State Asked to Study New Plan for NFL Team

A new approach to subsidizing professional football in Los Angeles is circulating among top city and state officials as they try to rescue the effort to win a National Football League franchise for the Coliseum from what many observers believe is its imminent demise.

Under the new proposal, which Assembly Speaker Antonio R. Villaraigosa has urged Gov. Gray Davis’ football representative to study, the state would help pay for new parking at Exposition Park, but would let the new owners keep the money generated by operating the parking structures. Another letter, this one by leading elected officials who represent the area, also urged Davis to consider the new approach.

The idea represents an important change from the proposal recently rejected by the NFL, which called for the state or some other agency to issue the bonds for the parking but proposed that the revenue be diverted to pay back those bonds--thus depriving the team of an important source of income enjoyed by most professional football franchises.

As a result, football boosters hope that the latest suggestion could entice the NFL to reconsider Los Angeles’ prospects, which have been fading ever since Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said owners were concerned about a team’s viability here, and Davis declined to up the state’s ante of public funds.

Whether the latest suggestion will break the logjam is unclear, as its net effect is to reduce the amount of money that would come to state and local coffers as a result of bringing a team here and to divert more of it to the franchise’s owners. That will make it a hard sell politically, and some local leaders who have seen the proposal predict that it will be rejected by the state.

On Wednesday, City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said he was encouraged by the latest round of talks, which he described as “preliminary but promising.”

“We have what we think to be a very viable solution to the financing issue,” he said. “This has three key elements: No new taxes, no increase in existing taxes to be borne by the public, and no risk to the taxpayers.”

Ridley-Thomas said he had discussed the proposal with NFL officials. “They’re interested,” he said. League spokesman Greg Aiello did not respond to a request for comment.

Where the new proposal recommends getting the payback money for the parking improvements, sources said, is from taxes that the team would pay anyway, as well as those that would be paid by the players and others who work for the new franchise. Such things as business license fees, income taxes, corporate taxes and state and local sales taxes all would be funneled back into the football effort.

A similar approach was used for a small piece of the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles and for improvements to Disneyland in Anaheim. Villaraigosa, in his letter, touted the Disney experience, saying the arrangement “created no exposure to the general fund of the city of Anaheim and provided for continuing revenue flows to the city over and above the payment of the bonds.”

Villaraigosa’s endorsement would be a major step in winning support for the proposal because he is arguably the state’s second-most important public official.

But his letter stops just short of endorsing the idea. Instead, the speaker asks Bill Chadwick, who had served as Davis’ emissary to the football negotiations, to study the financing option and “evaluate whether it would help us achieve our objectives of renovating the Coliseum and Exposition Park at no taxpayer cost.”

Technically, Chadwick no longer is in a position to do that because he resigned that post weeks ago. But sources said Chadwick has studied the idea. He does not favor it because it essentially eliminates the broader economic benefit of bringing pro football back to Los Angeles by pumping any economic boost back into the team itself.

Led by Councilwoman Laura Chick, members of the Los Angeles City Council are considering a motion to express their opposition to the use of any public money in support of football. The council has not acted on that motion yet, in part because Ridley-Thomas is urging his colleagues to study the new proposal.

Although Ridley-Thomas said he remains optimistic that a deal can be struck to bring football to Los Angeles, others have given up hope. One sign of what they see as the fading prospects: With just four weeks to go until the NFL deadline, Mayor Richard Riordan and businessman Eli Broad, one of the potential owners, are off on vacation together.