KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City Chiefs President Mark Donovan and Royals Chief Operating Officer Brooks Sherman were both part of a sports panel discussion Friday afternoon at the 2022 Downtown KC Annual Luncheon at the Loews Kansas City Hotel.

“We think baseball belongs downtown when you look around the country,” Sherman said Friday. “When you look around the country at cities that have put a downtown stadium in and invested in a downtown stadium, we have experience in Cleveland that was great. We got to see that up close and personal, and when you look at even St. Louis and the Ballpark Village, San Diego, Houston, when you look at those cities and you what they’ve done, there’s not a single one of them that regrets putting that stadium downtown.”

The Royals lease ends at Kauffman Stadium in January of 2031, and so does the lease for the Chiefs at Arrowhead. Donovan mentioned the Royals at the luncheon when he was asked his team’s future.

“I’m a big supporter of what they’re doing, not just because it frees up more options for us at Arrowhead, but I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said Friday.

Donovan said the team must look at whether it makes sense for his team to build new and where would it make sense to do that. In March, he said the team had considered stadium options in Kansas before when developers pitched them to the team.

“Whatever we do, whatever we decide to do, it’s our job and our responsibility to make sure that we’re making the best decision for those entities for the next 50 years,” Donovan told the crowd at Loews. “So the perspective I want to give everybody is, ‘Take a breath. We’ve got a lot of work to do,’ and we’re going to do our very best to do the best for all of us. That’s how I put it.”

Neither Donovan or Sherman got into how the teams would pay for their new stadiums or upgrades. The Royals have recently denied reports that they’ve already gone to Jackson County asking for the legislature to put an extension of the 3/8ths cent of a dollar sales tax on the November ballot for voters to consider county wide. People who shop in Jackson County are already paying for the current stadiums with a 3/8ths cent of a dollar sales tax that won’t stop being collected until 2031.