Union Station and downtown Kansas City (Getty Images).
As the Kansas City Royals scour the region for a new stadium site, and as the Chiefs weigh whether to renovate Arrowhead or move, a familiar story unfolds.
The two states are at it again.
Soon after Jackson County voters soundly rejected a ⅜-cent sales to fund a downtown Royals ballpark and similar subsidies to the Chiefs, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed legislation to free up state-backed stadium financing.
Meanwhile, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson promised his state would counter.
More border wars. More subsidies for businesses playing Kansas and Missouri against each other. The line that divides Kansas and Missouri continues to test local and state officials’ ability to work together.
The state line also poses a stubborn barrier to unraveling some of the region’s knottiest problems.
It complicates efforts to build a transit system that reliably gets you from your home in eastern Jackson County to your job in Overland Park, or from a retirement community in south Kansas City to a doctor’s office in the Northland.
It’s a barrier to constructing affordable housing that isn’t overly concentrated in low-income neighborhoods, and to addressing the root causes of homelessness.
And, as the Royals and Chiefs demonstrate, it often pits our counties and cities against each other as they lard up tax breaks to lure major businesses mere miles, sometimes just blocks, across the state line.
“We’ve got to figure out what those barriers are and how we get over them,” said Kansas Rep. Pam Curtis, a Democrat from Wyandotte County. “Because, honestly, both sides of the state line are dependent on that. Our future depends on it.”
Uniquely split by state line
Although several dozen metropolitan areas in the U.S. straddle a state line, the splits tend to be lopsided. The St. Louis region, for example, includes counties in Illinois, but more than three-fourths of its population lives in Missouri.
Of all these, Kansas City’s 14-county metropolitan statistical area comes closest to an even split: 57% of our residents live in Missouri, 43% percent live in Kansas. More telling, a recent Brookings Institution analysis of metropolitan economies found that Missouri represents 51.2% of the region’s gross domestic product; Kansas 48.8%. That’s the closest distribution by far of any region spread across more than one state.
These facts may barely register with the vast majority of Kansas Citians (who most likely call themselves that no matter which state they live in). But they’re facts that challenge the efforts of many political leaders and bureaucrats to coordinate major projects.
“As a citizen in that region you’re … constantly crossing that state border and you don’t care where you are, you just want things to work,” said Erich Zimmermann, executive director of the National Association of Regional Councils in Washington, D.C. “You want good transit. You want a vibrant regional economy. To you, the border is porous, but it creates all sorts of challenges for delivering all those services.”
A lot of these challenges exist deep beneath the surface of state statutes and budgets, policies that rarely grab headlines or even spark passionate debate.
Consider the 1965 compact that created the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. Approved by both the Missouri and Kansas legislatures, as well as Congress, the compact defines the KCATA’s jurisdiction and responsibilities.
Among other things, it creates a board with representation from seven area counties. Some, like Leavenworth, do not use KCATA services. The charter also does not give the KCATA the authority to collect taxes. Instead, it must contract with cities or counties to provide its services, a piecemeal approach that has long thwarted efforts to build a robust regional system.
To transit advocates, that’s an unworkable approach that has left the Kansas City area with many unfilled transit dreams.
“I’ve got half a dozen plans squirreled away in my closet,” said David Johnson, former chair of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance. “Decades of publicly funded transit plans that have gone nowhere.”
Cooperation is possible
We’ve overcome the state line barrier before.
Union Station once stood as a pigeon-infested, decaying monument to bygone days of rail travel. Rather than relying only on Kansas City or Jackson County taxpayers for the $250 million renovation, civic leaders asked voters on both sides of the state line to support a 1/8-cent bistate sales tax.
Voters, it turned out, proved willing to join hands across the state line. A quarter century after its grand reopening, Union Station is a regional asset, an iconic site for sports celebrations, political rallies and touring museum collections.
But it’s not the only example of bistate coordination.
More than a decade ago, leaders in Missouri and Kansas joined forces to attract Google’s first-in-the-nation broadband service. More recently, area leaders, along with the Kansas and Missouri legislatures, put together a joint package to host the 2026 World Cup in the metropolitan region — and won.
“We can’t understate what the World Cup means and what it will mean after 2026,” said Joe Reardon, president and CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. “This really is going to plant the regional flag.”
Regional coordination rarely comes easy — with or without a state line. Every county and city in every metropolitan community has its own interests to protect. Often, those interests run at odds with broader regional needs.
But successes like Union Station, Google Fiber launching its high-speed internet service here and the World Cup bringing matches to town can follow when there’s compelling reason to join forces.
Few, perhaps, believe that more strongly than the staff at Mid-America Regional Council, a nonprofit organization that oversees numerous metropolitan-wide initiatives, from highway planning to coordinating the region’s 911 system.
It’s hard, said David Warm, MARC’s longtime executive director. But he argues it’s worth the effort to find ways to bridge political and geographical divisions. The state line, he said, is just one of the many boundaries that challenge regional coordination.
“We have this very tight economic and social network,” Warm said. “And yet we have a fractured political system.”
Even far-flung communities see reasons to join the MARC fold. Outgoing Commissioner Rob Roberts of Miami County, Kansas, who’s a former MARC board chair, became a champion of regional coordination when he learned how MARC coordinates long-range transportation plans.
Miami County, he realized, could become a site for the next expansion of a bypass highway around Kansas City.
“We can’t be out here on an island,” Roberts said. “There is always common ground. … It does not change your local responsibilities. But it helps you understand that we’re all facing many of the same problems.”
Cooperation meets competition
In 2004, hoping to copy the success of the Union Station tax, the Chamber supported another bistate ballot measure. The proposed “Bistate II” would have paid for a mix of arts projects and renovations to the Royals’ and Chiefs’ stadiums from a ¼-cent sales tax. It needed to pass in Jackson County plus two of these: Johnson, Wyandotte, Clay and Platte counties.
The tax went to defeat in all but Jackson County. It was the last time that a bistate initiative made it onto the ballot.
If area leaders ever considered something similar to pay for the Chiefs’ and Royals’ latest proposals, their thoughts remained outside the public eye. Instead, the teams made their ill-fated request to Jackson County taxpayers — where residents tend to resent the lack of help with regional amenities from its neighbors.
Regardless of whether one or both teams are lured by a Kansas STAR bond proposal, taxpayers will get asked for more. As things stand on the Missouri side, no state or local proposals have publicly emerged.
Is it possible that a “Bistate III” could lower the temperature of the emerging competition? Maybe ease local officials’ concerns about placing too large a tax burden on any one community?
To date, such an idea has never gained traction.
“It’s not whether you could do a bistate three,” Reardon said. “There has to be a compelling reason, and then that leads you to the opportunity to get it done.”
This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.