The Spanos family, owner of the Chargers, has until January 2017 to decide whether to serve as a tenant in a to-be-built mega-stadium in Inglewood owned by Stan Kroenke and the officially relocated Los Angeles Rams. If the Chargers don’t take the option, Raiders owner Mark Davis will then have a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood.

In the days after the Jan. 12 announcement that the NFL had given its blessing to the Rams leaving St. Louis for Inglewood, there was considerable cynicism in San Diego and the sports world in general about the Chargers’ one-year option. The assumption was the team was gone.

But in the past 10 days, there have been glimmers of hope that the Chargers may yet be able to work with the city and county of San Diego to build an NFL-worthy stadium with $350 million of public subsidies. The main reason is the emergence of Fred Maas — a high-profile developer and former leader of the Centre City Development Corp., which oversaw highly successful redevelopment efforts in downtown San Diego — as a special advisor to the Chargers helping get a stadium built. The Union-Tribune has more:

“(Maas) has been around San Diego a long time,” Chargers chairman Dean Spanos said on a video posted to the team’s web site. “… He’s very familiar with all the political aspects of what goes on in the city, how all that works. His knowledge of San Diego as a whole will help us.” …

 

Maas was the stadium point man for former Mayor Jerry Sanders, as well as the former director of the Centre City Development Corp.

 

The Chargers suggested to Faulconer that he consider Maas to head the city’s side of stadium negotiations in 2014.

 

After meetings with Faulconer, Maas withdrew from consideration, citing concerns about the commitment he would have to make considering all that the new mayor was working through. … It was around that time in late 2014 that many people close to Spanos began to indicate he had essentially given up on getting a stadium deal in San Diego.

The San Diego Reader offered this tart description of Maas: “a specialist in steering public money into private real estate ventures.”

Raiders owner blasts A’s over long lease

Meanwhile, in Oakland, no Maas-type figure has emerged to help owner Mark Davis deal with local governments. While the Raiders renewed their lease for another year at O.co Coliseum, Davis is sounding increasingly downbeat about the lack of progress toward a new stadium — especially because of the actions of the Oakland A’s, the other primary tenant at the Coliseum.

“There’s an elephant in the room, and that’s the Oakland A’s,” Davis told CSNBayArea.com … . “They signed a 10-year lease while we were negotiating with Oakland officials, and it kind of put somebody right in the middle of things. There isn’t much you can do. They’ve tied our hands behind our back. Now it’s up to the A’s to make a declaration of what they want to do. If they don’t do that, I don’t see how we can make a deal.”

That’s from coverage in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Leaders of Nevada’s largest city are wooing Davis. Their strongest argument is the prospect of the Raiders not having to pay much or anything toward construction of a new stadium that an NFL team could share with the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ football team. Last month, the Review-Journal reported, Davis went to Vegas and …

… met with casino giants Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, Ultimate Fighting Championship owner Lorenzo Fertitta, UNLV president Len Jessup and former school president Donald Snyder. Adelson’s Sands Corp. has proposed building a $1.2 billion domed stadium … .

Long-standing NFL concerns about having a team in America’s sports betting mecca remain intact, if not as prominent. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft have come under fire for their early investments in DraftKings, a daily fantasy sports betting site that has exploded in popularity since 2014, and they may be forced to sell their shares.

By Chris Reed

The hypocrisy of the power-mad left of California’s Democratic Party has never been more on display than in the attempt to destroy the 2012 mayoral candidacy of San Diego gay libertarian Republican Carl DeMaio. The power play involved people from both parties, but the ultimate beneficiary was Democrat Bob Filner, who narrowly defeated DeMaio in November. This U-T San Diego report should sicken people on the left who really care about gay rights, as opposed to those who pretend to care when political advantage results:

“Some of the city’s biggest movers and shakers waged a clandestine campaign last year during the San Diego mayor’s race to gather and disseminate damaging information on candidate Carl DeMaio and his longtime partner, an effort that resides in the legal gray area of campaign disclosure.

“The group — financially backed by businessman Fred Maas — spent more than $33,000 to hire a true crime author to dig up dirt on DeMaio, which resulted in a 200-plus page dossier of court records and other documents that was distributed to nearly every local media outlet in early 2012 on the condition of anonymity.

“Those working on the project behind the scenes included a top aide to then-Mayor Jerry Sanders and at least three other people with ties to the mayoral campaign of Nathan Fletcher although Fletcher denies any involvement.

“The information dredged up went largely unreported because many in the media considered it old, irrelevant and an untoward attempt to draw attention to DeMaio’s homosexuality during the race. The records focused mainly on legal problems involving his partner — San Diego Gay & Lesbian News Publisher Johnathan Hale.

“Opposition research on high-profile candidates is commonplace in politics, but Maas and his cohorts may have run afoul of state and local campaign laws when they raised money for the project and failed to disclose its financial backers or spending activity. The group continued to resist subpoena attempts by local and state investigators for information throughout the mayor’s race as those involved tried to keep their roles in the project from being made public by saying it was a journalistic endeavor.”

Will gay Democrats complain about this?

Will John Perez, Christine Kehoe, Toni Atkins, Mark Leno, etc., say this reeks?

Don’t hold your breath.