Raiders Sign Pact to Build Stadium on Irwindale Site

The City of Irwindale and the Los Angeles Raiders, once considered the most unlikely of partners, signed a formal agreement Thursday to build a 65,000-seat stadium in an abandoned rock and gravel quarry along the Foothill Freeway in the little industrial town.

After hammering out the final details in a marathon 10-hour session with Raiders owner Al Davis, city negotiators handed over a check for $10 million--part of the $115 million that Irwindale will loan the professional football team to build a stadium, team headquarters, practice field and a Raiders Hall of Fame.

The agreement represents a major coup for Irwindale, a dusty San Gabriel Valley town 15 miles east of Los Angeles, with 1,000 residents and seemingly as many rock and gravel pits.

“The deal is signed and we’re going to announce it (today),” senior Raiders executive John Herrera said.

Herrera said the Raiders were never frightened off by Irwindale’s location.

‘Never Scared Us’

“The West would never have been settled if people were not willing to cross the Rockies in a covered wagon,” Herrera said. “Irwindale has never scared us. It’s the geographic center of Los Angeles County with great freeway access. The Los Angeles Raiders are going to build a beautiful stadium there for all of Southern California.”

Irwindale officials were elated.

“This is the just a fantastic day for the City of Irwindale,” said Xavier Hermosillo, the city’s press spokesman who helped negotiate the deal. “For years, people called us the armpit of the San Gabriel Valley. Today, we’re the crown jewel.”

“Everybody said Davis was using us as leverage to get a better deal out of the (Los Angeles Memorial) Coliseum,” said Fred Lyte, consultant to the city’s redevelopment agency who headed the negotiations. “But Davis is a true gentleman. This is the perfect marriage, a renegade franchise and a renegade city.”

A press conference announcing the deal is scheduled for noon today at Raiders headquarters in El Segundo.

The new stadium--to be located northeast of the intersection of the 605 and 210 freeways--is expected to be completed in time for the 1990-91 football season. The Raiders have a lease to play in the Coliseum through the 1991 season.

Disappointing News

The agreement comes as disappointing news to the nine-member Coliseum Commission, ending months of bitter wrangling with Davis over plans to improve stadium seating and to construct luxury suites along the stadium’s rim.

One Coliseum commissioner who has been close to Davis and was instrumental in the deal that brought him from Oakland to Los Angeles, labor leader William Robertson, said he regards the move as “a disaster” for the Coliseum.

“I’m disappointed,” Robertson said, “but I feel that had we done our work to renovate the stadium as promised last spring, he (Davis) would have stayed here.” City Councilman Gilbert W. Lindsay, also a Coliseum Commissioner, said of the Raiders departure: “I regret it very much. They’re a great team. I think they may end up regretting leaving, too.”

Lindsay described Irwindale as “a little hamlet that could give Davis anything he wanted.”

Joel Ralph, the new Coliseum general manager, said: “My only hope would be that Irwindale can’t deliver. We will continue to treat the Raiders as a first-class tenant while they are here, but I’m sorry this has happened.”

Davis has contended that the commission reneged on promises to begin the $17 million in improvements this year. After talks broke off in April with Coliseum Commission President Alexander Haagen, Davis found himself deluged with offers from other cities willing to loan the Raiders--one of sport’s most successful franchises--the money to build a stadium.

In recent weeks, Davis narrowed his choices to Irwindale, Inglewood’s Hollywood Park and the City of Oakland, which reportedly offered Davis an outright gift of several million dollars and promised to refurbish the Raiders’ old home, the Oakland Coliseum.

But the Inglewood offer apparently required Davis to put up some of his own money, and Oakland was never a front-runner because Davis has indicated a strong desire to remain in Southern California. So that left tiny, pockmarked Irwindale, known for its rich deposits of rock and gravel that provides the concrete for much of Southern California.

Over the last decade, through a combination of chutzpah and gambler’s guile, Irwindale has transformed itself by wooing a number of industries and corporate headquarters. Aggressive redevelopment has swelled city coffers from $25,000 in 1976 to $35 million today.

It was with that bankroll in mind that city officials first approached the Raiders in June with an offer to carve a stadium out of an 80-acre, 160-foot-deep quarry across from the Miller Brewing Co. plant.

“We were the last ones in with a serious proposal,” Hermosillo said. “Everybody said, ‘You’re crazy, Al Davis will chew you up.’ But we did our homework. . . . We learned early on that the only way you deal with Davis is straight up. No smoke. No mirrors. We think we’ve negotiated a deal that is fair to both sides.”

But some council members said they believe that Irwindale may have given up too much in its zeal to get the Raiders. Even as city negotiators met with Raiders owner Davis Thursday, there were objections that the proposed agreement was too generous to the Raiders and left Irwindale unprotected.

Councilman Pat Miranda pointed out, for example, that proceeds from the sale of tickets and any television contracts would be kept by the Raiders. These two items are among the biggest income generators from a stadium.

“The agreement never spells out how much revenue we can expect to get,” Miranda said. “How do I know how many hot dogs, hamburgers and bottles of beer they will sell?”

It is not clear how much income Irwindale stands to gain from the stadium, but city officials have said that the franchise could generate up to $1 billion a year for the area.

Since Davis first took a helicopter tour of the proposed site in June, the Irwindale offer has remained essentially the same. Hermosillo said Thursday’s “fine tuning” changed none of the major terms.

According to a memorandum of agreement passed by the City Council on Wednesday, Irwindale would provide about 180 acres of land at no cost to the Raiders and loan the team $115 million to build a stadium and accompanying facilities, all to be owned by the Raiders.

The loan would be repaid through 50% of the stadium revenues from the sale of such items as food and beverages, scoreboard and message board advertising and merchandise and novelties. The Raiders would agree to stay in Irwindale at least 15 years.

The city would finance the $150 million in construction costs through an $80-million stadium revenue bond. Also available is $25 million from bonds already issued by the city. In addition, Irwindale has scheduled a Nov. 3 vote on $10 million in general obligation bonds to improve streets and build additional freeway access for stadium traffic.

How the city would raise the remaining $35 million has concerned even supporters of the Raiders deal. Added to this has been Davis’ demand for a $20-million cash advance that would be part of the $115 million loan but retained by the Raiders in the event the deal collapsed.

In its initial offer to Davis, Irwindale refused to give the Raiders any more than $1 million in up-front, forfeitable cash. When Davis would not budge, Irwindale negotiators tried and failed to get Miller Brewing Co. to take a $19-million risk in return for first rights on stadium advertising.

Then city consultant Lyte, fearing the deals’ death, proposed a plan by which the city would gamble $10 million in up-front cash and $10 million at the time residents voted on the general obligation bond in November.

Davis accepted that proposal but Councilmen Miranda and Robert Diaz balked. They said they wanted the first $10 million to be advanced on the condition that the county and the Corps of Engineers approve a plan for a Raiders parking lot on 80 acres of nearby land, which is owned by the federal government and leased by the county.

At Wednesday’s three-hour City Council meeting, Diaz was told that a green light from the county and the federal government was expected but that it could take several weeks because the corps must first finish an ecological review of the area and then order an environmental impact study. City officials assured Diaz that if the county and federal government objected to the parking lot, another site could be found.

Diaz, the swing vote, then supported the measure.