CAPITAL IDEA : With a Stadium in the Works, Sacramentans Are Striving to Regain Major Legue Status

Although it looks a bit shaky now, if the Raiders finally choose to relocate in these parts, they will be moving into one of the nation’s five most historic cities.

That’s the view, at least, of a prominent local businessman who lists Boston and Washington first, then New York and Philadelphia, with Sacramento next.

“The U.S. began in Boston, the West began in Sacramento,” Gregg Lukenbill, 35, who built and financed the city’s new NBA arena, said at his office the other day.

As his newest project, Lukenbill, in association with a group of other central California landholders and investors, is building--and privately financing--an NFL stadium for his hometown, which, he said, is on its way to recognition as one of the great cities of the world.

“And Al Davis can grow with us,” he said of the Raider owner, who is considering a moving bonus of $50 million to be supplied by the city and county of Sacramento.

“If Davis goes in another direction, we’ll build the stadium anyway,” Lukenbill said. “We’re confident that we’ll soon have pro football or baseball or both.”

Confidence is a quality that seems to be in large supply again in Sacramento, which was the gateway to many fortunes a century ago after gold was discovered in the foothills east of town.

“We voted the $50 million (to Davis) unanimously,” City Councilman Joe Serna said, speaking for Mayor Anne Rudin and other council members as well as the county’s Board of Supervisors. “And the bonds have all been (sold). We have the $50 million in the bank.

“It’s a very rare thing, getting every last politician to agree unanimously on anything in this town--or any town. It shows you the value of a pro football franchise. We regard it as a prudent investment in the community.”

There’s only one catch.

“Time is up this month,” Serna said. “The terms of our offer specify that it’s only good until Feb 28. After that, you can imagine the pressures we’ll be under to do something else with the money. People aren’t just going to let $50 million sit there. But for now, it’s the Raiders’, if they want it.”

According to Mayor Rudin, they don’t. She said Friday that Davis had told another member of council that he would not seek an extension of the deadline for accepting the $50 million franchise-inducement fee.

Whether Davis really has made up his mind won’t be known until later this week but besides dangling the $50 million, Lukenbill and his partners reportedly have guaranteed the Raiders $200 million in ticket sales--plus other benefits--in a new, $125-million stadium. They plan to recoup in the adjacent real estate they own.

Is a football team really worth all those millions?

City Manager Walter Slipe said that an NFL franchise would generate more than $1.3 billion in economic benefits for the Sacramento area in the next 20 years, according to a study by a Chicago research firm that specializes in sports economics.

Rudin disputes the study’s figures but not the advantages of an NFL franchise.

“I’m in favor,” she said.

And, said Lukenbill, the advantages would be enormous for both parties.

“The Raiders can dominate (Sacramento) as they never dominated Los Angeles, even when they won the Super Bowl,” he said.

“It’s hard to get anybody’s attention in the same town with the Dodgers, USC, UCLA, Lakers, Rams, Angels and that big, wonderful ocean out there.

“In Oakland, the Raiders would be up against three champions, the 49ers, A’s and Giants.

“The Raiders will have Sacramento all to themselves, aside from the (NBA’s) Kings. They’ll be indisputably first in the West’s first city.”

The American frontier was on the Missouri border in the 1850s when California joined the Union. There were nearly 1,700 miles of raw land and Indian villages west of St. Louis until you got to Sacramento, which, in the California of 150 years ago, was the life of the party.

For one thing, Californians accepted Sacramento’s bold offer to be the state capital. City leaders, canvassing their assets and opportunities, agreed to give up 40 acres in the heart of town--four square blocks--for a capitol building.

When the Pony Express was organized in 1860, the citizenry made sure that the western terminus was Sacramento.

When the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the western terminus was Sacramento.

In those years it was a city of giants, of empire builders--Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins--whose names survive in California at a great university, a prestigious library, until recently a major bank, and, among other things, at a Nob Hill hotel in San Francisco.

But it didn’t last. The rise of San Francisco was followed by the rise of Los Angeles and the decline of Sacramento, which in time lost almost everything but the capital.

“Coastal cities always mature first,” said Lukenbill, a student of the history of cities. “It was the discovery of gold that gave this community a temporary impetus in the early years, but the edge soon went to the coastal areas with the best harbors.

“As trading centers, L.A. and San Francisco were more accepting of change, which enabled them to flourish at the same time that Sacramento became steadily more provincial and conservative.

“That’s an old story for inland capital cities--not just Sacramento, but London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and the rest. They’ve all had to come from behind.

“And they’ve come for the same reasons. First, they’re all on navigable rivers near a wealth of natural resources, so they’ve become inland resource centers. The Sacramento River, which flows into the San Francisco Bay Area, is one of the three biggest rivers in the United States.

“More important, the cost of living always gets too expensive in a coastal city. It’s only a question of time until people begin moving away, and the smartest of them move to the inland-waterway capital city--which has a more stable economy because of its taxing power. It taxes all the other cities.

“In today’s Sacramento, people get the same quality of life that they once had on the coast, but at a much lower cost of living.”

Thus in today’s Sacramento, Lukenbill said, it’s back to the future.

“We were a world-class city in the 19th Century, after the discovery of gold,” he said. “Sacramento was the anchor of democracy and capitalism in the West only 80 years after Boston and Philadelphia led the way in the East.

“Sacramentans provided the fort, the gold, the government and the impetus that created this half of the nation. Sacramentans won the West.

“And now, on the eve of the 21st Century, we’re again an emerging world-class city. Believe me, it’s our historic destiny.”

Metropolitan Sacramento is home to 1.3 million and counting, making it 28th in U.S. population, slightly ahead of New Orleans--which it somewhat resembles in its attention to riverside levees and low-lying, flood-threatened plains.

“If Sacramento city and county were consolidated, we’d be the nation’s seventh-largest city with (more than 2 million) residents,” Lukenbill said.

There is, however, one major difference between this and most metropolitan areas in the East and Midwest--a difference that is beginning to appeal strongly to sports teams and others in entertainment.

“You’ll find 40 growing cities within 50 miles of Sacramento,” Lukenbill said.

In that regard, Sacramento is getting to be like Los Angeles. New communities sprout overnight in Southern California--and also in the Sacramento Valley, where construction plans were announced by a San Francisco firm last month for two highly innovative new cities for 200,000 residents. One will be 12 miles south of Sacramento, the other 12 miles north.

These new cities, Sutter Bay and Laguna Creek, are planned as pedestrian villages. They will mix commercial and residential development in park-like neighborhoods radiating from town centers, with stations for the streetcars from Sacramento.

But even though desirable vacant land is everywhere to be seen in the central California valleys, there are two brakes on runaway expansion:

--First, the weather here isn’t for everyone. On summer days, the temperature hovers around 100 degrees,and winters are colder than Southern California’s.

Somewhat sensitive to such complaints, Sacramentans insist that their climate is perfect for sports, particularly football and baseball.

--Second, the forces of no growth and slow growth are still fighting the developers here as in all other population centers of the state.

“Growth is inevitable,” said David Mogavero, the influential former president of Sacramento’s Environmental Council.

So Mogavero is now pushing developers to:

--Minimize automobiles and freeways.

--Maximize trees, walkways, and open spaces in neighborhoods evoking the best of the traditional American small town.

“We concluded that we had no control, finally, on the quantitative side, and that the debate would have to shift to quality of life,” he told a San Francisco reporter.

Rudin is another slow-growth leader who has been overtaken by events. For, like it or not, the Sacramento area has been expanding by an average 35,000 new homes annually for the last five years.

Lukenbill--who said he would be on the no-growth bandwagon himself if it would work--is counting on this kind of growth to lure the Raiders or some team.

“I’m not saying that Al Davis will be the new Leland Stanford or Mark Hopkins,” he said. “But gold was discovered here once before. This is his best chance.”

In the race for the Raiders, the man leading the Sacramento charge has already had a street named for him in the new stadium area here.

It is Relentless Drive.

“That’s Gregg Lukenbill,” an aide said. “Anything he wants, he fights for until he gets it.”

As a fighter, Lukenbill, looking older than his years, is middleweight-sized. With bushy, almost unkempt, black hair and a bushy black mustache, he exudes a look of fierceness.

He is pleasant enough, though, in a social setting. He obviously commands the loyalty of his associates, though younger than most. And he is obviously unpretentious. In public, Lukenbill is seen in jeans, flannel shirts with open collars, and tennis shoes.

He has spent his life in east Sacramento, where his unostentatious office is on Power Inn Road and where his home is a quarter-mile from where he was born. The house is a two-story, clapboard fixer-upper built in 1922. His wife Jan did most of the fixing. There are three children.

His company, Lukenbill Enterprises, is involved in building construction projects worth millions, but to his family it’s a mom-and-pop operation. His wife, for instance, does the payroll.

His mother and father, who are in their 70s, work for him now, coming in every day. As a carpenter, he used to work for them. His Aunt Rose, 80, handles the books. Uncle Berk, 75, also comes in and helps out.

“It’s a melting-pot family,” Lukenbill said. “One of my great grandfathers was German, one Russian, one Syrian, and one was born on the boat coming over from England.

“We all grew up working, and all we know is work and family. (The Lukenbills) relocated to California in the ‘30s on a ‘Grapes of Wrath’ program. The Depression had hit them on their North Dakota farm.”

Before dropping out of Sacramento State, Lukenbill enlarged his father’s construction business, branching into the warehouse field. Concentrating on state accounts, he built so many warehouses that he became a multimillionaire 12 years ago at 23.

By his 25th year, he and his partners, at Lukenbill’s urging, had made their key investment, putting $4 million into 435 vacant acres north of the city, on the way to the Sacramento airport.

The land’s value is still increasing and it is still vacant--except for the basketball stadium that Lukenbill built in the middle of the property several years ago after buying the NBA’s Kansas City Kings. And it is there that the Raiders will play, in an adjoining stadium--if they play in Sacramento at all.

Of the several Sacramentans lobbying for major league sports in the state capital, Lukenbill has been the most active and influential, and by far the most visible, particularly since last November, when San Francisco voted down a baseball stadium.

Although San Franciscans in other years had shown a great reluctance to support baseball--whenever public funding has been a requirement--their mayor, Art Agnos, charged that this particular proposition lost because Lukenbill was against it.

Agnos’ associates indicated that Lukenbill either paid for a pamphlet opposing the stadium or asked someone to pay for it.

Lukenbill, a single-minded Sacramento booster with no great fondness for San Francisco, said he had made a few telephone calls to those who might help, but said: “(Agnos is) grandstanding. This is just parochial San Francisco politics.”

Still, Lukenbill did admit in late January to having solicited an anti-stadium contribution from a major steel firm, whose $12,500 donation helped finance the mailer, and he is under investigation for his part in the campaign, facing possible indictment.

To Sacramento historians, the flap seems minor compared to some others. There was a day when Sacramento’s relentless 19th Century railroad builders were accused of fraud, embezzlement and worse. One of their smaller schemes reportedly cheated the U.S. government out of $500,000.

Their pals said it was merely business as usual.

Chief among Lukenbill’s partners is Joe Benvenuti, whose fortune has been estimated at $500 million. The reports are that Lukenbill, as managing general partner, controls 50%, and that Benvenuti owns the rest.

To Sacramentans who say they have investigated this group, the motive that appears to be driving Lukenbill is public service as much as private profit.

Veteran newspaperman Gary Delsohn, the urban affairs writer for the Sacramento Bee, said: “Lukenbill clearly stands to make a huge profit if he hangs on long enough to develop the land near the arena, but those who know him say he’s not in it for the money.”

Sacramento environmentalist Mike Eaton, who once fought Lukenbill, told Delsohn: “(Lukenbill) has done a lot that is counterproductive to his business interests in the name of sports. Sports to Gregg is a metaphor . . . for civic pride in how you put Sacramento on the map and create a first-class place to live.”

It hasn’t been easy.

At the Sacramento Community Center last fall, on the night that the City Council convened to take up pro football, the sports fans in the audience numbered an estimated 1,200 to 1,500.

Some wore silver and black motorcycle gear. Others carried silver and black balloons inscribed, “Go Raiders.”

Suggestions that Sacramento should be raising money not for football but for the homeless or drug addicts or libraries were met with boos.

As the council’s main order of business, a motion to pay the Raiders $50 million came up shortly afterward, and passed unanimously. And a day later, the County Supervisors voted for it, 4-0.

“Everything’s in place now,” Lukenbill said that night.

Not quite. Sacramento is only one of the nation’s seven or eight emerging major league cities. And there are always doubts until a baseball or football team actually commits. So there’s always one question for the stadium builders: Should it be a ballpark, or a football stadium, or dual purpose?

Lukenbill and his associates think they have solved the problem.

One part of their stadium--the broad, high seating sections behind home plate, descending to the locker rooms and other ground-level service facilities--is to be identical for football and baseball.

Hence they are building that segment first, putting in seats for 40,000 baseball fans, plus restaurants, luxury boxes and all the other frills of a modern stadium.

The contingencies:

--If Sacramento gets baseball first, the stadium is designed in such a way that capacity can be doubled for football during accelerated construction in baseball’s six-month off-season.

--If the city gets football first, they will proceed immediately to build a completely enclosed stadium seating up to 80,000 with some sections on rollers for better baseball viewing.

There are two architects at Lukenbill Enterprises, Randy Haight and Roy Marshall, and their starting point in planning the stadium, they said, was the playing surface. Their priority: packing as many seats as possible close to the diamond and the gridiron. The stadium will be built out, up and around.

Haight and Marshall designed the adjacent basketball arena that way, shaping it unconventionally as a square instead of a circle. And as a result, the view of the action there is better than in most other arenas.

Lukenbill broke ground for the new football-baseball stadium last fall, and a lot of construction machinery is to be seen on the premises, but not too many workers, suggesting that he isn’t quite ready to proceed full speed.

He is getting an estimated $30 million from an oil company to call it Arco Park. His basketball venue is Arco Arena.

But why should the Raiders, or any team, take Sacramento over Oakland or Los Angeles?

“It’s illogical for the Raiders to return to Oakland,” Lukenbill said. “They’ve already been to Oakland. They put it on the map. But as the philosophers say, you can never go back.

“The 49ers, Giants and A’s dominate the Bay Area now. In the old days, Al Davis whipped them all, but times change.

“Davis’ destiny is to make a contribution. To make a difference. How can he do that in the Bay Area now? Or in Los Angeles? Down there, Lakers, Dodgers and Trojans are coming out of everybody’s ears.

“The Raiders are destined for Sacramento, the next great city of the West.”