But when it comes to the most corrupt counties, few if any can top the recent run that Los Angeles County is on — specifically, the cities and agencies in south and central L.A. County.

The latest example came last week when Luis Aguinaga resigned as mayor of South El Monte after admitting to taking bribes for seven years from a contractor paid by the city for engineering and construction services.

A Nexis search of stories by the Southern California News Group, the Los Angeles Times and Southern California Public Radio shows Aguinaga has plenty of corrupt company in neighboring communities.

Bell

In 2010, a  Los Angeles Times investigation found that the city was being run like a criminal enterprise to the benefit of city officials and City Council members who received huge salaries and relied on illegal taxes and deceptive accounting. Former City Manager Robert Rizzo was found guilty of 69 corruption charges. Five City Council members also were convicted over city schemes.

Carson

Mayor Al Robles is now under siege from Los Angeles County prosecutors for simultaneously serving on the board of the Water Replenishment District of Southern California and as Carson mayor. He faced a county grand jury rebuke over the water board’s move to pay his legal bills. He has also faced years of campaign finance allegations over his water board and Carson election campaigns.

Central Basin Municipal Water District

Political and legal fallout continues from a scandal involving an alleged $2.75 million slush fund created by the district to pay politically connected consultants such as former Assemblyman Tom Calderon, D-Montebello. Central Basin board member Art Chacon was allowed to collect car allowance and mileage reimbursements from the district from 2006 to 2014, an eight-year span in which he didn’t have a driver’s license. To avoid a potentially huge payout at trial, in 2014, the district settled sexual harassment allegations made by a female contractor against district Director Robert Apodaca for $670,000.

City of Commerce

In 2012, Councilman Robert Fierro resigned after he pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy charge related to his attempts to dupe investigators looking into the financing of his 2005 campaign. In 2010, Councilman Hugo Argumedo resigned after he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Argumedo concocted evidence to help an attorney sue his city for allegedly unpaid legal fees.

Cudahy

In 2012, City Manager Angel Perales, Mayor David Silva and Councilman Osvaldo Conde were arrested by the FBI after being caught seeking bribes from the owner of a marijuana dispensary. In 2014, then-state Controller John Chiang released a scathing report about city finances that found city credit cards were used improperly for meals, travel and entertainment; pay raises were awarded without explanation or justification; and that employees regularly received paid leave that they were not entitled to get.

Lynwood

In 2012, former City Council members Louis Byrd and Fernando Pedroza were convicted of illegally boosting their pay — by $330,000 and $160,000, respectively — by taking stipends for working on city commissions without any responsibilities, a crime with parallels to what happened in Bell. There were also reports that city officials used city credit cards to pay for entertainment, including “a $1,500 night out at a Guadalajara strip club, where dancers allegedly performed sexual favors” for two city officials, the Los Angeles Times reported. In 2007, Mayor Paul H. Richards II received a 16-year sentence for a long-running embezzlement scheme.

Maywood

County prosecutors are now investigating alleged illegal collusion to get around state open-government laws that may be related to questionable zoning changes made without proper scrutiny. There are also reports that the FBI is investigating possible bribery in the awarding of city contracts.

Montebello

In 2011, state Controller John Chiang issued a report showing that officials had improperly spent more than $31 million, helping prompt a city budget crisis. Redevelopment funds were used for many non-government purposes, including meals in Las Vegas.

South Gate

Former city councilman, city manager, mayor and treasurer Albert Robles was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in 2005 for public corruption, money laundering and bribery. Though several of the convictions were thrown out in 2013, Robles’ sentence was not reduced because of the seriousness of the bribery counts that remained.

Vernon

The tax-rich industrial city which long controlled who voted in the city by controlling who stayed in its very limited housing was nearly disbanded by the Legislature in 2011 after Donal O’Callaghan became the third city administrator since 2006 to face criminal charges. Mayor Leonis Malburg and his wife Dominica were convicted of voter fraud and conspiracy in 2009. The Malburgs lied for years about living in Vernon while actually residing at a Hancock Park mansion.

A series of unflattering media reports have depicted Raiders owner Mark Davis as clueless and outmatched by his responsibilities, with relatively few financial resources. Even if Davis had the best press in the world, however, he would have huge obstacles to overcome. Unlike the owners of the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams — the other teams in the L.A. triangle — he has no leverage with his home-town officials. Between their own budget headaches and a long history of scraping with Mark Davis’ late father, previous owner Al Davis, Oakland officials have no interest in offering a subsidy of any kind to the team and appear indifferent to the team departing.

Meanwhile, the Raiders’ and Chargers’ announcement earlier this year that they wanted to build a shared $1.7 billion stadium in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County is far less advanced than Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s planned $1.8 billion Inglewood stadium project. Kroenke has all has necessary environmental OKs to begin construction, and as the league’s second-wealthiest owner, the multibillionaire has no need to hunt for public subsidies or partner with other teams.

If Kroenke is willing to flout league rules and move a team without permission from three-quarters of team owners — as Al Davis did when he moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982 — he has clear sailing ahead. But if the league puts up enough obstacles to a unilateral move — say, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell trying to withhold TV contract money or threatening some other highly punitive action — Kroenke would be forced to reconsider. As the past three years have shown, Goodell is the most unpredictable commissioner of a major U.S. sport in memory.

No team has enough owner support to relocate — yet

Pro Football Talk, generally the best connected of any media covering the NFL, looks at a possible — perhaps likely — scenario. It appears to be what Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan was talking about last week after owner meetings in New  York City when he referred to a “Plan C.”

With Chargers owner Dean Spanos definitely having the nine votes needed to keep Rams owner Stan Kroenke out of L.A. and Kroenke likely having the nine votes needed to keep Spanos out of L.A., the future of the NFL in Los Angeles could hinge on the ability of Spanos and Kroenke to work something out. …

 

Some owners actively oppose Kroenke’s desire to move the Rams, believing that Spanos has tried long enough to get a new stadium in San Diego, and that St. Louis is on the verge of crafting a viable stadium proposal to keep the Rams. But if at least nine owners feel strongly enough about Kroenke getting the L.A. market to vote against the Chargers, the situation will remain at impasse, with both teams in limbo.

 

A brokered deal would hinge, as many such arrangements do, on money and/or other considerations. With each owner able to block the other from moving, one owner needs to persuade the other owner to drop his opposition. In addition, then, to the relocation fee that would be paid to the league generally, the owner who moves to L.A. may have to make a large, separate payment to the one who doesn’t.

 

Likewise, the arrangement could include other terms. For example, if Spanos accepts that the Chargers will stay in San Diego and the Rams will move to L.A., the league could agree that only one team would be in L.A. …

 

It’s becoming more and more clear that something will happen, sooner than later.

Owners eager to set up team in L.A.

Meanwhile, the eagerness of the other owners to get a team in Los Angeles is difficult to overstate. Last week, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney Jr. and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay all told reporters in multiple interviews that it was quite possible the NFL would have a team playing in the nation’s second-largest market in 11 months.

It seems unlikely that the league would allow two teams to play in temporary quarters at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or at the Rose Bowl in the same season. So NFL insiders offer this scenario as increasingly plausible: Kroenke gets the necessary support in a January vote to allow him to bring the Rams back to Los Angeles — after he makes a big enough payoff to Chargers owner Dean Spanos to drop his interest in Los Agneles.

The NFL has long liked the idea of teams sharing new stadiums, as the New York Giants and Jets do in the Meadowlands facility in northern New Jersey. So perhaps “Plan C” is for the Chargers to sign on as a secondary tenant in Kroenke’s Inglewood stadium. But that’s an awfully complex negotiation to finish by the January vote at which NFL owners want to take decisive action.

But when it comes to Oakland — home of the third team that’s been subject to years of intense speculation about a possible move — Mayor Libby Schaaf has handed negotiations with the Raiders and the NFL over a new stadium to an assistant city administrator, a low-level official more accustomed to helping neighborhoods get better trash collection or to settling disputes over zoning infractions.

Given that the Raiders have a loyal fan base, an international following and a rich history, how is it that local elected officials could be so blase about losing the team?

The most obvious reason is the city’s weak finances and how they relate to the most pressing local issue. Oakland has had persistent budget gaps and has not benefited from the tech boom remotely as much as San Francisco, Santa Clara or many smaller communities in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

Fighting crime the priority, not keeping Raiders

Meanwhile, crime has grown steadily in recent years, to the point where Forbes declared Oakland to be America’s third-most dangerous city. Public safety is Mayor Schaaf’s priority, as this April story about her proposed budget in the San Francisco Business Times story makes clear:

The $2.4 billion two-year budget would increase the Oakland Police Department from 722 to 762 officers in the next year and a half, with a long-term goal of 800 officers by 2018.

 

“Oakland will not grow unless people are confident it is getting safer,” Schaaf wrote in a letter earlier this month to the City Council.

That letter identified three priorities beyond public safety, but never mentioned the Raiders or the NFL and their desire for an upgrade from the battered Oakland-Alameda County Stadium.

From the national media perspective, this indifference is being interpreted as a sign the team’s departure for L.A. is inevitable. The NFL executive overseeing Los Angeles relocation issues this week said no “viable” plan had ever emerged from either the city or the team, and a league committee declined to even talk with a Bay Area real estate developer who wants to build a stadium as a centerpiece to a larger, $4.2 billion mixed-use development, believing the plan to be far-fetched.

“As for Oakland, there is no there, there. The area doesn’t have a stadium offer on the table, and time is running out,” ESPN’s John Clayton wrote on Tuesday.

But that presumes the Raiders’ and Chargers’ proposal to jointly build and then share a $1.75 billion stadium project in Carson — where they already have land and regulatory approvals —  is likely to get the league’s go-ahead.

St. Louis and San Antonio may be team’s future

San Diego officials don’t believe that’s close to inevitable. It’s why their stadium proposal announced this week is actually tougher in its financing terms than a proposal that a task force recommended this spring, as CalWatchdog reported Tuesday. The thinking appears to be that the NFL is far more likely to approve the Rams’ move back to Los Angeles, where its stadium plan is considerably closer to fruition than the Raiders/Chargers proposal. There is believed to be no NFL interest in having three teams in Los Angeles.

Oakland’s mayor and City Council may have a similar take. But unlike San Diego officials, they’re not offering a financing plan, one perceived as “tough” or otherwise, to the Raiders. They appear resigned to having the Raiders eventually leave for a city with a much more lucrative, modern NFL stadium with luxury boxes and more seats.

If the Rams leave town, St. Louis is an obvious option for Raiders owner Marc Davis. This week, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon expressed confidence that the St. Louis riverfront stadium project that’s now being planned would have an NFL team as a tenant even if the Rams departed for Inglewood.

And the most populous U.S. city to not have an NFL franchise — San Antonio, America’s seventh-largest city, with 1.5 million residents — is also likely to be in the mix. City officials are eager to get a team for football-crazy South Texas. And the Raiders have already had talks with city officials, dating back years.

San Antonio believed it had proven itself as an NFL-ready city in 2005 when the New Orleans Saints got a warm reception after temporarily relocating that season because Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Superdome. But so far it has been unable to attract a team.

Mark Fabiani, the veteran Democratic political strategist and crisis-management specialist who has long been the point man for team owners on stadium questions, immediately denounced the plan, as ESPN reported:

Fabiani criticized the “hastily prepared” EIR, saying, “The Chargers have been clear from the start that the franchise will not be the city’s guinea pig for this inevitably ill-fated legal experiment.”

 

“Remember, these are the same politicians who told us, with disastrous results in court, that the convention center expansion could be financed by a vote of the hoteliers rather than a vote of the people,” Fabiani, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, said in a statement.

Team, league expected to contribute $562.5 million

But Fabiani and the Spanos family, owners of the team since 1984, also couldn’t have been happy with the details of the financing proposal. An informal stadium task force that formed earlier this year with the mayor’s blessing issued a financing plan that was more generous than the plan touted by Faulconer and Roberts.

That plan called for the Chargers to pay $300 million and the NFL to foot $200 million of the bill for a new stadium. The official plan offered Monday by San Diego officials to their hometown media — and in a presentation to a committee of NFL owners in Chicago — calls for the Chargers to pay $362.5 million and the NFL to pay $200 million, and pegs direct taxpayer subsidies at $350 million — $200 million from the city and $150 million from the county.

The Voice of San Diego, while generally skeptical of the official proposal, also noted three ways the deal offers protections to taxpayers not recommended by the informal task foce:

Monday’s plan … says that the Chargers should be on the hook for:

 

• Operating and maintaining the stadium, which is a huge loss for city taxpayers now at Qualcomm.

 

• Any cost overruns on the construction of the new stadium.

 

• Any failure of $188 million in personal seat license sales pegged toward stadium construction to meet projections.

Let’s make a deal — eventually

This plan suggests that Faulconer, Roberts and the other officials and consultants who shaped it are not in panic mode because of a fear the Chargers are sure to leave. Instead, they are making a calculated gamble that the other 31 NFL team owners will choose the St. Louis Rams franchise as the league’s Los Angeles centerpiece and pass on the Chargers/Raiders plan, leaving the Chargers to come back to the negotiating table. This was judged to be the most likely of nine possible scenarios in an April analysis by Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times, who has provided several scoops in recent years in his coverage of the Los Angeles-Oakland-San Diego-St. Louis NFL quadrangle.

The Rams and Stan Kroenke, the NFL’s second-wealthiest owner, are well along the way toward breaking ground for a $1.8 billion stadium project next year in Inglewood, with environmental clearances already in place and strong support from city elected officials and local special interests.

And Kroenke has already signaled that he will move even if the Rams’ proposed relocation fails to win the league-mandated support of three-quarters of the 32 teams — using a strategy borrowed from the Raiders. This is from a January item by the well-connected Mike Florio on the Pro Football Talk website:

Kroenke has informed the mayor of Inglewood on multiple occasions that he’ll move the team with or without the approval of the other clubs.

That would be an aggressive, risky move.  If Kroenke moves without approval, he’d be entitled to no financial assistance from the league, and his stadium would be blocked from hosting Super Bowls. He also would avoid paying the relocation fee.

The matter could end up in court, as a sequel to the barrister’s brouhaha between the Raiders and the NFL in the 1980s, arising from the league’s efforts to keep the Raiders from moving to Los Angeles. The Raiders eventually won a $34.6-million judgment, which reportedly was settled for a payment of $18 million in 1989.

The NFL is likely to signal in coming days what it thought of San Diego’s official presentation to the team owners committee in Chicago. But as CalWatchdog noted Monday, the fact that the league is eager to begin selling 2016 season tickets for a Los Angeles team to be named later suggests that most owners are panting at a return to the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area after being gone since 1994.

In their coverage, both the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Voice of San Diego don’t appear to think much of the city’s chances. In the U-T’s opinion pages, former Sports Illustrated and USA Today writer Jill Lieber Steeg — a San Diego resident who is married to former NFL executive Jim Steeg, who still has good sources within the league — offered this brutal assessment:

Here is the cold, hard truth, San Diego: You are not the Chargers’ first choice. The Chargers want Los Angeles in the worst way. What can San Diego officials say or do on Monday to keep the team here? NOTHING. …

‘Planning to sneak out of town’

Steeg endorses the theory that the Chargers have not acted in good faith:

When the mayor tried to engage the team in stadium discussions, Mark Fabiani, special counsel to Spanos, told Faulconer to sit tight, that there was no sense of urgency. It is clear now why the Chargers were so quiet: They were planning to sneak out of town and move to Carson. They had hoped to demonstrate to the NFL that there was no interest in retaining them in San Diego.

 

But the mayor threw a monkey wrench into their plans. He announced in his State of the City address Jan. 14 that he was forming a task force of civic leaders to help develop the first “real plan” to build a new stadium and keep the team in San Diego.

 

 

From that moment on, Fabiani, who presumably conveys the thoughts, values and ethics of team ownership, has adopted a scorched earth strategy to get the team out of town. He has tried to manipulate the media and bloggers, unleashing texts and emails written in legalese with incredible ferocity and in great abundance, seemingly around the clock. He has leaked documents prior to important meetings with the Citizens’ Stadium Advisory Group (CSAG) and Eric Grubman, the NFL’s executive vice-president and Los Angeles-point person. And he has ridiculed, attacked and abused some of San Diego’s icons and civic-minded citizens, including Convention Center Chair Steve Cushman, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, the mayor, CSAG and the Padres, insinuating through a media channel the baseball team was a roadblock in the Chargers getting a downtown stadium. The thought may be it would impact Petco Park for parking and compete for revenue-generating events.

‘The Chargers will not be on board’

The Voice of San Diego is also skeptical the city has a chance of keeping the team, for several reasons. Here is one:

[For the city’s] plan to work — for a public vote to be possible in January, in time to inform the NFL before it decides which team gets to move to Los Angeles — the San Diego City Council would need to begin talking about it in mid-September. And the mayor has said he won’t go forward with that unless the Chargers are on board. Thus, the Chargers would have to be on board by then.

 

The team would have to be fully invested in the effort. A successful campaign in that short of a time frame would require the team’s money as well.

 

The Chargers will not be on board by then, though. The moment the team signals that it is 100 percent committed to getting the mayor’s plan done and passed through voters, Carson leaders will likely drop their push. What’s more, NFL staff is not allowed to work with a city like Carson if a team isn’t leading.

 

The team would essentially have to give up its push for Los Angeles in about a month. All based on the promise … that a majority of San Diegans is willing to support the mayor’s plan.

Selling tickets for a team to be named later

There remain observers who think the Chargers will be stuck in San Diego, whatever their hopes for Los Angeles. The owner of the St. Louis Rams, billionaire Stan Groenke, has a much clearer and easier path to building a privately funded stadium for his team in Inglewood than the Chargers and the Raiders do for building a jointly used stadium in Carson, where financing details remain murky.

But one thing is playing: The NFL is eager to get started in Los Angeles. Fox Sports reported on Friday that team owners were to discuss the possibility of selling season tickets for the 2016 regular season for a Los Angeles team — without even knowing which team or teams will have relocated.

Attention, Rams, Raiders and Chargers fans: You might soon be able to get in line for tickets for your team’s home games next year in Los Angeles.

Even before it’s decided whether your team will actually move there. Sources have told FOX Sports that, at next Tuesday’s special meeting in Illinois, NFL owners will discuss implementing a program to allow fans to make deposits to get on a waiting list for tickets at a temporary stadium in L.A. before the end of the calendar year.

The goal would be to start building a season-ticket base for the 2016 season now, rather than waiting until it’s clear which, and how many, teams will be making the move.

This suggests the San Diego argument that allowing the team to relocate would make the league look bad isn’t likely to have much impact — and that the NFL, as Steeg says of the Spanos family, “wants Los Angeles in the worst way.”

But the doubts that have been raised publicly and privately by the Spanos family — the owners of the Chargers — about the the city’s financing plans and expectations of quick environmental OKs appear to have sunk in with the NFL’s upper brass. The league’s executive vice president, Eric Grubman, had a good news-bad news reaction to the meeting with San Diego officials in an email to the Union-Tribune:

Grubman was also positive after the meeting … praising the city for its large team of environmental experts and for giving the NFL a thorough understanding of its accelerated timeline for environmental approvals and a January public vote.

 

Grubman also said the city’s proposed stadium design has “all the key elements we would expect at this stage.”

 

But he stressed that the design was only conceptual, no actual negotiations took place on Tuesday and that the financing plan presented by the city includes “very significant funding from NFL and Chargers sources.”

That was a reference to the $400 million to $500 million that the team and the league are expected to kick in for construction and related costs.

Is a mostly subsidized stadium not good enough?

Grubman’s critique prompted a sharp response on social media from some who wondered how the world’s most lucrative professional sports league could gripe about a proposal in which taxpayers bore two-thirds or so of the cost of a stadium for the league.

But as an indication of how NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and other team owners felt about the Chargers’ interest in moving, it was telling. Past assumptions about the league not wanting to risk a backlash over a moneymaking team leaving a community that had supported it for more than a half-century may have been based on a sentimental view about how the NFL operates.

So where do things go from here? The Union-Tribune’s coverage suggests a meeting in less that two weeks could be absolutely crucial:

[San Diego officials will make] a presentation scheduled for Aug. 10 in Chicago to the NFL’s relocation committee — a group of six team owners overseeing possible franchise moves to Los Angeles.

 

The day after that presentation, all 32 NFL owners are scheduled to meet in Chicago to discuss how to handle relocations to the Los Angeles area, where the Chargers, Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Rams are working on stadium projects.

How — and how much — does Atkins want to help?

The fact that the San Diego political establishment is not united on the stadium issue came up again Tuesday. The involvement of Atkins in the meeting with Grubman was treated as a huge plus by Mayor Faulconer, but her decision not to join him at the press conference and the vagueness of her confirmed comments led editors of the Voice of San Diego to wonder what help she was actually providing.

On Twitter, VOSD’s Liam Dillon paraphrased her position this way: “Atkins: I’m happy to expedite the mayor’s Chargers plan, but I don’t have a position on the mayor’s Chargers plan.”

An aide to Atkins said she was ready to help the city and the team maneuver through the obstacle course of state environmental rules in building the stadium. But the City Council member whom Atkins appears closest to — former interim Mayor Todd Gloria — is very cool to Faulconer’s stadium push.

So how much Atkins actually wants to do to help keep the Chargers in San Diego is open to question. For now, city Republican leaders appear far more inclined than elected city Democrats to subsidize a Chargers stadium, wherever it is located and however the taxpayers’ share of costs is provided.

The attorney for the Spanos family, which owns the team — former Clinton administration media aide Mark Fabiani — depicts the city of San Diego as disorganized, unrealistic and “unsophisticated” with its plan to have city voters weigh in via a Dec. 15 special election on whether the city and San Diego County should help the team pay for a new $1.2 billion stadium in Mission Valley. Fabiani points to the unlikelihood that the stadium can readily win necessary environmental approvals and questions the soundness of the funding plan, among several concerns.

City leaders, meanwhile, have gone from quietly seething over what they see as bad-faith negotiating by the team to open displays of disappointment and anger. In a recent radio interview, Mayor Kevin Faulconer accused the team of trying to “run out the clock” by delaying meaningful negotiations while pursuing a stadium project in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County.

Faulconer’s arguments appear to be winning the public-relations war in San Diego County, where social media, letters to the editor and online comments largely reflect the view that the Chargers are going through the motions in their talks with local officials while yearning for a chance to play in the far bigger Los Angeles metro market in a stadium they would jointly own with the Raiders, who want to leave Oakland for L.A.

‘Do you want to be in business with them?’

If that local perception becomes a national perception, that could hurt the Chargers’ chances of winning support for relocation from three-quarters of the 32 teams, as is required by league rules. The likelihood that this does become conventional wisdom recently got a big boost from an unexpected source: prominent, popular L.A. sportscaster Fred Roggin.

The longtime KNBC Los Angeles broadcaster made big waves recently by denouncing the Chargers and suggesting that they might not be welcome in Los Angeles if they left San Diego in ugly fashion.

“Given the way they’re conducting business, do you want to be in business with them? If you could pick, would you want to be in business with somebody who is spinning out of control, telling everybody a different story, trying to manipulate?” he said in an interview with 1090 AM San Diego. “We’re not stupid people, and would you want to be in business with someone that you couldn’t trust, that every 35 seconds changes his mind, or you are sitting across talking from him comes up with a reason to walk out of the room? I think that’s going to hurt the Chargers in Los Angeles.”

This isn’t the norm for cities which are being eyed by NFL teams for relocation. In the mid-1990s in Nashville, Tennessee, for example, the rumblings of interest from the Houston Oilers in relocating led to an intense campaign meant to show local enthusiasm, capped by bus-loads of fans showing up at the NFL owners’ meeting where the relocation was approved  — with the minimum number of votes.

On Monday, Faulconer had a 45-minute phone conversation with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell about the stadium situation. Details of the conversation weren’t divulged, but the city’s position — that the Chargers don’t want to give San Diego a chance — has been plain since Fabiani ridiculed the proposal for a Dec. 15 stadium vote earlier this month.

For their part, the Chargers have repeatedly made the case to Goodell and other owners that San Diego has been on notice for more than a decade that the team urgently needs a new stadium if it were to remain competitive in a league where new stadiums with lucrative luxury boxes and first-rate facilities have become common. Fabiani says the idea that San Diego never was given a chance is a historical fiction manufactured by city leaders who can’t get their act together.

Some see a plan in which San Diego does much better than the cities which have hosted other NFL teams seeking new stadiums. In a commentary by David E. Watson, a San Diegan involved in the effort to build Petco Park, the Padres’ downtown baseball stadium, he says it’s unusual for “a professional sports team and league to pay for more than 60 percent of a new modern sports facility.”

Some see a plan that is vaguer and much costlier than it lets on. This is from Voice of San Diego:

Taxpayers could end up investing nearly $1 billion in the new Chargers stadium under the plan released this week by the mayor’s stadium task force, a Voice of San Diego analysis of the plan shows.

 

The analysis includes all the public money the task force said would need to go toward the stadium, plus the money to prepare the Mission Valley site for development and some costs the task force neglected. Most notably, the task force did not factor in the price tag to operate and maintain the facility every year – something that costs the city about $11 million a year at the current site.

Some see the proposal as a clever ploy to undercut the claims the Chargers will make to other NFL teams to win their support — 24 of the 32 teams must give their blessing if a franchise wants to relocate, and they don’t want the bad blood seen when the Colts fled Baltimore in the middle of the night in 1983. This is from Union-Tribune columnist Nick Canepa:

… if the franchise turns this down, it simply will mean it doesn’t want to stay here. Because there is enough for them to remain — maybe not L.A. money, but enough. After all, haven’t they always said their objective is to remain “competitive” with the rest of the teams in the NFL, not to make billions?

More of the same from San Diego political insider Peter Q. Davis:

Remember, the NFL and Chargers have claimed that their preference is for the team to remain in San Diego, provided our city puts forward a plan that meets or exceeds the competitive city.

The plan proposed this week does this, overwhelmingly.

But one way or the other, one thing is clear: Whatever the problems with its plan, San Diego has a serious proposal. In Oakland, there’s a $500 million gap in financing a stadium that officials can’t seem to finesse.  San Francisco Chronicle columnists Matier and Ross say they hear the Raiders’ plan is “gurgling blood.” Really.

Meanwhile, San Diegans who want to keep their team have an unlikely supporter: one of the most famous dropouts of the London School of Economics. Yes, it’s Mick Jagger. “We are having such a great time in San Diego. It’s so beautiful here. Why would anyone want to leave? Especially the Chargers,” Jagger said at a Sunday night Rolling Stones concert at Petco.

But an unforseen twist involving a powerful San Diego-based tech juggernaut has given new ammunition to foes of a government-led effort to provide the NFL and the billionaire Spanos family with a fancy new stadium. Voice of San Diego has the details:

On March 4, as they were preparing their vision for a new Mission Valley football stadium, San Diego City Councilman Scott Sherman, real estate analyst Gary London, developer Perry Dealy and City Attorney Jan Goldsmith visited Qualcomm, the company.

They met with Ed Capozzoli, the vice president in charge of all of Qualcomm’s facilities and real estate needs … .

Sherman and the team wanted to pitch Qualcomm on an idea. Their vision for the Mission Valley stadium site included nearly 3 million square feet of office space. You can’t really fill that much piece by piece. …

Qualcomm would be perfect, they thought. After all, it was planning a 1.2 million square foot expansion. …

But when the group sat down … Capozzoli lit into them for the way he felt the company was treated by the city. Particularly frustrating, he said, was the traffic situation around Qualcomm’s Sorrento Valley office. London said Capozzoli told the group the city was dragging its feet and not letting Qualcomm modernize nearby traffic lights. …

Even as it expands elsewhere, Capozzoli said Qualcomm would never build anything in San Diego again. Capozzoli, participants in the meeting confirmed, said that order came from the top of Qualcomm’s leadership. That planned 1.2 million square foot expansion has not gone forward.

Company more important than Chargers

This gives those hoping city and county officials let the Chargers address their stadium problems on their own — or move to Los Angeles — two new frames for their anti-stadium arguments.

The first is that Sherman’s plan looks much better from the city’s perspective than from the private sector’s. San Diego’s civic finances are much healthier than a decade ago. But it still has massive pension debt, needs billions in infrastructure repairs and can no longer use redevelopment to encourage private companies to assist its development plans. A large corporation is likely to see the city as a problematic development partner.

But the second and more potent argument is this: Why are city leaders focusing so much on a pro football team while neglecting the city’s biggest private-sector employer, a company that’s been crucial to San Diego’s emergence as a global tech center? More from Voice of San Diego:

If it is true that Qualcomm is done building anything in San Diego, it could be a new low in relations between the city and its largest company. It also highlights a troubling backdrop to the stadium saga: that as the community and politicians rally to subsidize and keep one company, the Chargers, in town, another much larger one — with roughly 13,000 more employees — sits displeased.

A 2013 study by the San Diego Workforce Partnership and Regional Economic Development Corp. found that Qualcomm ‘s presence supports more than 27,000 jobs in the region, including its own — adding to a $4.53 billion annual economic impact. Qualcomm employees represent nearly 2 percent of all workers in the city.

Stadium hunt was already messy

This complicates an already-messy stadium picture. Most city leaders believe the Chargers are in the middle of a dubious good-cop bad-cop routine.

The Spanos family insists it wants to stay in San Diego and wants to work with local politicians and the business community to come up with an acceptable stadium. Meanwhile, it actively works with the Oakland Raiders on a plan to build a shared stadium in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County. As that plays out, former Clinton White House aide Mark Fabiani, an attorney who has been the team’s point man on stadium issues, has been undercutting the stadium task force with declarations that the Mission Valley site will never work.

Fabiani’s real constituency is probably the NFL owners who will have to approve the Chargers’ move to the Los Angeles area, as the consultant working with the stadium task force points out.

The NFL has suffered from years of bad publicity over past decisions allowing teams with loyal fan bases to leave Baltimore, St. Louis, Houston and Cleveland. The blowback was much less when the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles in 1994 because attendance had been mediocre for years.

San Diego fans’ relatively strong relationship with the Chargers will make any team move more likely to trigger the local and national anger seen when the Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis, the Cardinals left St. Louis for Phoenix, the Oilers left Houston for Nashville and the Browns left Cleveland for Baltimore.

Raiders moved without league approval

But will that matter to enough NFL owners to prevent the Spanoses from gathering the necessary three-quarters support for a team relocation? Perhaps.

Pro Football Talk reported in January that Rams owner Stan Kroenke was having trouble building three-quarters support for his desire to move from St. Louis to Los Angeles County at an Inglewood stadium he has taken several steps toward constructing.

But the football insiders’ website noted that Kroenke didn’t believe the other owners’ approval was ultimately necessary.

Kroenke has informed the mayor of Inglewood on multiple occasions that he’ll move the team with or without the approval of the other clubs.

That would be an aggressive, risky move.  If Kroenke moves without approval, he’d be entitled to no financial assistance from the league, and his stadium would be blocked from hosting Super Bowls.  He also would avoid paying the relocation fee.

The matter could end up in court, as a sequel to the barrister’s brouhaha between the Raiders and the NFL in the 1980s, arising from the league’s efforts to keep the Raiders from moving to Los Angeles.  The Raiders eventually won a $34.6-million judgment, which reportedly was settled for a payment of $18 million in 1989.

This has led to optimism about the prospects of San Diego keeping its NFL team with an inventively financed billion-dollar stadium. Some local CEOs wrote in the U-T San Diego about their confidence the public would help out:

Recent stadium projects in midsized cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, and Minneapolis are being financed with public sources between 35 and 50 percent. The Strategic Roundtable believes that the public funding should not exceed 50 percent of the total project costs, including land and infrastructure improvements. This realistic and pragmatic approach must be embraced by all sides to gain the public’s support.

Some believe that San Diego city or county residents would not be willing to give $50 million to the Chargers, much less $350 million to $500 million. Support for taxpayer subsidies is only 29 percent.

On Saturday, the chair of the stadium task force recognized this reality:

In San Diego, the mayoral committee assigned to find a location and financing plan for a new stadium for the Chargers has decided it will not ask for a tax increase.

Meeting the two-thirds vote of the public needed for a tax increase is not realistic, committee Chairman Adam Day said.

Instead, the committee will look at assembling a financial plan that includes naming rights, personal seat licenses, contributions from the NFL and the Chargers, parking fees, concession fees and profits from any mixed-use development on the 166-acre, city-owned site that includes Qualcomm Stadium.

The committee is set to deliver its financing plan to Mayor Kevin Faulconer by May 20. Faulconer has said that the issue will be presented to voters even if that is not legally necessary.

That is from the L.A. Times. This has the feel of the end game for San Diego and the Chargers. If a realistic financing plan could have been assembled without public subsidies before now, it would have been.

That presumes the Spanos family wants to stay in San Diego, a presumption some folks no longer buy. Even if they were one of two NFL teams in Los Angeles, the Chargers would likely be worth $1 billion more in America’s second-biggest metro area than in San Diego, which is no. 17 on the list of largest U.S. metro areas.