Giving It the Old College Try

This Labor Day weekend marks the official start of football season. It may also signal the beginning of Los Angeles’ last chance to renovate the Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park, home to both the Raiders and USC football teams, before that historic old stadium is so outdated that it becomes a costly relic.

Last week the Coliseum Commission made the risky, but necessary, decision to begin the process of renovating the stadium on its own. Earlier, the private management company that runs the facility on a day-to-day basis had informed the commission that its efforts to begin the renovation using private funds had failed, due largely to the recession, which has hit California especially hard. So the commission voted to use the $15 million it won several years ago in an antitrust suit against the National Football League as seed money to borrow additional funds, with the aim of starting the Coliseum’s facelift at the end of this year.

The move is risky because the amount of money the commission has to gamble with is relatively small, given the estimated $100 million to $116 million cost of even a scaled-down renovation plan. The most optimistic projections are that the commission can leverage its $15 million into about $60 million in loans. That is probably not enough to pay for all the improvements the Coliseum needs, like a lower playing field, restructured seating and luxury boxes to bring in additional revenue. And taxpayers will be at some risk if the gamble fails and any loans must be repaid from public coffers. But commission members hope that a successful start at renovation could create the financial leverage to pay off any interest as well as to borrow more money in 1993 to finish the job.

The gamble is necessary because it could put off a disaster that is inevitable if no impovements are made: the stadium will almost certainly be abandoned by the Raiders, and possibly even by USC, and go broke.

One can well ask whether the future of an old football stadium is really all that important when the three levels of government that oversee the Coliseum--the state of California and the city and county of Los Angeles--all face serious budget problems and are scrambling to provide even basic public services. The answer is yes, because unless something is done to modernize the stadium soon, it will become (for the first time ever) a drain on local tax coffers and yet another aging eyesore in central Los Angeles, about the last thing that part of town needs as it struggles to rebuild.

But even those still unconvinced must give the Coliseum Commission its due. By using its own funds, rather than the taxpayers’, to do the job, the commission is putting its money where its mouth is. We wish it luck.