Kansas City Business Journal: How Opportunity Zones could be a player for $2B Royals stadium, ballpark district
As the ownership and development team behind the Kansas City Royals’ effort to get public subsidies for their stadium continue their effort, there’s one place they could additional benefit from: the federal Opportunity Zones program, reports the Kansas City Business Journal:
“Although the Royals have not yet announced a final stadium site, eight of the 14 locations the team has explored at least partially overlap with an Opportunity Zone in or near Downtown.”
Opportunity Zones were supposedly to direct investment to economically depressed communities, but the final rules around the program not only failed to ensure transparency, it didn’t require development to actually benefit such neighborhoods.
“The federal opacity means that the only line of defense is a robust and highly transparent local community benefits agreement,” Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a Washington-based nonprofit incentive watchdog, told the Journal. “There’s no other safeguard available.”
Read the full story at the Kansas City Business Journal (note: you must be a subscriber to read).
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