If Other Cities Do It, Why Not L.A.?

If you are following events on planet jock, you doubtless are aware that a new stadium is being built on the South Side of Chicago to shelter the White Sox.

A dome is under construction in Atlanta.

St. Louis has voted funds for a football stadium to serve as home for an NFL team the city aims to capture.

And Cleveland has just come in with a vote to build a complex that would serve the baseball Indians outdoors and the basketball Cavaliers under a roof.

You know, of course, that Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta and St. Louis have no homeless. They have no problems with education, no problems with public works, no problems with drugs.

Such problems are peculiar only to Los Angeles, where it doesn’t seem possible to get a new stadium airborne.

In the 1920s, Los Angeles doesn’t even build the Coliseum. When voters reject the project, local newspaper publishers get a bond floated to finance the edifice. It is a sterling effort until the publishers handed over management of the stadium to the city, county and state, forming a body called the Coliseum Commission.

That is like handing over the British Museum to Larry, Curly and Moe.

In the 1950s, Los Angeles tries to build a baseball stadium with the idea of bagging a major league team. This venture fails, too.

The city finally give land to the Dodgers, who built the stadium with their own money.

Tapping the old scalp, the Coliseum Commission then underwrites bonds to build the indoor Sports Arena, to be paid off, for the most part, from revenues from basketball and hockey tenants.

The only trouble is, the Commission ticks off the guy controlling pro basketball and hockey, and he moves his teams to a stadium he builds in Inglewood.

Now stuck with the bond obligation, the Coliseum earmarks money from its football tenants to pay off the Sports Arena, except the principal tenant, the Rams, moves to Anaheim.

When a pro replacement, the Raiders, arrives, a college tenant, UCLA, moves to Pasadena.

So now we sit down for a review. We have a pro football team called Los Angeles in Anaheim, another in the Coliseum. We have a college football team in the Coliseum, another in Pasadena. We have a college basketball team in Westwood and another at the Sports Arena. We have a pro basketball team at the Sports Arena and another at Inglewood, where we also have a hockey team.

And the baseball team occupies Dodger Stadium.

“Seven facilities doing the work of maybe four,” a cost efficiency expert gasps. “With better management, Nicaragua went broke.”

Now 67 years old and visibly dated, the Coliseum needs replacing, but it won’t come off because a cry is heard that the historic beauty of that monument must not be defaced.

And, guarding the ramparts of public welfare, political knights awaken our conscience to the plight of the homeless, even though the issue is not related to a stadium.

Money raised for a stadium is calculated to come back. If a stadium weren’t built, that money would not go to the homeless.

There is still another point to which Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta and St. Louis give thought. Those who aren’t homeless outnumber overwhelmingly those who are. Lives of everyday people must go on, and so must those of their children.

Forming the backbone of any society, they have something coming from the pot into which they ante.

And a sports stadium is a cultural accommodation, as is a music center, an opera house, a museum or a zoo. Indulging any of the foregoing, one needn’t be made to shoulder the guilt.

A few years back, Cleveland voted down a stadium, linked to an excise property tax. The new proposition, financed jointly by private and public funds, is tied to a sin tax, specifically, on cigarettes and booze.

Minneapolis helped bankroll its Metrodome with a tax on tippling, touching off a bitter fight that even went to court.

Drinkers argued that it was illegal to tax them when they had no interest in baseball or football.

Baseball and football fans countered they had no interest in drinking, but were made to pay for all the problems drinkers create, including a need for hospitals to dry them out.

In the end, baseball and football fans prevailed, proving the ideal society is one in which there is something for everyone.