Ex-NBA Owner Joins Anaheim’s Bid for Westdome

The former owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers joined a group of developers and Anaheim officials Friday in announcing plans for a $40-million, 20,000-seat sports arena next to Anaheim Stadium and efforts to attract a professional basketball team to play in it.

Former Cavaliers owner Nick Mileti said at a press conference in front of Anaheim Stadium that he has posted a $100,000 fee with the National Basketball Assn. and plans to apply for an expansion franchise in the place of the Westdome Partners. The Westdome Partners is the firm, controlled by four wealthy Orange County developers, that would build the arena.

The Board of Governors of the NBA is meeting Monday and Tuesday in Phoenix to consider applications for expansion franchises. Mileti and the developers said Friday that they will make a presentation to them Monday.

Westdome Partners signed a preliminary agreement last year with the City of Santa Ana to locate the arena there, but stiff opposition from local residents to two proposed sites in that city led the Santa Ana City Council to reject both.

In Anaheim, “the Westdome partnership has finally found a home,” Alan Durkovic, one of the four developers involved in the venture, said Friday.

The agreement announced Friday--between the City of Anaheim, Mileti and Westdome Partners--is a preliminary one. But officials expressed optimism that construction could begin as early as next summer and the arena could be ready for the 1988-89 basketball season should the bid for a team be successful.

However, Donald Oliphant, another of the developers involved in Westdome Partners, said Friday that plans for the arena will proceed regardless of whether a basketball team is secured for Anaheim.

“It absolutely can get along without it,” said Oliphant, adding that the arena “could even work better” without a basketball team because it would leave open more dates to book concerts and other events, such as ice hockey games and trade shows.

But Anaheim Mayor Donald R. Roth expressed a different opinion Friday: “If we don’t get a basketball team, I can’t see the need for an arena. But that’s not a problem because we’ll get a team.” Before an arena could be built at the site selected in Anaheim--just northeast of State College Boulevard and Orangewood Avenue--the developers would have to buy almost 11 acres of land from four different owners.

Friday, two of the four owners said they were not interested in selling. One of them, James Ingrassia, owner of Okeh Caterers Inc. on East Orangewood, said he had not heard of the arena plans.

Although Westdome Partners had been looking at Anaheim as a potential location for the arena for more than two years, it was only in the last two weeks that the site was narrowed to the area southwest of Anaheim Stadium, Assistant City Manager Ron Bates said.

Friday’s announcement was rushed, officials said, because of the NBA meeting in Phoenix, where the board, made up of the 23 NBA team owners, will meet to discuss whether to allow any expansion franchises into the league. Approval of an expansion team requires the support of at least 18 of the owners.

Discussing the prospects, Mileti on Friday mentioned his long involvement with the Cleveland Cavaliers and his personal friendship with NBA owners.

“They are my friends. I know them,” Mileti said, adding that he has discussed his hopes for a team and the proposed Westdome arena with all 23 NBA owners within the past year.

Durkovic called Mileti “credible.”

“The NBA looks at the four (Westdome) partners and says, ‘Do they know how to run a team?,’ ” Durkovic said. “They look at Nick Mileti and say, ‘He knows how to run a team.’ ”

Mileti, 55, said he has been itching to get back into basketball ever since his departure in 1980 from the then financially troubled Cavaliers. He said he has “been talking to the league for a couple of years” in private about a possible franchise expansion. “I don’t believe in negotiations in public,” he said.

Mileti added that his experience should be a boost. He financed the construction of a sports arena in Richfield, Ohio, that opened in 1974 as the home of the Cavaliers. He has had an ownership interest in the Cleveland Indians baseball team, the Cleveland Barons of the American Hockey League and the Cleveland Crusaders of the World Hockey Assn. The Beverly Hills resident was one of the investors that in 1981 put up funds to finance Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Film Co. productions for a five-year period.

An Anaheim arena would not compete with the city’s Convention Center, city officials said. Rather, they said, the arena would complement the center by taking the excess business it can’t handle.

Effect on Rams, Angels

The officials also emphasized that the arena would not interfere with Anaheim Stadium’s two well-known tenants, the Los Angeles Rams and the California Angels. The plans call for the use of the adjacent stadium parking lot for Westdome events.

Roth stressed that events at the sports arena would not coincide with either football or baseball games. “The priority of the parking belongs to our tenants, the Rams and the Angels. I want to emphasize that over and over again,” he said.

The City of Anaheim is involved in litigation with the California Angels over who has final control of the stadium parking lot. The Angels filed suit against the city to halt a development of high-rise office and parking structures on part of the lot.

Angels Vice President Mike Schreter said Friday that he was displeased that the city had not informed club officials of the Westdome project earlier.

“I don’t understand why the city is going about this proposal in such a clandestine manner,” Schreter said. “They could not have come out possibly with this kind of a plan in the last couple of weeks. But if they say so, who’s to argue? We have no comment whatsoever on the proposal until we see it.”

Owner Won’t Sell

Both Schreter and Rams spokesman Pete Donovan said Friday that they approved the concept of a new sports facility but would withhold further comment until they could see the plans and review its possible effects on their two teams.

Ingrassia, the owner of the catering company whose food trucks have been using the Orangewood location as their home base since the mid-1960s, also did not want to comment. Asked whether he would be willing to sell his land, he said only: “No, I wouldn’t.”

Douglas G. Melugin, whose family has operated an electrical manufacturing firm on 1.6 acres of land on Orangewood Avenue for 24 years, confronted Oliphant outside Anaheim Stadium after the press conference Friday afternoon. “I own some of that property, and I’m not interested in selling,” he said, handing the developer his card and then walking back to his office.

“They’re making it sound like the land’s all cut and dried,” said Melugin, who videotaped the announcement at the press conference and said he’ll make sure his lawyer gets a copy for use if litigation becomes necessary. The property owner said he doesn’t believe he has any recourse if the city wants to take the land but added that he doesn’t want to move.

Bates said the city has the authority to condemn the land and take it for a public use, while compensating the owners, but would do so only as a last resort.

Melugin said Bates called him Thursday morning to advise him of the press conference and ask him not to “get riled up about it” because the city would make a fair offer for the land. This wouldn’t be the first time Anaheim has wanted his property, Melugin added. He said the city has had plans to acquire it three times--once for the stadium itself, once for a commuter heliport and once for a proposed monorail linking the stadium with the convention center.

The area around Anaheim Stadium has been targeted for high-rise office development because it is accessible to freeways and to a large labor pool and is close to low-cost housing. Anaheim officials have been seeking to convert the vacant or low-rise industrial land to “intense commercial office development.”