Preserving Plants Delays Report on Raiders’ Stadium

A federal requirement that the city of Irwindale act to preserve plant life affected by construction of the proposed Raiders stadium is delaying completion of an environmental impact statement, it was disclosed Friday.

W. J. Lockman, whose firm is in charge of preparing the statement for Irwindale and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said that evaluation of the various alternatives means that the statement probably will not be ready until August.

That is six months beyond the completion date Irwindale officials had first predicted last September when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ordered the city and the Raiders not to proceed with their deal to build a stadium until environmental reports were finished.

‘Doesn’t Affect Timetable’

A Raiders official, senior team executive John Herrera, said Friday that the delay “doesn’t affect our timetable (for beginning construction of the stadium) at all.” Herrera had said earlier that the Raiders hope to begin building the stadium in the Santa Fe Dam basin of the San Gabriel River by the end of the year.

But Lockman, discussing the matter, said the bottom line is that the environmental impact statement will have to include assurances that Irwindale will buy or lease other acreage upon which plant life destroyed by the construction will be preserved in perpetuity.

He said the plant life in question is alluvial scrub bushes of the kind that grow only in flood plains that are seldom flooded, such as the land proposed for parking lots around the new stadium.

Lockman said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Wildlife Service and the California state Department of Fish and Game have all agreed that such “substitute habitat” must be prescribed before the statement can be finalized.

He said biological assessors retained by his firm are still studying how much substitute land will be necessary. How much depends on its growing qualities, he said.

No New Requirements

Asked for comment, a Corps of Engineers spokeswoman said the corps has not issued any new requirements for the environmental impact statement. She suggested instead that Lockman and his firm have just recently discovered what the precise requirements are.

The spokeswoman said the corps recently told Lockman that if he submitted a draft statement by April 4, the corps would get back to him with its comments by the end of May. But, she added, Lockman missed that deadline and the corps is now uncertain when to expect the draft.

Official Irwindale city spokesman Xavier Hermosillo said Friday: “We have always said we would comply with whatever it took to get this done. We are not shirking our responsibility.”

Lockman declined to estimate how much acreage Irwindale may have to obtain elsewhere to preserve the plant life. But he said an area of 30,000 acres has been identified as affording possible sites, with 5,000 acres of that probably affording the best sites.

The court order requiring environmental reports and statements has prevented Irwindale and the Raiders from finalizing their agreement for construction of the stadium and from obtaining financing.