Soap Opera in Downtown L.A.

Pity that the downtown sports arena doesn’t exist yet, because someone could make good money charging admission to the long-running show over its approval and construction. Each week seems to put the city further from consensus on a deal to build a new home for the Kings and Lakers sports teams and closer to gridlock.

Los Angeles Councilman Joel Wachs says he supports building the arena, but he has a funny way of showing it. Wachs is now shopping yet another version of his initiative, the “City of Los Angeles Taxpayers Right to Vote Act,” requiring voter support for any professional sports facility using public funds. Under this version, a committee would formally determine whether a financing package approved by the City Council for any pro sports project constituted a public subsidy. If the committee--the city attorney and controller and a big-name accounting firm--determined that a public subsidy would be involved, the project would then be put to a public vote. Talk about red tape.

For their part, the arena developers have stumbled badly in recent weeks. They admit now that they should have made public their contracts with the city early on. Their initial insistence on confidentiality agreements that bound city negotiators created suspicion that the taxpayers were being taken. That suspicion, along with continued haggling by both sides over each detail, has shadowed this deal.

And now comes the local Sierra Club chapter, which Monday announced its opposition to the project partly because the arena will be a huge concrete building, albeit with landscaping and trees but not a park.

Alas, the lesson in all this silliness for any other builders contemplating a redevelopment project of the arena’s magnitude in the city of Los Angeles might be “it ain’t worth the trouble.”