearly two pages it spends outlining the ways in which the team already does charitable outreach, which is completely irrelevant to the document.

It provides only a rough outline of which areas the money should address but is very specific in a few places. For one, the donations must be made to organizations qualified as 501(c)(3) charitable organizations in Jackson County. There is only one exception to that rule: the money may also be given to baseball stadiums in Jackson County.

This continues to allow for the scenario I outlined in the last article where the Royals could put $3.5 million in the fund and the board could allocate it back to the Royals to do commercials promoting mental health awareness. This would seem to allow them to get an associated tax benefit and public goodwill for, essentially, free.

The document does outline that the county gets to appoint a 55% majority of the board that will decide how to allocate the money, but that still allows the Royals to keep things very close by appointing the other 45% of the board. Another new bit from the final document versus what we had seen before is that it takes a two-thirds majority vote to decide where the money is going.

This means that the Royals don’t even have to use any normal negotiations or nefarious means to get their way if they decide to attempt the scheme I outlined above. All they have to do is fill their 45% with people who will only vote in specific ways and have them refuse to allow the money to be allocated any other way. Eventually, you’d have to think the county board members would capitulate because some will come to believe allowing the Royals to have their way would be better than having the money sit there and do nothing.

Alternatively, the county could use the Breach of Agreement section of the contract to redress its issues with the team or its appointed board members, but that section states:

The sole and exclusive remedy of the County for any breach of this Agreement or a default shall be specific performance.

That’s a bit of legalese which I spoke about with Gina Chiala, Executive Director and Staff Attorney at the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom - a member of The Good Jobs Coalition - to make sure I had fully grasped. In layman’s terms, she confirmed, it essentially says that the county’s only recourse if they feel the team has breached the contract is to require them to do what the contract says. The county can neither enforce nor request punitive measures nor even seek a neutral arbitrator.

Why won’t the Royals just do the right thing?

Here’s one really weird aspect to all of this. As I mentioned, I got my hands on the Workforce Benefits Agreement the Royals signed with SEIU Local 1. It’s night and day compared to the CBA above. In its own way, it guarantees all of the biggest things that were in the Milwaukee agreement! It’s missing only two things: an agreement on a living wage floor - though it includes a provision that the two sides can continue negotiating on that - and the inclusion of workers who don’t work for the team or on a contract for the team. It even includes a bit where if either side feels the other isn’t upholding their end of the bargain, they can call for arbitration with a federal mediator, which forces both sides to be much more honest in their dealings.

Had the Royals included all of those provisions, but for any businesses that want to operate in their district, in the CBA, we’d be having a very different discussion now. It still wouldn’t be perfect - affordable housing is also a huge issue in Kansas City and around the country - but it would have been a good start and might have been enough, by itself, to convince The Good Jobs Coalition to at least stop calling for people to vote no on Question 1, even if it didn’t convince them to back it.

And the thing is, doing that doesn’t seem like it would have cost the Royals anything. They won’t be paying the people who will work at the fast food places, the hotels, or the grocery stores in their district.

Had they also included a provision for affordable housing - and the Nashville document that was held up as the template for that only calls for 30% of the housing in their district to be affordable - the team could have bought even more goodwill at a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of public dollars they are trying to get.

The only conclusion I’m forced to come to is the same one that Terrence Wise, one of the leaders in The Good Jobs Coalition came to when I asked him for a comment on the CBA after we had both read over the final version:

The Royals are treating the people of Kansas City like we’re fools. [...] Their ‘community benefits agreement is a sham. Rather than being ‘transformative,’ what the Royals have signed at best, maintains the status quo and at worst, harms working Kansas Citians like me.

John Sherman thinks we’re all stupid or he thinks we don’t deserve even the barest of considerations. He thinks he shouldn’t have to give Kansas City or Jackson County anything for the hundreds of millions of dollars he wants so that he can build his new toys. John Sherman thinks ‘public-private partnership’ means the public gives him everything he wants and he pauses the threats to move the team to another city for a while.

He thinks he can spend a few million extra on his team, make a few pointed threats, appease with a couple of vague promises, and everyone will be so terrified that they’ll absolutely capitulate on everything. The only way to fix this is to show him he’s wrong.

I know some of you are desperate for downtown baseball and some of you are afraid that he’ll just pick the team up and move it to Tennessee. But you can’t let those fears let you give in to someone who would rather not give an iota back to the community while taking as much as he can get his hands on.

The team’s lease runs until 2031. The one thing the Royals have been consistent on from the beginning is that they want their new stadium done as quickly as possible, even if it means being reckless about how and where to build it. Moving the team to Nashville or Utah will not be done quickly. It would be much quicker, simpler, and generally smarter for him to respond to a “no” vote tomorrow by negotiating more thoughtfully with Jackson County. Even if he decided to just move locally to Clay County or across the state line, it would take far longer than negotiating a better deal with Jackson County because of the lease situation.

Still, nothing is guaranteed. It’s possible Sherman would be so enraged by the public’s refusal to grant his every wish that he will pivot to another community entirely and that he will find one that won’t gainsay him on anything. It’s even possible he’ll choose to violate the terms of the lease to make it happen faster so he can escape the town that told him no. Not likely, but possible.

I guess you’ll have to weigh those unlikely fears against the very likely fears that giving in to his demands will lead to a lot of people’s lives in Kansas City becoming worse for it. Maybe even someone you know. Maybe even a bunch of people you know. Maybe even you.

Here in the United States, we have long-held values like rooting for the underdogs and standing up to bullies. If you vote no tomorrow, that will be your opportunity to follow through on those values. Are you willing to lick some billionaire’s boots on the off-chance that not doing it will cause the team to leave the area and knowing that if they stay, prices are likely to keep rising until you can no longer afford to go to a game? Or do you want to stand up to the bully and force him to treat you with respect? I know which I’d rather do.