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.

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.

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.