K.C. Councilman Johnathan Duncan believes that the city’s plan to offer the Royals $600M for a new stadium “was rushed” and he “wants to force a public vote on it,” according to Kacen Bayless of the K.C. STAR. Duncan said such a decision should “go to the will of the people.” He began “publicly floating the idea” shortly after K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas on Thursday unveiled the city’s plans for a new, $1.9B stadium at Washington Square Park near downtown. He was “in discussions with various groups about whether to launch a signature-gathering drive to force a citywide vote on the stadium plan.” Progressive organizing groups -- and Duncan himself -- have over the past two days “mulled several different mechanisms to push back against the stadium plan.” But the “exact path, and whether a path exists at all, was not immediately clear.” Serving as “perhaps the largest roadblock,” the city’s charter bars citizens from forcing referendum votes on ordinances “with an accelerated effective date or emergency measures,” giving city leaders the “ability to stave off a referendum by declaring the ordinance as an emergency or expediting the ordinance’s effective date.” The proposed ordinance introduced by Lucas on Thursday includes an “accelerated effective date because it involves ‘appropriating funds and relating to the design, repair, maintenance or construction of a public improvement.’” That language is “likely to block any potential referendum push” (K.C. STAR, 4/11).
K.C. councilman pushes public vote on Royals stadium plan
