Loan OKd for Olympic Training Site

Gov. George Deukmejian Sunday approved a controversial $15-million loan to help build a year-round Olympic training center near Chula Vista, but only after extracting an unusual written promise from a San Diego nonprofit group to make good on the money.

Deukmejian said he asked for the guarantee from the San Diego National Sports Training Foundation before signing into law a bill that dips into the state’s general fund to help finance the $70-million facility planned for 154 acres overlooking the Lower Otay Reservoir.

Commemorative License Plates

The measure, sponsored by Sen. William Campbell (R-Hacienda Heights), has raised eyebrows here because it gives the foundation $5 million during each of the next three years but does not specifically require the nonprofit group to reimburse the state.

Instead, Campbell’s bill would pay back the loan by selling new Olympic Training Center commemorative license plates--a scheme that has been criticized by some legislators as unrealistic and a “give-away.”

An analysis by the Department of Motor Vehicles indicated that, at the rate people were willing to buy the plates for $100 a pair, it would take 142 years to make up the $15 million.

However, the bill passed out of the Legislature last month after a personal lobbying effort by Campbell, who told his colleagues that a training center would be an economic and public-relations boon for California. He also said that many former Olympic athletes living in California would be mobilized to hawk the license plates and accelerate the pay back.

Yet the uncertainty of the license plate sales apparently bothered Deukmejian, who directed his staff to extract the promise from the foundation.

“Although I originally had concerns that the source of revenue provided in this bill would be insufficient to repay the loan to the state, I have received assurances in writing from the San Diego National Sports Training Foundation that they will enter into a written contract with the Department of Commerce to guarantee repayment of the loan,” Deukmejian said Sunday in a message issued with the announcement that he had approved the loan.

“Therefore, I am satisfied that state resources will not be jeopardized by enactment of this legislation.”

Details to Be Worked Out

David Nielsen, director of the San Diego foundation, said Sunday that the nonprofit group didn’t hesitate to make the loan guarantee when the Department of Commerce called him in the last few days with the governor’s request. While the details of the guarantee are still to be worked out, Nielsen said the foundation is “quite willing to put our money into marketing” the proposed Olympic Training Center tags.

“We felt comfortable guaranteeing it (the loan) based on the Los Angeles experience in 1984,” Nielsen said, referring to the $2 million raised by the state from the sale of special license plates during the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games.

Even before Campbell introduced his bill for the criticized loan, Deukmejian had been approached privately by at least one prominent San Diegan about the idea of building an Olympic Training Center near Chula Vista. Developer Ernest Hahn, architect of San Diego’s downtown redevelopment and a member of the sports training foundation board, gave Deukmejian and his wife an aerial tour of the proposed training center last year, the governor’s press secretary confirmed.

The tour took place Nov. 27, when the Deukmejians were riding in Hahn’s plane from Long Beach to San Diego to see a 49ers-Chargers football game as a guest of Charger owner Alex Spanos, said Kevin Brett, the governor’s press secretary.

Before landing in San Diego, Brett said, Hahn had his plane circle over the proposed Olympic training center site for the benefit of the governor. “The governor is familiar with the geographic location of the site as a result of the tour,” Brett said.

The site, west of the Otay reservoir, was donated by the EastLake Development Co., a partnership that includes the politically powerful J.G. Boswell Co. agribusiness firm of Los Angeles. It is also contiguous to the former Otay Ranch, which was recently purchased by the Baldwin Company, a large Orange County development firm.

Plans for the training facility call for 250,000 square feet of buildings, including a 300-bed dormitory and 1.5 million square feet of outdoor training areas. Construction is expected to begin in the spring and be completed in 18 months--enough time to help American athletes train for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona.

Besides the property, private fund-raising efforts by the foundation so far have yielded $7 million in pledges, and Nielsen said about $1.2 million of that will be collected by the end of the year.

The legislation signed by Deukmejian requires the foundation to match its $5 million in state loans each year with private donations, a task that Nielsen said he is confident can be performed.

Overall, Nielsen said Sunday, the $15-million state loan is a “major contribution” to the effort to build a training center.

He also said that the center “will bring significant benefits to the state . . . as one of the capitals of international amateur sports activity.”