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<\/a>The HCA Midwest Health corporate office in Overland Park. Photo credit Kaylie McLaughlin.<\/p>\nBefore the 2019 truce, major employers and corporate headquarters frequently relocated back and forth between Kansas and Missouri, primarily in metro communities close to the border, including Johnson County.<\/p>\n
For instance, movie theater giant AMC relocated from Kansas City to Leawood<\/a>, Waddell & Reed pledged to leave Overland Park<\/a> for a new downtown Kansas City office building (though a subsequent merger scuttled those plans<\/a>), and HCA Midwest moved its offices just a few miles from Kansas City to Overland Park<\/a>.<\/p>\n During that period in the 2010s, the Hall Family Foundation found the two states had forgone around $330 million in tax revenue in all that wooing<\/a>, which resulted in few, if any, new jobs and little to no real economic growth.<\/p>\n Before the two states formalized the truce in 2019, Kansas and Missouri\u2019s years-long economic border war in the metro area made national headlines<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was even mentioned in a 2017 episode of HBO\u2019s \u201cLast Week Tonight\u201d<\/a> as a particularly egregious example of faulty economic development schemes that did little to benefit the communities that offered them. The segment pointed out that as the two states were luring businesses in the metro back and forth across the state line with subsidies intended to support job creation, but had the practical effect of simply relocating existing jobs within the metro.<\/p>\n \u201cThat isn\u2019t creating jobs anymore than moving your couch from the bedroom to the living room is creating f***ing furniture,\u201d comedian and host John Oliver said.<\/p>\n Expert calls wooing deals \u201cwasteful, inefficient and ineffective\u201d Multiple attempts to call a truce were unsuccessful over the years, including a Missouri-led attempt in 2014 that Kansas ultimately did not reciprocate.<\/p>\n Eventually, in 2019, an agreement was reached, designed to stop the use of state-level incentives for luring corporations from one state to the other in the Kansas City area, and led by two relatively new governors from opposing political parties: Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican.<\/p>\n At the time, national experts like Amy Liu, a scholar from Brookings Metro<\/a> \u2014 the local-focused policy program at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank \u2014 referred to the truce as a common-sense approach to regional economic growth<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, as the truce shows signs of crumbling and cross-border competition heats back up, Liu warns that there\u2019s more to lose than to be gained.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing tax breaks just to move a sports team or a company back and forth across the state line has no net benefit to the region\u2019s economy,\u201d she told the Post in early 2026. \u201cIt\u2019s just well understood that tax subsidies for attracting businesses are wasteful, inefficient and ineffective because that is not how an economy grows.\u201d<\/p>\n She said, if the region wants to be situated to attract growth and opportunities in a changing economy with evolving industries, it should be careful how it spends its economic development energy.<\/p>\n \u201cThe metropolitan area needs to think about how it\u2019s situated in the U.S. economy, and therefore it needs to spend more time thinking about how it competes, perhaps against other U.S. regions or international economies, versus trying to compete against itself,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a waste of energy to fight across a state line.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, Liu said the private sector bears some of the responsibility, too.<\/p>\n \u201cThe private sector should not be pitting governments against each other to gain more tax benefit when they \u2026 were going to stay in the region anyway,\u201d she said, referencing corporate offices that have bounced back and forth across the state line over the years.<\/p>\n Officials from the Olathe Chambers of Commerce declined the Post\u2019s request to comment.<\/p>\n Economic border war tensions have been heating up All that said, the 2019 truce agreement itself may very well be dead following a series of events late last year.<\/p>\n Missouri\u2019s part of the deal \u2014 enacted by the state legislature \u2014 came with a 2025 expiration date, which came and went last year without a renewal. Subsequently, the Kansas City City Council voted unanimously to repeal its consent to the truce<\/a> in September, ending that city\u2019s participation in the formal agreement.<\/p>\n (On the Kansas side, Gov. Kelly enacted the truce agreement through an executive order, and it did not require the approval of the state legislature.)<\/p>\n In the background of all of this, economic border war tensions seemed to heat back up in 2024 and 2025 as Kansas and Missouri vied for the favor of the two professional sports teams.<\/p>\n Ultimately, Kansas convinced the Kansas City Chiefs to move to the Kansas side with a special incentive package<\/a> that\u2019s poised to pay for an estimated 60% of a new multibillion-dollar development project, including a $3 billion domed stadium in Wyandotte County<\/a> and a $300 million training facility in Olathe<\/a>. (The fate of the Royals\u2019 search for a new home for a future ballpark is still unclear<\/a>, though the prospect of the team coming to Kansas looks increasingly unlikely<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Additionally, Lockton announced its plans to make the jump across the state line to Leawood\u2019s Hallbrook North development<\/a> from its current home at the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri, buoyed by a historic $150 million incentive package from Leawood that includes the first-ever promise of a Tax Increment Financing district in that city.<\/p>\n Ron Lockton, the brokerage\u2019s CEO, cited a need for more space to grow as the company looks toward its future, among other factors, that led to the decision to move to Leawood\u2019s Hallbrook North development at State Lane Road and College Boulevard.<\/p>\n Shortly after the move was announced, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said he was \u201cdisappointed by the misplaced confidence many of us had\u201d in the border war truce.<\/p>\n \u201cRegionalism cannot be one sided. The region will only thrive when we look to grow the pie, not rearrange pieces on the chess board,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Later, in a subsequent interview with the Post, he said he sees the Chiefs deal, like the Lockton move, as a violation of the original truce agreement, though Kansas officials have denied that the Chiefs and Royals were ever part of the truce<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are people that can make money from moving entities around,\u201d Lucas said. \u201cI think it\u2019s up to the body politic to decide the extent to which they want to support or not that type of behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n Lucas said he sees the way some people or businesses can benefit from these sorts of deals \u2014 through financial gain and even political favor in particular \u2014 is part of why \u201cit\u2019s been very hard to root out this type of behavior\u201d that has the two states competing with each other in their shared metro area.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a competitive space, and I\u2019ve generally always had the view Kansas City, Missouri, has to try to be the best place to do business, whether it\u2019s competing with somebody who is across the street, across the state or across the world,\u201d Lucas said. \u201cWe\u2019re all going to make sure that we live within that reality and ensure that we\u2019re all ready for what is a long-standing competition.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re just moving the puzzle pieces\u201d Meyer, from the Leawood Chamber of Commerce, said the realities of an economic border war can be challenging for communities right on the state line, particularly smaller cities like Leawood.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s something that we interact with every day,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n However, she stressed that her organization is focused on \u201ca strong community competitive value, and not just shifting jobs across the state line one way or another.\u201d<\/p>\n She said Lockton\u2019s decision to move to Leawood was not about one metro city taking a big employer from another, but instead keeping a company with long-rooted connections to the Kansas City area in this region.<\/p>\n \u201cI think they were perhaps looking for a place where they can have a little more control over their future in terms of their growth,\u201d Meyer said. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be surprised if that included some outside of the Kansas City metro locations.\u201d<\/p>\n (Meyer said her organization didn\u2019t approach Lockton about leaving their current home in Kansas City, Missouri, nor did the city of Leawood.)<\/p>\n So, from her perspective, the company\u2019s planned move is good for the region.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were able to keep one of the best, brightest, largest companies in Kansas City, in the metro area, and I think that that really benefits everyone,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Meyer, who previously served on the Shawnee City Council, said she remembers a time when cross-border wooing of corporate headquarters and major employers was \u201cproblematic.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think that\u2019s a tough game to get into when you\u2019re just not really creating new net jobs, but you\u2019re just moving the puzzle pieces as it were,\u201d she said, which is why she supports a truce, formal or informal.<\/p>\n As for the Chiefs\u2019 deal, which moves the team to Kansas with a new Wyandotte County stadium and an Olathe headquarters and training center, some worry that it might be good for Kansas but bad for the region.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a big get to bring the Chiefs over to Kansas, and I think it will have positive economic impacts for the state as a whole, despite us giving up quite a bit,\u201d said Kansas House Rep. Rui Xu, a Westwood Democrat. \u201cI think for the region, it\u2019s unquestionably bad.\u201d<\/p>\n For one thing, the new location doesn\u2019t make much of a difference for his constituents in northeastern Johnson County, who are likely to have about the same drive time to the new stadium as they do to Arrowhead Stadium in Jackson County, Missouri.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just really bad practice to use tax incentives to, especially across state lines, to lure companies to one side or the other,\u201d Rep. Xu said. \u201cIt\u2019s just kind of a race to the bottom in terms of offering more and more tax incentives to draw over companies, and that doesn\u2019t benefit anybody, least of all the taxpayers.\u201d<\/p>\n Liu from Brookings Metro agrees that such moves aren\u2019t usually a benefit for an entire region. In a metro such as Kansas City\u2019s, where the two states have virtually equal geographical footing and derive around half of their respective economic outputs from this area<\/a>, competing with each other like that is nonsensical, she said, since there\u2019s a \u201cshared interest in seeing the Kansas City region economy grow.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe way a regional economy grows is not by moving jobs and investments around a region, but to grow the economic pie,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Still, local officials in Johnson County feel it\u2019s only natural that some businesses will still want to move from one side of the border to the other based on their specific needs. In Johnson County Chair Mike Kelly\u2019s eyes, that doesn\u2019t need to change anything.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t seek Missouri businesses out particularly, so regardless of the actions that may or may not have been taken across State Line, it\u2019s business as usual in Johnson County,\u201d he said. \u201cI think as a result of so much economic success, that it stands to reason that some companies do want to look at Johnson County as an investment location for their company\u2019s future.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n<\/a>State Line Road near 97th Street in Leawood. Photo credit Kaylie McLaughlin.<\/p>\n
\n<\/a>Mayor Quinton Lucas (center) of Kansas City, Missouri, greets attendees at a 2024 World Cup kickoff event in Overland Park. Photo credit Leah Wankum.<\/p>\nA conceptual rendering of a new Lockton headquarters at Hallbrook North in Leawood, on the northwest corner of College Boulevard and State Line Road. Image courtesy Lockton.<\/p>\n
\nStephanie Meyer, CEO and President of the Leawood Chamber of Commerce. Photo credit Kaylie McLaughlin.<\/p>\n