“I Can’t Breathe!” Black Community Leader Violently Attacked & Arrested For Resisting KC Billionaire Stadium

Darrell Miller builds his life around the Kansas City Royals. He works at Kauffman Stadium. He pours his labor into the machine that makes John Sherman’s franchise worth a billion dollars, and yesterday morning he rode to City Hall to say one thing to the Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee before it handed his boss $600 million of public money.

For that, and for objecting when stadium supporters were allegedly allowed to blow past the two-minute public comment limit that everyone else was held to, security officers dragged him from the chamber, pinned him to the ground in the hallway of the people’s building, and handcuffed him while he told them he could not breathe.

Then the committee went back to work. It voted unanimously, five votes to zero, to advance the ordinances. Mayor Quinton Lucas, whose chamber had just watched a stadium worker taken to the floor, called the day “a homerun for Kansas City.”

To be clear about what happened, again, a Black worker came to the one room where the law says his voice counts. He signed the petition, took off work to show up in person, spoke inside the rules. And when he pointed out that the rules were being bent for the people with money, the state put its knee into the process itself.

Police later announced that Miller was issued a municipal summons for trespassing and assault.

What the council actually did

Strip away the renderings of crown-topped scoreboards and here is the deal the committee fast-tracked. The ordinance authorizes the City Manager to execute a lease, funding, and development agreement for a stadium at Crown Center, committing up to $600 million in public financing with no public vote. It carries an accelerated effective date. It waives procurement and historic preservation review. It directs the city to fund the deal from convention and tourism taxes and, if those fall short, from the city’s water, sewer, and streetcar funds.

Yes, you read that correctly, if the money runs thin, they will reach into the water fund. The sewer fund. The streetcar fund. The infrastructure of ordinary life in this city has been offered up as collateral for a ballpark.

The full financial documents were released to the public barely a day before the hearing. Council members themselves received the paperwork days before they were first asked to vote.

When you add state incentives, the total public cost could exceed $1.5 billion over thirty years. This in a city staring down a $100 million budget shortfall, underfunded schools, a transit system in crisis, and a housing shortage that working families cannot survive.

Missouri Workers Power, the organization Miller belongs to, named it plainly in their statement:

“Miller came to the hearing today, along with other Missouri Workers Power members, to speak against a deal that would commit $600 million in public money to a billionaire’s stadium while Kansas City cuts transit, schools, and housing. Instead of being heard, he was taken into custody.” Missouri Workers Power

The people already voted. The council is pretending they didn’t.

Two years ago, voters across Jackson County looked at a stadium subsidy for this same team and rejected it at the ballot box. The answer was no. The council heard that no and has spent the time since engineering a path around it, structuring this deal so that the people whose money is being spent never get asked again.

In June, organizers with Missouri Workers Power submitted more than 4,500 signatures, well above the roughly 2,068 required, for a citizens’ initiative that would bar the city from funding a stadium project without first putting it to voters. The City Clerk certified the petition later that month, starting a 60-day clock that gives the council until August 31 to either adopt the ordinance or send it to the ballot. Darrell Miller was one of the signers.

If the council adopts the ordinance or voters approve it in November, it would trigger a second election, expected next spring, where residents would vote on whether to approve the city’s $600 million commitment.

Missouri Workers Power has now put the city on legal notice, in a letter delivered to Mayor Lucas, the City Council, and the City Clerk, that the council’s sprint cannot outrun the ballot:

“If voters adopt the proposed ordinance, it will prohibit the City from in any way implementing, advancing, furthering, or fostering the stadium plan without a public vote. Any new contracts signed, any new appropriations, any new bonds issued after that point would violate the law. The Council cannot outrun the people’s right to vote: the deals signed this week do not settle anything, the initiative does.” Missouri Workers Power legal letter to Mayor Lucas, the City Council, and the City Clerk

City officials dispute that reading. Mayor Lucas has said agreements finalized before a public vote would stand regardless of how that vote comes out, meaning the outcome of this legal fight is still unresolved.

That is the strategic ground beneath this fight.

Terrence Wise, a Kansas City worker and leader with Missouri Workers Power who has spent more than a decade organizing low-wage workers in this city, put the whole thing in a single frame:

“John Sherman is a billionaire. The city is ready to hand him $600 million of our money while we’re told there’s nothing left for the schools our kids go to, the buses we ride to work, and the housing we can’t afford. Two years ago, voters rejected this deal. Now the Council is rushing it through in two weeks with no public vote, no released financial projections, and no real community benefits. This isn’t economic development. It’s a giveaway to a billionaire, paid for by workers.” Terrence Wise, Missouri Workers Power

The lesson Darrell Miller taught this city

There is a long tradition in Kansas City of Black workers telling the truth in rooms built to ignore them, and paying for it in their bodies. Miller now stands in that lineage. He was not disruptive. The process was disrupted long before he opened his mouth, disrupted by the decision to release documents a day before the hearing, disrupted by a comment clock that ran long for the suits and short for the workers, disrupted by a deal structured specifically to keep it off a ballot.

What Miller did was refuse to pretend otherwise. And the response, the knee, the cuffs, the summons, revealed more about this deal than any financial projection the city has declined to release. When a government has to physically remove a stadium worker to give a stadium owner $600 million, the deal has already told you whose city it believes this is.

The full council is expected to take up the funding ordinance Thursday, August 20. A rezoning vote to allow for stadium construction follows on September 3. The petition is certified, the legal letter is delivered, and the demand of Missouri Workers Power has not moved an inch:

Because the fountains at the new ballpark will run on water workers paid for. The lights will burn on the backs of concession workers who cannot pay their bills. And no ordinance, however fast it travels, can repeal the oldest truth of this tradition, that the people who build a thing hold the final claim on it. Darrell Miller knew that when he stood up. The council knew it when they put him on the ground. Now the whole city knows it too.