Is Downtown Sports Arena in the Cards? : Development: The City Council is expected to give developer Ronald E. Hahn the chance to push ahead with plans for a downtown sports facility.

In trying to assess the impact of sports on American society, sportswriter Thomas Boswell once described the stadiums and arenas that dot the contemporary landscape as being like giant cathedrals.

By that definition, San Diego is a city with only one, and, by a fan’s reckoning, it is a sprawling metropolis desperately in need of another.

Consider these facts from the 1990 census: Of the 10 largest U.S. cities, only San Diego lacks a professional basketball franchise. Nine of the top 10 cities have a major indoor arena, and several have plans for new ones on the drawing board.

San Diego has neither a National Basketball Assn. nor a National Hockey League franchise, with no tangible plans for either, and a 13,000-seat, 30-year-old arena that almost everyone agrees is hopelessly outdated.

Two NBA franchises have abandoned the city, citing the arena as their primary complaint.

Starting at 2 p.m. today, when the San Diego City Council goes into session, the city may be ready to change all that. That’s when the city is expected to give formal approval to developer Ronald E. Hahn’s plans for a new downtown arena.

Hahn said in an interview last week that what he’s proposing, in essence, is a marriage. Under the terms of a “memorandum of understanding” negotiated between Hahn and the city attorney, the developer will have 18 months to find a site for a downtown arena.

Failing that, Hahn is free to search for a site outside downtown but confined to the city limits of San Diego. The partnership, which every business leader and civic official interviewed for this article claimed to support unequivocally, will last until Dec. 31, 1995.

If, by then, the city has neither a new arena or a professional hockey or basketball franchise, Hahn and partner C. Samuel Marasco are free to search for a site outside the city--in, for instance, North County.

The city can negotiate with no other party until 1996, unless Hahn or the council agrees to terminate the relationship. In the meantime, Hahn will manage the existing arena, which he hopes will eventually be sold to help finance the dream he envisions.

By controlling the lease to the city-owned Sports Arena--the council is expected to approve the transfer of the lease from Harry Cooper to Hahn at today’s meeting--Hahn hopes to have a temporary home for an NBA or NHL team, in case one seeks to relocate before 1994.

Hahn said he wants the new arena downtown, where he and his father Ernest W. Hahn--who built the Horton Plaza shopping mall--have been successful, not only in developing new property but in forging reputations of trust and credibility.

Part of the city’s problems with professional basketball and the existing Sports Arena is that both were always controlled by outsiders who felt no loyalty to the city and, ultimately, left it for more lucrative pastures.

This is the first time, according to several council members, that a so-called San Diego “insider” has led the effort to build a new arena and stock it with fresh franchises.

In other words, if this effort fails, maybe San Diego isn’t meant to have its second sports cathedral. If Hahn isn’t able to pull it off, the thinking goes, it may say more about the city than it does about him.

“San Diego’s pretensions about being a world-class city are definitely compromised by the absence of an NBA team,” said Gordon Clanton, a professor of sociology at San Diego State University, and a season-ticket holder when the NBA Clippers played at the Sports Arena from 1978 until 1984.

“All the big cities have professional football, baseball and basketball franchises,” Clanton said. “The NBA has teams in 27 cities. For us not to be included among 27 cities . . . . One can argue that Baltimore and St. Louis don’t have NBA teams.

“But those are deteriorating cities. If you look at the pattern of teams leaving cities, it’s that they tend to abandon cities on the way down. It began in the ‘50s, when baseball’s Dodgers and Giants left New York--which people said would never happen--and moved to California.”

John Reid, executive director of the Greater San Diego Sports Assn., who plans to attend today’s council meeting to show support, said Hahn’s vision would “complete the definition of our city as major league.”

“We’re just woefully short right now,” Reid said. “We call ourselves a sports capital, but we don’t have the NBA or the NHL. Cities that are much smaller than San Diego have thriving franchises and have for many years.”

Without a major indoor arena, Reid says the city has no hope of attracting college basketball’s “Final Four” tournament or a major political convention. Critics say the city lost the 1992 Republican Convention for that reason alone.

Hahn says the arena could also hope to attract major entertainment acts that might otherwise go to Los Angeles because San Diego, for the first time in its history, would have a “state-of-the-art indoor theater” with more than 20,000 seats for concerts.

Even with enthusiastic political support, Hahn says the task won’t be easy. He agrees with his detractors, who say a new arena adjacent to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium would be less complicated and far more economical, “but,” Hahn said, “what would that do for downtown?”

Hahn admits the lure of downtown redevelopment is a primary motive. He’s hoping an 18,000-to-20,000-seat arena would be “the economic engine” to jump-start a sluggish downtown, in the way that Horton Plaza did in the mid-1980s. Hahn says the recession has hurt downtown and put redevelopment in limbo.

He sees the normal economic incentives--high-rise office buildings, hotels, major corporate transfers--as being stalled indefinitely. “The arena could provide the critical mass,” he said, “that, on its own, changes the face of downtown redevelopment.”

Hahn likes downtown for other reasons--the infrastructure of trolley and bus lines and the fact that several hundred acres of parking could be used by workers in the daytime and sports fans at night.

He’s supported by dozens of influential power brokers--Mayor Maureen O’Connor, City Manager Jack McGrory, mayoral candidates Susan Golding and Ron Roberts. But even he concedes that downtown poses problems that are glaringly absent next to the stadium in Mission Valley.

“The cost of assembling the land and the time factor in doing it is going to be excessive, as opposed to doing it (someplace other than downtown),” Hahn said. “There’s potential water-table problems, and if you’re delayed two years . . . .

“Well, you’re looking at a 16% higher price just to start. I’m not suggesting it isn’t worth the price-tag differential, but there’s a limit to how much you can finance and pay for.”

As it’s currently conceived, most of the cost of building the arena would be privately financed. And although Hahn is reluctant to talk about sites, he and others concede that Centre City East is a possibility--particularly the nine square blocks of San Diego Gas & Electric property near 10th and Imperial avenues.

Another possibility is an area near San Diego City College. A critical factor anywhere, sources say, is whether the City Council approves the expansion of the Centre City Development Corp.’s downtown domain. CCDC is the city’s downtown redevelopment agency.

Costs of putting the arena downtown vary widely, and may include city subsidies, particularly in acquiring land for the project. But both city officials and Hahn say it’s too early to identify specific subsidies.

The cost of a downtown arena ranges roughly from $65 million to $90 million, in part because its location remains a mystery.

Sources say a voter-approved bond referendum for financing part of the arena’s cost is a possibility. After all, the stadium was built entirely with public funds.

Another difficulty in pinpointing costs is the sale of the existing Sports Arena and what it would bring to the city. Money from the sale of the Sports Arena would be used to offset the public cost of building a downtown arena.

Others suggest, however, that putting it near the stadium would be cheaper and quicker because the city already owns acres of available land--but by how much, no one is sure.

Two who support Hahn’s efforts to build an arena but oppose it downtown are former state Sen. James R. Mills, chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, and slow-growth mayoral candidate Peter Navarro.

“It makes a lot of sense to put the new arena in the stadium parking lot,” said Mills, who notes that the San Diego Trolley will begin serving the stadium by 1996. “It brings the costs way down, and you get the land for the project for nothing.

“I’ve always liked the idea, but the city prefers to have it downtown. That has a lot of advantages--I, too, wish to promote the economic vitality of downtown--but from a financial point of view, the stadium project would be far more expedient and much easier to put together.”

Navarro says he’s alone among current mayoral candidates for favoring a next-to-the-stadium arena. His reason? “You could save $20 million or more by locating it in Mission Valley,” he said, adding he would oppose a bond referendum to ensure its construction downtown.

Navarro argues that downtown can’t logistically support a new central library, hundreds of new residential units, a new civic-center complex, new cultural facilities and a new arena. He also says that downtown arenas “haven’t really been effective” in other cities.

Many would dispute that assessment. Dallas and Atlanta, to name only two, are cities whose downtown areas have been transformed by new sports arenas and the blocks of additional new development they inspired.

Hahn says that, “depending on where you put it,” an NBA franchise, in the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird-Michael Jordan era, could mean as much as $150 million a year in revenues; in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, as much as $250 million a year.

“Even taking the lower figure, that’s quite a bit of economic play,” Hahn said. “Restaurants, bars, hotels . . . all of those are enhanced by the advent of such a franchise.”

Clanton, the SDSU sociologist, considers the collective benefit of such franchises minimal.

“Despite what we always hear, prosperity is not brought to the community as a whole by undertakings of this sort,” Clanton said. “Prosperity is brought to a small number of investors, concessionaires, etc. The payoff for the community, to use an old Jerry Brown term, is one of ‘psychic income.’ It’s fun, it’s good for morale, it gives you the feeling that your city is on the upswing.”

Clanton is also skeptical of having the arena downtown, citing crime and his sense that “most of the people who attend sporting events in San Diego County live north of Interstate 8. That’s where the growth is. Why not put it next to the stadium? Oakland, which is otherwise a depressed city, has thrived by having a stadium and arena adjacent to one another.”

Regardless of where it’s put, City Manager McGrory says, “It’s critical we get a new arena--and soon. A city of our size needs the name identification that such a building, and NBA and NHL franchises, would bring. Plus, the economic development aspects are just real positive for the city as a whole, especially in the downtown core.”

County supervisor and mayoral candidate Golding says it’s important for the city to throw its weight behind Hahn, because he’s the one who has the idea, “and his ideas are quite good.” She, too, favors a “state-of-the-art” arena in Centre City East.

“It’s short-sighted just to look at the cost of building it,” she said. “We’re trying to make downtown a generator of income for the rest of the city, rather than draining income from the rest of the community.

“We’ve got to put a facility downtown that creates 24 hours of excitement and activity and also provides a lot of parking. I want downtown to come alive! Let’s do everything we can to make it happen in that location first, then worry about other sites.”

Hahn has until June 30, 1993, according to the memorandum of understanding, to determine that a “downtown site for the sports arena is either not feasible and/or not desirable” before he and Marasco cast their lot elsewhere in San Diego.

Site location could be determined by a more salient factor--whether any of six NBA franchises currently for sale (the San Antonio Spurs and Indiana Pacers are but two) would like to move here any time soon. The same applies to the NHL and how soon it hopes to expand into the sixth-largest city, which Hahn says it will eventually.

If neither franchise is a possibility until 1996, “then we’re more comfortable continuing to look downtown,” Hahn said. But if a franchise wishes to come sooner, Hahn said the existing Sports Arena would work “for a year or two”--but no longer.

“In that case, we might have to look elsewhere,” he said, meaning that needing a new arena as soon as possible would make putting it in Mission Valley, next to the stadium, far more practical than anything else.

In terms of franchises, “Nobody is waiting in the wings but that’s not to say they won’t be by mid-summer,” Hahn said. “A lot of forces are actively working to secure franchises for San Diego. In the end, that dictates timing, and timing dictates location.”

NBA owner Jerry Buss has expressed interest in owning a San Diego hockey team; NHL owner Bruce McNall has expressed interest in owning an NBA team in San Diego. Like Hahn, neither lacks in credibility. (As a show of support, representatives for both may attend today’s meeting.)

“It’s tough to measure the progress of a team coming here,” Hahn said, “the same way you would in building the arena--in increments of council meetings and the like. It’s more a case of somebody saying one day, ‘We’re coming to San Diego.’ We have to be ready when they do, and for the first time in a long time, I think we’re closer to that than we have been in years.”