One Man Takes the Field in an Attempt to Block the Raiders

As a child, Fred Barbosa passed out leaflets for his parents when they campaigned in local politics. For years, Barbosa’s father was a councilman; his mother was city clerk and treasurer.

“I hated (politics). I said there are better things to do than to fight with people,” said Barbosa, 39. “Now here I am raising hell.”

Frederick Silva Barbosa is suing the people who run his hometown of 1,040 residents. And he is suing the Los Angeles Raiders.

With the two suits, filed last fall, Barbosa hopes to stop the city and the Raiders from building a 65,000-seat stadium in a huge rock and sand pit near the intersection of the Foothill and 605 freeways.

The litigation has not made it any easier for city officials and the Raiders in their multimillion-dollar negotiations to move the team from the Los Angeles Coliseum to the San Gabriel Valley. According to Barbosa’s attorney, John W. Belsher, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ricardo A. Torres, who heard motions in the case last October, has indicated that “if the lawsuit had not been filed, the stadium would already have been half built.”

Among his fellow Irwindale residents, Barbosa said, “I’m about as popular as Newcastle disease at a chicken ranch.” He explained: “Whenever they find Newcastle disease . . . they kill all the chickens.”

Barbosa, a foreman for a Los Angeles cement plant, is built like a cement mixer--thick and strong--but casts himself as a reluctant gadfly. “There was a lot of other people . . . upset (about the Raiders deal),” he said in a deposition filed as part of the suits. “But I guess I am the one that took the bull by the horns.”

He first became involved last September, when he attended a City Council meeting where city officials outlined the Raiders proposal. There he met lawyers from a Los Angeles public interest law firm, Kane, Ballmer & Berkman, that opposes the use of redevelopment funds by cities to benefit private concerns. That night he decided to join their cause.

The law firm, which is financing the legal action, filed suit the next day, seeking an environmental impact report to determine the stadium’s effects on Irwindale. Initially, the plaintiffs were Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi and a group called Irate Irwindale Residents Advocating the Environment.

Another judge later ruled that because Bernardi did not live in Irwindale, he had no right to sue. When no other members of the Irwindale group agreed to allow their names to be made public, Barbosa agreed to become the sole plaintiff.

Bernardi, who never met or talked with Barbosa, said: “To have this one person stand up is just so commendable.”

Judge Torres has ordered the city to do an environmental study that is expected to be available for public scrutiny in a few months.

The second suit charged that the way Irwindale officials proposed to use public redevelopment funds is illegal. That suit is pending.

Since last summer, city officials and the Raiders have been negotiating how to finance the construction of a stadium, team headquarters and a football hall of fame. Cost estimates for the stadium range to more than $115 million. As part of the deal, the city has provided $10 million to the Raiders, which the team can keep whether or not the stadium is ever built.

Commitment Sought

Also under consideration is a proposal for the Raiders to own the stadium after paying the city for its construction. Negotiations have centered on how long the Raiders would commit to playing in the stadium--30 years, as city officials reportedly want, or 15 years, as Raiders owner Al Davis wants.

Irwindale’s leaders have made no apologies for the Raiders deal and other lucrative but unusual approaches to attracting industry. Last year, City Manager Charles R. Martin told The Times that the way the city conducts business is “novel . . . unconventional, but it works.” Revenues from industrial parks, warehouses, office parks and industries such as the Miller Brewing Co. have allowed the city to offer scholarships to residents and grants of up to $10,000 to homeowners who want to make improvements. Its library and recreational facilities are the envy of communities with 30 times the population.

But Barbosa said the Raiders deal threatens the city’s fiscal progress and sets a bad precedent as well. “If Irwindale can give millions of dollars to Al Davis, what’s to stop any other city in Southern California from giving money away on the pretense of making money for the city?”

A jogger, biker and weightlifter, Barbosa said he has no interest in professional football. “I’m not crazy about professional sports anyway. When I see people on the street starving, when I see bag people . . . people with mental health problems, and then you read in the paper they just gave some guy a $7-million contract to throw around a pigskin . . . and half of them are on dope.”

‘Never Got Answers’

In part, he said, he got involved because city officials wouldn’t answer his questions about the worth of the abandoned 85-acre quarry where the stadium would be built. “We never got answers. (City officials) said: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said: ‘Worry about it? Hell, I’m stopping it now.’ ”

Even Johnny Carson, Barbosa said, has joked about Irwindale and its stadium plans on his television talk show. “You’re talking about pollution, noise, a parking lot. . . . It’s what it is going to do to the city. It won’t be the quiet little town it used to be.”

One of those parking lots would be built at another pit next to Barbosa’s house. Under one plan, he said, shuttle buses would transport fans from that lot to the stadium 2 1/2 miles away. “The people who brought the Raiders here will be sitting in San Marino counting their money while we sit here with gridlock.

“The Raiders deal is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Barbosa said as he and his wife, Rebecca, sat in the living room of their 3-bedroom house. “We’ve put up with the noise, the dust and the traffic for 30 years now.”

Just then, a tandem gravel truck rumbled by the house, across from a park behind City Hall in one of the few oases of greenery and single-family housing in the city.

Family Feud

As he complained of Irwindale’s “it’s-who-you-know” style of politics in a town where everybody seems related to everyone else, Barbosa said: “I’m fighting my uncles and my cousins.” He has lived there for all but two years since the late 1940s.

He acknowledges that last year he was embittered when city officials said his wife could not continue her part-time job at the city swimming pool after their son was hired to work there last summer. (The city eventually agreed to let them both work at the pool.)

One of Barbosa’s relatives who opposes him on the stadium issue is Terry Chico, a first cousin. She wonders why Barbosa didn’t make his complaints known sooner.

“He’s related to me,” she said in a telephone interview. “But I don’t think it’s right what Fred’s doing.”

Chico regularly goes to council meetings and attended them last summer during the initial negotiations with the Raiders. “If he cared about his city,” she said, “he should have been there at the meetings in the beginning like I was.”

When Barbosa eventually began coming to meetings and complaining about the Raiders deal, she said, “I had it out with him. I said: ‘Hey, why weren’t you here in the beginning?’

‘Other Side Gets Huffy’

“We’re one big family here, I tell you,” she said. “When one person does something, the other side of the family gets huffy.”

Barbosa said he became involved as soon as a written proposal for the deal was presented to the council.

Barbosa’s mother, Margaret, who retired as city clerk and treasurer two years ago after serving for more than two decades, has only lukewarm support for Fred’s lawsuits.

“I stay out of his way. He’s stays out of mine. He’s old enough to know what he’s doing,” she said. “My own feeling is that we shouldn’t finance the stadium with public funds. But I have no objections to the Raiders. The Raiders are great.”

Death Threat

Although Barbosa presents an exterior as tough as the big rigs rolling day and night through town, he becomes emotional when talking about a death threat he received.

When the telephone call came, he said, the eldest of his three sons, then 16, was home alone. “They scared the hell out of my boy. ‘We’re going to kill your dad. Don’t spend his money. Save it for his funeral.’

“And you hear little innuendoes. Like, ‘Oh, we’d have the Raiders if it weren’t for Fred.’ You get harassed. People think you’re a jackass.”

But Barbosa said: “I sleep good at night.”

‘Greatest Thing’

His wife said: “I work with a woman, and she thinks (the Raiders coming) is just going to be the greatest thing. There’s no talking to her. She’s all for it.”

“It’s all egos,” Barbosa said. “Everybody wants to brag and say: ‘We have the Raiders.’ Now they’re all worried about their season tickets and Raiders jackets.”

Despite his tough talk, Barbosa has retained a sense of humor. As a foreman for Owl Rock Products in Vernon, he figured out the concrete mixture to be used for improvements at the Los Angeles Coliseum, part of the Coliseum’s plan to keep the Raiders--plans that fell through.

“I was going to build luxury stadium boxes for Mr. Al Davis,” he said. “Ironic, huh?”