The bonds use money paid to lease the facilities they build to pay off construction and financing costs. The Chargers would presumably be expected to be the main payer of lease fees to the city-county consortium that Mayor Kevin Faulconer and county Supervisor Ron Roberts hope will build the new stadium and keep the team from heading to a stadium proposed for Carson in southwest Los Angeles County.

But the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled that using such bonds for a stadium is legal under state law — a ruling the city quickly relayed to the NFL and to other team owners who have been skeptical San Diego has the wherewithal to build a modern football stadium. The ruling upheld the state trial-court’s decision from a year ago.

The Union-Tribune noted that the ruling …

… may alleviate one of several concerns league officials raised in a Nov. 10 letter to the city’s lead stadium negotiator.

 

City negotiators have been working directly with the NFL since June, when the Chargers terminated stadium talks as the NFL considers whether the Chargers, St. Louis Rams or Oakland Raiders can move to Los Angeles next year. ….

 

City officials say they are drafting a response letter to the NFL that will include an explanation of last week’s appellate ruling, which City Attorney Jan Goldsmith called a significant victory.

 

“Whether you like them or not, lease-revenue bonds are a legal way to pay for public infrastructure projects,” Goldsmith said.

 

Critics say lease-revenue bonds, where city buildings and other assets are used as collateral to borrow money, violate the spirit of state law by skirting the two-thirds voter approval that would typically be required to raise such money.

Mayor has repeatedly promised stadium vote

But just because San Diego can issue the bonds with a public vote doesn’t mean city officials are likely to do so.

The Chargers’ popularity in San Diego is at low ebb as another disappointing season plays out. It has become common for fans of visiting teams from across the nation to out-cheer Charger loyalists at Qualcomm Stadium. Meanwhile, Fabiani, a former Clinton White House aide, has emerged as a lightning rod for fan anger over his repeated caustic attacks on Faulconer and other officials who have lobbied the NFL against allowing a money-making team with a loyal fan base to leave for more riches elsewhere.

When Faulconer seeks re-election next year, his handling of stadium negotiations — and his support for using public funds — will be a big issue. The Republican is likely to face a Democrat who is strongly opposed to public funding. He’s also repeatedly said San Diegans “deserve a vote” on a new stadium.

A possible scenario being discussed on sports talk radio was for Faulconer to seek voter blessing of the lease-revenue bonds in a special election with lower turnout. The theory is that using lease-revenue bonds to fund the city’s share of a $1 billion-plus stadium project would be much easier to sell to voters than raising sales taxes, rental-car taxes or hotel taxes, such as other communities have done to help pay for new arenas and stadiums.

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.”

A major component in the fight to keep professional football in Oakland and San Diego or move a team to Los Angeles is taxes: Will taxes be necessary to build a stadium?

Team owners want a public subsidy to help build a stadium in Oakland and San Diego. But two new proposals for stadiums in the Los Angeles area are not tied to any tax proposals.

A tax set aside for a football stadium would be a special tax requiring a two-thirds vote. The two-thirds vote provision was placed in the California Constitution when voters approved Proposition 13 in 1978.

City officials are concerned the two-thirds hurdle is too high to clear since voters don’t see using tax dollars for a sports stadium as a top priority.

According to a Contra Costa Times article on Oakland’s effort to improve the Coliseum for the Raiders and major league baseball’s A’s, a city-commissioned poll “found that keeping the A’s and Raiders finished last among 20 spending priorities for the 701 Oakland residents randomly polled. Only 7 percent of those polled were willing to pay significantly more to keep the teams.”

San Diego Chargers

Prop. 13’s requirement for a two-thirds vote for local tax increases for a specific purpose was an issue in San Diego. Mark Fabiani, representing the Chargers, accused the city of trying to work around the state law that required a two-thirds vote, thus putting more pressure on the city to somehow fashion a deal both the Chargers and the voters would accept.

The Los Angeles proposals are expected to pencil out without public money because it is believed the teams could raise hundreds of millions of dollars by selling personal seat licenses that allows for the purchase of prime tickets, a formula that is not probable in smaller markets.

While the Los Angeles proposals do not include tax increases, past efforts to fund a football stadium or refurbish the Coliseum in Los Angeles using tax increases ran into plenty of opposition.

Howard Jarvis

In July 1999 I wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, “L.A., Say No to the NFL Owners’ Greed.” The subheadline was: “No public funds should be expended to bring a football team to the Southland.”

I quoted then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue from an April press conference, “We all understand the reality of taxes in California since someone named Jarvis came on the national scene.”

He was referring to Howard Jarvis, who led the campaign to pass Prop. 13. And as I noted, “Residual attitudes from the tax revolt Howard Jarvis helped foster have local politicians from the mayor on down declaring that no new taxes will go toward refurbishing the Coliseum for the NFL.”

Fifteen years after that op-ed and, with still no NFL franchise in the country’s second-largest market, the NFL may be willing to back off the demand for public funds to establish a Los Angeles team.

The reaction was harsh in San Diego. Sports columnist and veteran Chargers watcher Kevin Acee likened the announcement to the Chargers being “in bed with a silver and black whore,” a reference to the team’s long and at times ugly rivalry with the Raiders. That characterization was soon toned down, but Acee’s bitterness — and San Diego’s mayor’s bitterness — was still plain:

“It’s now abundantly clear,” San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said in a statement Thursday night, “that while we have been working here in San Diego to create a plan for a new stadium, the Chargers have for some time been making their own plans for moving to Los Angeles. This would amount to abandoning generations of loyal Chargers fans.”

Yeah. That’s right.

No matter how much we try to understand why the Chargers have to do what they’re doing to protect their business interests – and the team is a business – this stinks.

It feels like we’re in the midst of being cheated on.

Sounds ‘like a fabulous pipe dream’

In the Bay Area, the Raiders’ threat to leave was treated skeptically — quite a change from San Diego journalists, many of whom sound as if they believe the team is gone. This is from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Al Saracevic:

Both the Raiders and Chargers are desperately trying to find public or private money to build stadiums in their existing communities. With no legitimate plans forthcoming, it seems like the two NFL franchises are throwing a hail-mary pass to the deep reaches of L.A. County, hoping their professed desire to move will unlock local riches.

Or maybe they really do want to move to Los Angeles. Carson certainly seems to want them.

“If you can’t work it out with your cities, we’ll welcome you here in Carson,” said Congresswoman Janice Hahn (D-Los Angeles). “ We’ll give you a new stadium. We’ll give you fans like you’ve never seen before. This is not going to be at the public expense. This is not going to be taxpayer dollars. Chargers and Raiders, come on down.”

Sounds fabulous. Like a fabulous pipe dream. While the two teams announced they have actually bought land in Carson to help facilitate the plan, concrete financing is a long way away. And the absence of team executives at Friday’s press conference was downright mind-boggling.

The difference may be that San Diego journalists have considered the chance of the team leaving to be credible for several years. In the Bay Area, the Raiders are considered dysfunctional even years after the death of controversial, irascible owner Al Davis.

This L.A. Times excerpt addresses the initial developments:

Frustrated by the prospect of another do-nothing stadium task force, the Chargers on Monday warned San Diego to either step up or step aside in the pursuit of a new NFL venue, and again raised the specter of a relocation to Los Angeles. …

Fabiani wrote any stadium proposals should pass a series of “real world tests,” such as it needs to have a strong chance of being approved by the required two-thirds of votes, needs to have the support of the mayor and a majority of the city council, and should “recognize the economic realities of our local marketplace and of the NFL.”

Among those realities, Fabiani wrote, the Chargers cannot be expected to generate the robust preferred-seat-license revenues the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys did when building their stadiums.

Members of the task force offered mild reactions to the Chargers’ bluntness. But Fabiani’s response was to raise new questions about the competence and integrity of the city task force.

“Latest salvo in a string of concerns”

This is from the U-T San Diego account posted Tuesday afternoon:

Public subsidies are unlikely

For 14 years, the team — owned by billionaire entrepreneur Alex Spanos and run by son Dean Spanos since his father was afflicted with dementia — has been seeking a new stadium. Qualcomm Stadium in Mission Valley was built in the mid-1960s and is considered one of the NFL’s dowdiest stadiums even after some costly overhauls; only Lambeau Stadium in Green Bay is older. Team officials, at least, believe it can’t be remodeled to include the luxury suites that have become a gold mine for many NFL teams.

A new stadium integrated into a larger mixed retail-housing zone on the Qualcomm site was the early focus, but the 2004 election of Chargers’ foe Mike Aguirre as San Diego city attorney followed by the collapse of the housing market killed that plan. In more recent years, interest centered on a new $800 million to $1 billion stadium in the city’s downtown, near the taxpayer-subsidized Petco Park baseball stadium — either a standalone football stadium or one integrated with the bigger Convention Center the city needs to build downtown to continue to attract Comic-Con and other lucrative gatherings.

But the team has always made plain that it expects public subsidies, something that elected leaders promised would only happen if voters supported them in a referendum. Few observers think the Chargers could win half the vote, much less the legally required two-thirds of the vote, in such an election in a city scarred by years of fiscal problems and reduced services.

In recent months, while being somewhat optimistic on the record, team officials have made particularly clear in not-for-attribution interviews that they needed some sign of progress.

Conventional wisdom vs. the view of insiders

But Faulconer’s turn to another task force infuriated the Chargers — at least if the conventional wisdom is to be believed.

That conventional wisdom has been mocked for years — off the record — by many prominent San Diegans. Their view was that as soon as it seemed likely an NFL-blessed and possibly subsidized stadium could be built in Los Angeles, the Chargers would be on their way — either as the lead team or the secondary team sharing the facility. The huge financial success of the New York Giants and New York Jets sharing a stadium in north New Jersey is a key factor in the league’s eagerness for an L.A. dual-team facility.

If this more cynical view is accepted, then Fabiani’s actions of the past two days look to be calculated to make him be the villain of both contemporary and historical accounts of why the Chargers left San Diego — not the Spanos family that has paid the former Clinton White House spin doctor lavishly for more than a dozen years.

But there’s another twist that makes the Spanoses’ eagnerness to move to L.A. even more plausible. The Los Angeles Rams and Raiders may not have enjoyed consistently good attendance before fleeing in 1994 for St. Louis and Oakland, respectively, but the value of having a professional sports franchise in the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area looks more immense then ever after the recent sales of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Clippers.

The Dodgers fetched $2.15 billion and the Clippers — which don’t even own the arena in which they play — cost $2 billion. No MLB or NBA team has ever been sold for even half that much money.

Given that the NFL is much more popular than the NBA or baseball, the incentives for Fabiani to offer himself up as a distracting villain for a team completely committed to leaving San Diego are plain. The Chargers could be worth $1 billion more in Los Angeles than the city 110 miles south on I-5.

Faulconer’s remarks came Wednesday in his first State of the City address. The Republican city councilman became mayor in February 2014 after a special election triggered by the September 2013 resignation of Democrat Bob Filner following a scandal- and peccadillo-filled eight months as mayor.

Beneath the blandness of Faulconer’s stadium remarks appeared to be a cold political calculation, local observers believe. There is no larger U.S. city with a GOP mayor than San Diego, and Faulconer wants to maintain that distinction after the November 2016 general election.

Filner defeated Republican Councilman Carl DeMaio 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent in 2012 despite an awful reputation for his personal behavior, a reputation he proceeded to amply confirm when the 20-year congressman moved from the relative anonymity of the House to the spotlight of being mayor of California’s second-largest city.

Because of widely reported early returns that showed Faulconer with a 9 percent edge in his special election mayor’s race against unseasoned 33-year-old Democratic challenger David Alvarez, there is a state and national perception that he won easily in the eighth-largest U.S. city. But final results showed Faulconer’s edge to only be 52.9 percent to 47.1 percent in an election dominated by older, whiter and wealthier voters.

Alvarez might well have won in an election with general election demographics. A Democratic candidate with a longer track record would have been a clear favorite over Faulconer in a race with no incumbents and the turnout seen in November 2012 and expected in November 2016.

This leaves Faulconer with political dynamics which compel him to seek the center ground. The idea of public subsidies for a stadium have been politically poisonous in San Diego since its pension debacle triggered a city fiscal crisis in 2004 and 2005. The idea of providing indirect subsidies, such as giving city-owned properties to the Chargers to develop, has not emerged as an alternative that an elected official or major political leader is ready to champion. (Disclosure: My newspaper’s editorial page has advocated this option.)

And so the mayor is likely to keep saying he wants to keep the Chargers from leaving without ever offering the sort of stadium subsidies that are common in U.S. professional sports.

The irony is that more than a few city insiders believe that the Chargers have been playing the same PR-optics game for years. A marginally successful NFL franchise based in Los Angeles would be immensely more valuable than a moderately successful NFL team in San Diego.

The patriarch of the family that owns the Chargers, 91-year-old developer Alex Spanos, has been in poor health for years. Many insiders think his passing would lead to a much quicker exit for the team.

The owners have a year-to-year option to pay to get out of the lease at Qualcomm Stadium in Mission Valley. They announced well before the Feb. 1 deadline that they will be back at the half-century-old stadium this fall.

A dozen years ago, the Spanos family backed a proposal to renovate Qualcomm and redevelop adjacent areas. That possibility was scuttled by the collapse of the real-estate bubble after 2005 and by the 2004 election of a city attorney, Mike Aguirre, who saw the Chargers as unworthy partners of taxpayers.

In recent years, the team has pushed for a team in the downtown area of San Diego, near the popular and well-regarded Petco Park, home of San Diego’s major-league baseball team.

Petco opened in 2004. It was partly paid for by taxpayer subsidies approved after the Padres’ 1998 World Series appearance.

The Chargers have no such goodwill dividend to draw upon. While their team has had an average to good record for most of this century, fans and the media alike have perceived them as underperformers based on their talent.