Backers hoped a soccer stadium would ease the pain of losing the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles in 2016. Now St. Louis sports fans will have to go back to the drawing board.
Danny Wicentowski reports from election night in St. Louis, where a controversial proposal to build a stadium to house a Major League Soccer (MLS) team failed to receive the necessary voter support.
As election night dragged on, the once-boisterous crowd of soccer supporters in the Union Station Hotel's Regency Ballroom began to grow quiet, their excitement replaced by the sullen resignation of sports fans watching their team lose the biggest game of the season. Only, in this case, it wasn't just a game.
The prospect of bringing an MLS team to St. Louis was meant, in small part, to assuage the pain of losing the St. Louis Rams NFL team in 2016.
Ultimately, 30 percent of city voters came out — a surprisingly high percentage (higher than the 28 percent who voted in the hotly contested March primary). And 30,603 voted no on Prop 2. Just 3,300 votes separated the soccer fans from victory.
Jim Kavanaugh, one of the primary investors in the stadium plan, is quoted extensively throughout the story. According to Kavanaugh, county officials never bought in to the idea for the stadium downtown, and city residents would have been left paying the bill for a regional attraction.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also shared this television news broadcast from the local Fox affiliate, reporting the news of the stadium proposal's defeat.
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