The NFL Is Taxing L.A.’s Patience

It would be easy to make fun of Chris Norby. Norby is a history teacher at Brea Olinda High School and a Fullerton city councilman, so why in the world would he want to be limping around the corner of Vermont Avenue and Exposition Boulevard on a bubbling hot Thursday afternoon, carrying a sign and beseeching puzzled drivers to honk in agreement?

Honk if you agree--”Lunch Boxes, No Luxury Boxes,” “NFL Owners Play With Your Own Money,” “NFL Go To H . . . (Houston).”

And sometimes someone would honk, often because five children would plead through open car windows. “Honk and we’ll get a dime,” the children begged. Norby had promised the kids that besides the melting ice pops and the free bologna sandwiches, they could get a dime for every honk prompted by their sign-waving.

Norby organized this anti-NFL rally outside Exposition Park, a block from the Coliseum. “It’s sponsored by PANG, People Against the NFL Giveaway,” he says. Norby wants you to know that he is not on this street corner as any part of his job as a Fullerton councilman. He is doing this because he is a California taxpayer, “and the state taxpayers might get hit with a $150 million bill for the NFL thing,” Norby says.

This “NFL thing,” of course, is the tortured negotiations between the NFL and Los Angeles about bringing pro football back to the city. It is a proposal by billionaire Eli Broad to renovate and upgrade the Coliseum that has seemed most attractive to the NFL, but the NFL has also thrown the most recent proposals back because there is not enough public money--from the city, from the state, from you folks the taxpayers.

Here’s the thing, Allan Pilger was saying. Sports teams have gotten used to demanding, and then getting, the public’s money. Pilger is from Mission Viejo and came to Vermont and Exposition representing a group in his hometown that is still livid because Mission Viejo and several small business owners were left holding a debt after the debacle that was called the Mission Viejo Vigilantes. This minor league baseball team left Long Beach and expected Mission Viejo to build it a $6 million ballpark.

The stadium wasn’t built. The team went bankrupt. The Vigilantes don’t live here anymore. But their debt does.

“When will we learn?” Pilger says. “Businessmen want us to build things for them. Los Angeles doesn’t need the NFL. The NFL needs Los Angeles.”

Boom. There it is.

These 15 or 20 people who stood in the sun for two hours attracted not much attention. A few car honks. A police car that sounded its siren briefly.

Certainly people have protested in other cities. In San Francisco, against a new baseball park. In Oakland, against a new football stadium. In Cincinnati and Chicago. But usually the protests don’t work. Usually the new stadiums get built. With public money somehow. With bonds and tax breaks and free land.

“I think,” says Greg Nelson, an aide to Joel Wachs, the Los Angeles city councilman in whose 2nd District the Coliseum sits, “that the NFL is afraid to take less [tax] money in Los Angeles because then all the other cities who have coughed up the tax money to build new stadiums are going to stop and ask why. And the same with the next place the NFL wants to go.

“But the thing is,” Nelson says, “is that we believe the NFL needs Los Angeles a lot more than Los Angeles needs the NFL.”

That’s how it seems to Norby. The NFL needs the bright lights of Hollywood, he says. It needs the nation’s second-largest TV market. It needs to start attracting more Latino fans nationwide if the sport is to grow, and where better to attract Latino fans, Norby says, “then right here in Los Angeles.”

The little group kept on marching, the representative from the Libertarian Party, the representative from NOW, the National Organization for Women. “Who are those nuts over there?” one man whispered, pointing. When told what was happening, the man shook his head and said, “Good luck.”

Other pedestrians stopped and looked at the signs. Nobody wanted to stop and talk.

The deadline for the NFL and the city to make a deal is Sept. 15. The NFL probably won’t notice the Thursday group of marchers. Those people make no difference. But the NFL should notice something else. There has been no public groundswell of support to bring the NFL back to Southern California. And maybe the NFL should care. Because more and more of the United States is going to look like Southern California, more people from Asia, from South and Central America, and those people will have to be taught about the NFL.

They already understand about tax money. Spending it on pro football, that probably won’t be popular. Southern California politicians want to be popular. Caving in to the NFL won’t make them popular.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com