The Kansas City Royals have chosen the contractors who will build the club’s new downtown ballpark and the 85-acre district around it, moving a $3 billion redevelopment of Crown Center in Kansas City, Mo., from entitlement fights into construction planning.
A joint venture of Minnesota-based Mortenson and Kansas City-based McCownGordon will serve as construction manager at risk for the ballpark itself, the team said in announcing the selections on Sept. 14. JE Dunn Construction, also headquartered in Kansas City, will oversee development of the surrounding mixed-use neighborhood.
The stadium is planned at roughly 1.25 million square feet, open-air, with seating for about 34,000. The district around it covers 85 acres of Crown Center, the Hallmark Cards campus just south of downtown.
“We have always said this is about more than a ballpark, and this combination of national pedigree with incomparable local expertise will produce the best possible entertainment destination for our hometown,” said Brooks Sherman, the Royals’ president of real estate and development.
Sherman said in a separate statement reported the same day that the club was “proud to bring these outstanding construction companies together to build a world class ballpark that will be seamlessly integrated with a best-in-class mixed-use development.”
A contractor list built for ballparks
Mortenson is one of the few American builders with a long list of major-league venues behind it. Its sports portfolio includes Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Chase Center in San Francisco, U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City and the Las Vegas ballpark being built for the Athletics. The firm is also part of the Clark | Mortenson | SmootDC team selected to build the Washington Commanders’ $3.8 billion stadium.
McCownGordon and JE Dunn bring the local half of the equation. JE Dunn, a Kansas City institution founded in the 1920s, built CPKC Stadium, the purpose-built National Women’s Soccer League venue in the city’s West Bottoms.
Construction-manager-at-risk is the delivery method most large stadium projects use: the builder is brought on during design, helps set the budget, and then commits to a guaranteed maximum price, absorbing overruns above that number. Bringing the contractors on now, roughly a year before the Royals expect to break ground, is what that model is for.
The financing and the calendar
The Royals and Hallmark Cards unveiled the Crown Center plan on April 22, 2026, after years of public debate over where the team would play next. In announcing the plan, the club described a $3 billion public-private partnership funded at least two-thirds by the Royals and their private partners, with about a third coming from the state of Missouri and Kansas City. The Kansas City Council passed an ordinance covering up to $600 million in stadium funding. The team has projected 20,000 jobs during the construction phase.
Hallmark, whose corporate headquarters occupies the site, is relocating within Crown Center to clear ground for the ballpark. The Royals are targeting the 2030 season for opening day, with groundbreaking expected in 2027.
Zoning cleared its first hurdle in August. The Kansas City Plan Commission voted unanimously on Aug. 6 to rezone the 85 acres, attaching two conditions: that parking arrangements for residents of the neighboring San Francisco Tower be preserved, and that the developers complete and publicly release a visual, noise and light study. Residents of that building had pressed the commission on access and construction impacts.
Two stadium districts, one metro
Kansas City is now carrying two professional-sports real estate programs at once. Two weeks before the Royals named their builders, the Kansas City Chiefs and Hunt Midwest formed a joint venture called Two-Point Development to master-plan two districts on the Kansas side — one around a new enclosed stadium in Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kan., and one around a training campus in Olathe, Kan.
Two franchise-scale district plans are therefore in design simultaneously in one metropolitan area, drawing on the same regional pool of skilled trades. The Royals’ choice of two local builders alongside a national one is, on our reading, an acknowledgment of that constraint as much as a nod to hometown firms.
Mayor Quinton Lucas framed the selections in broader terms. “The Kansas City Royals baseball district at Crown Center will transform not only our community, but also construction design nationally,” he said.
Nothing announced on Sept. 14 changes the project’s cost, its public contribution or its schedule. What it does settle is who is accountable for delivering it — the question that usually determines whether a stadium district of this size opens on the season it was promised for. More development coverage is collected on RealtyWire’s commercial real estate page.
