Rams Near Deal for 10-Year Lease on Practice Site : Pro football: New package would include escape clause. Team gets 30-day extension on current Rams Park lease.

While buying time to develop a long-term lease that would leave the door open for a move, the Rams reached an agreement with Anaheim City Manager James Ruth on a 30-day extension to their lease on the Rams Park practice facility.

An agreement also appears to be in place for a 10-year lease with a five-year option and a two-year escape clause that would allow the team to leave as early as 1995.

The clause would require the Rams to give one-year notice to the Magnolia School District and pay off the second year of rent ($120,000) for the practice facility.

“I think we have this worked out,” Ruth said. “It (long-term lease) still needs to be approved by the school board and city council.”

The extension allows the Rams to stay at Rams Park, the former Juliette Low Middle School, until Jan. 31, 1994. The current lease expires Dec. 31, two days before the team’s final game, against Chicago at Anaheim Stadium.

The extension also allows Ruth, who’s negotiating on behalf of the school district, to write a long-term lease and send it to the Rams. The lease also would need approval from the school district and the Anaheim city council at its Jan. 11 meeting.

The school district had rejected the Rams’ offer to double the rent for a two-year extension of the lease.

“The only thing that we have agreed on is a 30-day extension to the present practice facility lease, which takes us through Jan. 31,” said John Shaw, Rams’ executive vice president.

“I told (Ruth) if they give us a 10-year lease with the flexibility of (an escape clause) we would probably accept it.”

The Rams’ lease with the city of Anaheim for the use of Anaheim Stadium expires in 2015, but an escape clause allows the team to leave, provided it gives 15 months’ notice and pays the remaining $30 million owed on bonds issued to expand the stadium when the Rams moved to Orange County before the 1980 season.

The lease also gives the Rams an escape clause to move to another city as early as the 1995 season. Shaw last week confirmed that the Rams have been contacted by ownership groups in Baltimore, St. Louis and Memphis, which recently failed to land NFL expansion teams.

Shaw also said the Rams are in no position to hold substantive discussions about moving, but have hired three law firms to look into the legalities and ownership policies of franchise movement.

The Rams haven’t seen the long-term lease proposed by Ruth, although it has been discussed, Shaw said.

One of the lease provisions discussed, Shaw said, was having the city subsidize any rent increase. The Rams would pay $120,000 a year in rent, as they have been doing, but the city would agree to pay an annual increase of $125,000 recommended by the school district.

Ruth said his proposed lease would not include $7 million in improvements that the Rams claimed were part of the existing one. The Rams contend that the city agreed to pay $7 million to move the practice facility or improve the current facility at the end of the existing lease, a claim that city officials deny.

Times staff writer Matt Lait contributed to this story.