Fumbling the Ball

The dispute between the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission and the stadium’s principal tenant, the Los Angeles Raiders, has reached an impasse that could result in the football team’s leaving the facility once a new stadium can be built elsewhere. If that happens, the fault will lie with the current commission majority.

The Raiders’ owner, Al Davis, has been at loggerheads with the commission, a nine-member body made up of representatives of Los Angeles city and county and the state of California, for several months concerning how to proceed with plans to modernize the Coliseum. The dispute became public last spring, when Raider management halted the construction of luxury boxes around the stadium rim because of a disagreement over how other improvements at the stadium would be financed.

Since then relations between the two sides have deteriorated to a point where there is no communication between them, and Raider management has begun weighing offers from other cities--most of them near Los Angeles--that are willing to build a new stadium for the team.

There have been times in the last few years--a stormy transition period for the Raiders, who moved here from Oakland amid several complex lawsuits--when Davis and other team officials lived up to their reputation for being difficult to deal with. But in this case they seem to have been genuinely wronged. The team moved to the Coliseum with an understanding that the facility would be upgraded and that the commission would share the cost of doing so. The current problems began because of changes in the commission’s makeup--new appointees have replaced members who pursued the Raiders and other National Football League teams when the Rams left for Anaheim Stadium.

The Coliseum is more than 60 years old, and it needs improvements like luxury boxes and more parking spaces if it is to remain profitable. As a publicly owned facility, the Coliseum will be a drain on the tax coffers if it starts losing money--as it would without a pro football team as a tenant. That is why the Coliseum Commission must start talking with the Raiders again, and why it must make every reasonable effort to keep them in the Coliseum. When the Lakers and the Kings left the neighboring Sports Arena in the 1960s, and when the Rams departed for Anaheim, team management complained that part of the problem was dealing with an unwieldy and often unresponsive commission. Now, if the Raiders leave, local residents may start asking themselves if there might be a better way to run the Coliseum.