Plan Takes Rose Bowl Off Council’s Hands : Facilities: A nine-member panel would oversee marketing and maintenance of the stadium and Brookside Golf Course.

Last spring, as Pasadena city officials were trying to construct a lucrative deal with a rock concert promoter to bring Guns N’ Roses and Metallica to the Rose Bowl, community leaders were doing their best to tear it down.

They squawked at City Council meetings about the potential for noise and traffic in their sedate hillside neighborhoods near the Arroyo Seco, predicted a doomsday scenario of rioting and curfew violations, and attacked heavy metal bands and their fans as drunkards and vulgarians.

“If they’ll book a group like Guns N’ Roses, who won’t they book?” said one outraged resident of the Linda Vista neighborhood in the hills west of the stadium.

For some council members, it seemed an odd way for the struggling proprietors of a major stadium to win over a promoter, who was offering the city a cool $250,000 in profits for a one-night stand. There should be a more businesslike way of booking acts in the Rose Bowl, they reasoned.

Now the council has approved, in principle, the idea of taking the responsibility away from city staff and turning the 101,000-seat stadium over to a quasi-independent operating company.

If all the kinks can be worked out in the next few months, a nine-member panel--something like a corporate board of directors--will begin to oversee the marketing and maintenance of the stadium.

“It’s not realistic to expect the City Council to manage the stadium and conduct a political referendum about every performer that comes,” Councilman William Paparian says.

The board will have three community representatives, a city manager’s appointee, at least one member of the council, two experts in finance or facilities management and representatives from two major clients of the bowl--the Tournament of Roses and UCLA.

If all goes according to plan, the new company will assume responsibility for managing both the Rose Bowl and the adjacent Brookside Golf Course, either by itself or through a facilities management company much like Spectacor, which runs the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Profits will either go back into the two facilities, for maintenance and improvements, or they will be used to pay off debts, like the 20-year revenue bonds that financed the bowl’s $11-million press box.

Though the management company will make its own deals, it will still have to abide by certain rules, city officials say. For example, there will continue to be a limit of 12 major events a year, and current noise restrictions and the 11 p.m. curfew can be suspended for only eight of those events.

The company will have to abide by city affirmative action requirements and restrictions on doing business with companies that have done business with South Africa.

The bowl will be “run as a business in close coordination with city priorities and city policies,” Mayor Rick Cole says.

Most important, those who favor the plan say, the new board will take over the task of scrutinizing the stadium’s bookings and focus some much-needed expertise on the problems of making it profitable.

“It will insulate the process from the vagaries of elected officials,” says Councilman William Thomson, a prime proponent of hiring an operating company.

All of this makes some people suspicious. Despite the prominence of community members on the proposed board, some residents of the Arroyo Seco area believe it will only further disrupt their lives.

“Yes, we knew the Rose Bowl was there when we moved in,” says Cam Currier, vice president of the Linda Vista/Annandale Assn. “But we also knew there were limits to the amount of nighttime usage of the Rose Bowl. It’s as if they’ve changed the rules after they were agreed to.”

Councilman Chris Holden, for one, sees the idea of turning the stadium over to an operating company as needless piling on of bureaucracy. “I don’t like the idea of removing an important asset that the taxpayers own and putting it in the hands of non-elected officials,” he says.

Why not just keep the current system with a mandate for the city staff to operate more efficiently, Holden says.

“What we really need is to streamline operations, create an environment of opportunity and greater efficiency and bring in a top-flight manager,” he says.

Thomson says the same argument was made in the mid-1980s about the money-losing Brookside Golf Course.

“We kept hearing the city staff say, ‘Just give us a few more resources and we can turn this red ink around,’ ” he says. “But each year, the losses were larger and larger.”

In 1985, the city contracted with the American Golf Corp. to run the facility. It now brings in about $600,000 a year in profits.

Holden says the Rose Bowl is doing all right as is. For example, the stadium will host Super Bowl XXVII in January and, in 1994, the finals of the World Cup soccer tournament.

“My attitude is if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” Holden says.

But others say those world class events were landed largely through the efforts of the Los Angeles Sports Council, a private agency that represents Los Angeles-area cities in bidding for major sporting events.

“The fact of the matter is it hasn’t been self-sufficient economically,” Paparian says. “It’s been bailed out by the profits of the golf course.”

An operating company will unburden the city of hundreds of hours of planning time for major events, as well as major expenditures for security, officials say.

“We can improve the efficiency of the operation,” Thomson contends. “I’m not talking about the nine or 10 city employees (the bowl’s permanent staff), as much as what it costs the city to pull off an event.”

These are tough times for any stadium, experts say.

“There are really not that many outdoor shows,” says Rick Nafe, manager of Tampa Stadium, in Tampa, Fla., and president of the International Assn. of Auditorium Managers.

Many rock acts which, in more prosperous times, would have performed in big stadiums are now choosing smaller venues, he said. For example, the Bruce Springsteen tour played at the Los Angeles Sports Arena last month, rather than one of the three Los Angeles-area stadiums.

And the competition is stiffer than ever for big-ticket acts, Nafe adds. Promoters eventually brought Guns N’ Roses and Metallica to the Rose Bowl, in relative tranquillity, two weeks ago. But it could easily have chosen another stadium where there were fewer community pressures, city officials say. The groups also played the Coliseum last month.

The stakes are high, city officials say. An audit issued early this year showed that the Rose Bowl has lost money in five out of the past six years, with one-year losses as high as $570,000. The Rose Bowl is scuffling for customers just as it faces $40 million to $50 million in maintenance requirements, officials point out.

For generations, the 70-year-old stadium was the setting for the Rose Bowl football game on New Year’s Day, and little else. Residents of the area’s well-to-do neighborhoods resisted aggressive marketing of the stadium for concerts and other events.

It was, in effect, “an aesthetic backdrop for a few hillside homeowners,” Councilman Isaac Richard contends.

The council will now put together the board, which will operate temporarily as a task force. If it is so decided, the new operating company, unencumbered by political constraints, could be in place as early as February.

City officials are betting that the new setup will bring financial health to the Rose Bowl, but area residents are hoping it will not end their peace and quiet.