NFL Coliseum Deal Not Dead Yet, Officials Say

Don’t pack up those wooden stakes just yet, Buffy. The proposed deal to bring a National Football League team to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum may yet stir in its grave.

At least, that is how local officials on both sides of the issue were acting Friday, despite the announcement that the NFL was kissing off the downtown landmark--and, thus, the prospects of pro football in Los Angeles any time soon--because state taxpayers will not cough up additional public money to sweeten the deal.

Suspicious that the NFL’s pronouncement was a negotiating ploy, officials of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. released results of a statewide poll Friday showing that nearly four out of five Californians oppose using public subsidies to land the league’s 32nd franchise.

Leaders of the taxpayers group, which commissioned the poll, and Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs said they would seriously consider forcing a referendum on any NFL deal that includes taxpayer subsidies.

“The minimum bottom line here is that there is no public subsidy without the people’s right to vote on it,” Wachs said, characterizing the poll results as taxpayers “drawing a line in the sand.”

But those still hoping to see a pro team at the Coliseum downplayed the role public subsidies have had in negotiations and insisted the proposed deal, by outside appearances moribund, still has a pulse.

“Once we get past the finger-pointing and the drama, I think we will get back to the business of trying to make the deal happen,” said Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who has led local efforts to bring an NFL franchise to Exposition Park. “I don’t think the deal is dead by any stretch of the imagination.”

Pat Lynch, manager of the Coliseum, added: “We’ve been dead before. We were dead a couple of different times. Unfortunately, it’s not new to us. . . . It’s just another major challenge.”

In a statement released Friday, developer Eli Broad, one of the principals behind the Coliseum proposal, said he remained firmly committed to the plan. He reiterated his claim that the financing package, as submitted to NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue earlier in the week, could be accomplished at no net cost to taxpayers.

That statement was echoed by Coliseum Commission President Sheldon H. Sloan, who issued an endorsement of the Broad plan Friday and called for a special meeting of his panel Monday to discuss it.

“The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum continues to be the one potential site in the entire area which is not only the most economically viable, but also has a unanimity of support across the spectrum of the business and political leadership of the region,” Sloan said in a statement.

The verbal scrimmage came one day after the NFL announced it would no longer focus exclusively on putting an expansion team into the Coliseum--a development sources said all but guaranteed Los Angeles would lose out to Houston for the franchise bid. “We’re putting a stake in the heart of the Coliseum,” a high-ranking NFL official told The Times.

That dramatic shift came in response to an earlier statement by Gov. Gray Davis that California would not throw more than $150 million of publicly guaranteed bonds into the deal. The bonds would pay for a new parking garage at the Coliseum, which the NFL says is 15,000 spaces short.

Davis wanted to use parking fees to pay off the bonds; league officials have insisted the money go directly to the team’s owner. That and similar disagreements caused the deal to unravel.

Which is just as well in the opinion of Californians, according to the Jarvis Assn.-financed poll of 600 voters taken last weekend.

Eighty percent said they would be against using taxpayer-backed bonds or other public subsidies as bait for a Los Angeles-based team, figures show. That percentage remained constant, even when the respondents were told that some or all of the money might be returned in the form of taxes and fees.

Those numbers are in line with the results of a January 1998 Los Angeles Times poll, which showed that 62% of the residents in the county were against using public money to acquire a team.

Wachs, who fought giving public subsidies to developers of the new Staples Arena, said the poll underscored the “grave concern that people have over their hard-earned tax dollars going to billionaire owners and gazillionaire players.”

“I would not be surprised that at this very moment, people were huddling behind closed doors, trying to figure out a new way to get the public to pay for it,” he said at a news conference outside the Coliseum peristyle.

Wachs said phrases like “no net cost” were “nothing more than code words for hidden taxpayer subsidies.” And if supporters persist, Wachs added, he is prepared to circulate an initiative petition that would prohibit using city funds without voters’ approval.

Jarvis Assn. President Jon Coupal said he would do the same statewide if a deal included an unacceptable subsidy from Sacramento.

Ridley-Thomas, however, cautioned against getting hung up on the issue of subsidies, which he added were far from settled. He said the $150-million figure that has been widely reported is factually incorrect, and emphasized that terms of any deal are still fluid.

“This is about the 20th iteration in terms of a proposal to finance the deal, and it will change again,” he said.

Some investment of public money at Exposition Park would be totally defensible if done with the public’s knowledge, he said. And he chalked up the NFL’s announcement this week to frustration, not negotiation posturing.

“I think they’re tired of being thumped,” Ridley-Thomas said. “It’s time to get this deal done. Everybody’s wearing thin, I think.”