Six better ways to spend sports betting tax than trying to lure the Chiefs to Kansas

You gotta hand it to the Kansas Legislature. Even when they do the right thing, they somehow end up doing it wrong.

This time, it’s sports betting, which Gov. Laura Kelly signed into law last week

It makes absolute sense to allow sports betting in Kansas, because:

A) It’s just a different form of gambling in a state that already allows betting on everything from lottery tickets to gas station Keno to casino games,

B) Kansans are already betting countless millions through online sportsbooks that are technically illegal but as close as your smartphone,

and

C) There’s a whole lot of money to be made from the state getting a piece of the action.

But in deciding what to do with that money, the Kansas Legislature made about the dumbest decision it’s possible to make.

The vast majority of our state’s coming windfall is earmarked for a newly created “Attracting Professional Sports to Kansas Fund,” to try to lure the Chiefs from Kansas City, Mo., to Kansas City, Kan.

Your tax dollars at work, increasing the wealth of the multi-billionaire Hunt family that owns the Chiefs.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Using gambling taxes to enrich the already wealthy is a Kansas tradition.

Ask the average Kansan where the money goes from the state lottery and casinos and most will probably say: “Uh? Education?”

Nope, that’s California and 16 other states.

In Kansas, the lion’s share of gambling revenue goes to the state’s “Economic Development Initiatives Fund,” a slush fund for payoffs to businesses.

And even that’s never enough. This year’s Legislature voted for $1 billion in tax breaks for a company without even knowing who it is or what they do.

When you really look at it, we Kansans have a pretty sweet deal on professional sports right now.

We’ve got NFL football and Major League Baseball 15 minutes across the state line.

We get to go enjoy the games, while the Missourians have to deal with the traffic, drunks and parking-lot fights.

We don’t have to pay off the $375 million in renovations at Arrowhead Stadium that were completed about a decade ago. And we don’t have to pay the $8.5 million it costs to maintain the stadium each year — Missourians do.

Arrowhead is part of KCMO’s Truman Sports Complex. If we build the Chiefs a new stadium on our side, we should call it the Kansas Inferiority Complex, because that’s the only state issue it addresses.

Sine die, the final meeting of the Kansas Legislature for the year, is scheduled to start on Monday and what this situation calls for is a “trailer bill.” That’s a type of legislation that lawmakers pass to fix something that they really screwed up in the regular session.

To help them out, I suggest the following alternatives for our sports gambling revenue, any of which would be more beneficial to Kansas than what the Legislature is actually doing:

▪ Buy 20 million feet of string and hire a crew to roll it into a ball. That way, Cawker City could have the World’s Largest Ball of Twine and the World’s Largest Ball of String.

▪ Repave the Kansas Turnpike with yellow bricks. That’s the only thing anybody remembers about us anyway.

▪ Stage a Woodstock-style rock concert in a farm field halfway between Dodge City and Garden City. Three days of peace, love and biting flies.

▪ Get a bunch of snow guns and turn Wichita’s Brooks Landfill into a ski resort.

▪ Build a wall along the Colorado state line to stop Kansans from bringing back leftover marijuana from on vacation.

▪ Hire George Lucas to create a new mascot to replace the Wichita North High Redskins.

I welcome your suggestions.