Taxpayers in Jackson County, Missouri, voted on Tuesday to discard a sales tax to finance stadium renovations for the Kansas City Chiefs and the construction of a new stadium for the Kansas City Royals.

Even in the face of threats by owners to leave the city if the initiative failed, voters rejected the dodgy campaign to keep the 3/8-cent sales tax, which currently goes toward maintaining the Truman Sports Complex and was slated to raise around $2 billion worth of public funds over 40 years.

The teams' efforts essentially sought to exploit fan culture in service of saving private funds. Whether any tax was needed is doubtful when considering the owner of the Chiefs, the Hunt family, is worth billions, as well as the fact that the Royals' current stadium was recently deemed to be in satisfactory condition. KC Tenants, a major tenant union that rallied against the sales tax, said that the tax would have been "among the largest transfers of public money to private corporations in our region's history."