So everything is looking positive for the Warriors coming back to San Francisco? Not exactly. Critics have assembled a multimillion-dollar legal fund to fight the project at every turn, and a classic NIMBY battle between well-funded interests looms.

The main opponent “came out of nowhere” in April. The San Francisco Business Times had details:

A group of University of California, San Francisco, donors is threatening to sue or push a ballot measure against the Warriors’ potential Mission Bay arena over parking and traffic concerns. …

 

The group, a nonprofit called the Mission Bay Alliance, worries that arena traffic will bottle up to ensnarl ambulances headed to nearby UCSF Medical Center and threaten the neighborhood’s ability to grow as a biotechnology hub. Its proximity to AT&T Park and possible overlapping game days will exacerbate that, the group says.

 

Sam Singer, who is representing the alliance’s public relations efforts, [said], “The alliance wants to see the (arena) and office towers halted completely. If that doesn’t happen through the EIR and public participation process, the alliance will consider a lawsuit and going to the ballot to stop the stadium.”

Poll suggests public not sold on arena

On the eve of the supervisors’ vote, the Mission Bay Alliance released a poll of 540 voters that showed much less support than the Warriors have asserted. This is from a statement on the alliance’s website:

Based on what they know today about the proposed arena plan in Mission Bay, fewer than half of voters say they support it:

 

Support – 49 percent

 

Oppose – 42 percent

 

Don’t know – 10 percent  …

 

Once voters became aware of the facts surrounding the proposed arena and the expected regional impacts, including traffic gridlock, the lack of parking and clogged emergency access for adjacent UCSF hospitals, support for the arena plummeted even more:

 

Support – 38 percent

 

Oppose – 59 percent

 

Don’t know – 3 percent

 

Parking and traffic ranked as the two most problematic impacts, with 65 percent of voters concerned about traffic gridlock and 67 percent about a lack of parking in and around the arena. … [The project] does little to alleviate the burden the arena will put on regional transit like BART and CalTrain.

Being a popular champion helps sway debate

But the Warriors and the city leaders who back them up on the planned move could benefit tremendously from timing. San Diego voters agreed to help pay for PETCO Park for the Padres in the city’s downtown area in November 1998 — a month after the team won a rare National League title and advanced to the World Series.

The contrast is sharp with present-day San Diego and seemingly broad opposition to having local governments help the Chargers pay for a new NFL stadium. Other factors certainly come into play. San Diego’s reputation as “Enron by the Bay” has faded, but the city’s years of financial struggles have left scars. The city is debating a huge infrastructure program, prompting questions about why $200 million that might go to fix pocked roads and add fire stations would instead help a billionaire build a stadium. But it hasn’t helped the let’s-hold-our-noses-and-accept subsidies crowd that the Chargers have been hugely disappointing since their 14-2 season in 2007, rarely living up to expectations.

The Warriors, by contrast, sharply exceeded expectations in 2014-15, when they won their first NBA championship in 40 years. This season, meanwhile, they got off to the fastest start of any team in NBA history. That could be an ace in the hole for team owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber.

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.

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.