LOS ANGELES COUNTY : Supervisors Bar Use of County Funds for Stadium

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted without dissent to bar the use of county funds to build a new football stadium, dumping cold water on a proposal by National Football League Commissioner Paul Tagliabue for a partnership with government to construct such a stadium.

Board Chairwoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke was missing for the vote on the motion by Supervisor Mike Antonovich, but she has previously stated she does not believe a new stadium is in anyone’s best interest.

The motion contended that the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, recently the site of $60 million in earthquake repairs, would be likely to lose “a crucial tenant,” the Raiders, if a new stadium were built and might be able to stay open only with the support of the taxpayers.

As for a new stadium, the motion added:

“A project with the scope of an 80,000-seat football stadium as Tagliabue has suggested would likely require public funding. With California still coping with the effects of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression, allocating scarce government dollars on a football stadium when many vital services . . . are sustaining cutbacks would be a folly of the worst sort.”

Needed instead, the motion said, “is a long-term lease with the Raiders that would allow for the financing without risk to the taxpayers of luxury boxes and other improvements that would again make the Coliseum a state-of-the-art facility.”

At NFL headquarters in New York, spokesmen declined comment.