Governor Becomes Player in Talks for NFL Team in L.A.

After months of infuriatingly slow negotiations between local leaders and the National Football League, the state government has launched an aggressive move to take over the talks, roiling the waters even as major issues, particularly the question of parking, remain unresolved.

The state’s effort is being waged on several fronts. Gov. Gray Davis has met with leaders of the groups trying to secure a team for Los Angeles, and the attorney general’s office has tried to push aside the commission that oversees the Coliseum by arguing that the state, not the commission, should be the lead negotiator for the stadium and park that surrounds it. Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles) is pushing a bill that would eliminate that commission and replace it with a largely state-appointed board that would oversee all of Exposition Park, including the historic stadium.

The most striking development, say insiders, has been the governor’s growing role. Davis, once a background figure on the issue, has emerged as a player in recent weeks, according to participants in the negotiations.

In addition to sounding out the prospective owners, he has spoken with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and has appointed a personal representative, Bill Chadwick, to represent the state in negotiations.

“It has become abundantly clear to the governor that there is promise for this deal,” said one person who has spoken with Davis. “He wants to make this happen.”

Another person close to the negotiations agreed. “He’s involved now, he’s got his person in here working the deal, and he’s going to get it done,” that source said.

Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who has long led the effort to bring football back to his home district and the Coliseum, has spoken directly with Davis and his staff. “The role that the governor’s office is playing is that of trying to make sure the state’s interests are represented and protected,” he said. “And of making sure that the deal goes down.”

The growing state involvement in part reflects frustration over the local handling of the NFL talks, and some parties close to those discussions express optimism, apparently without much basis, that Davis’ interest could bode well for an infusion of state money that some say is needed to get a deal. Others see the state’s increasing involvement differently: as an attempt to claim credit for a deal on the eve of its completion and as a way for the state to reclaim control over the Coliseum, which is overseen by a board whose majority comes from the city and county, not Sacramento.

“You know the saying: Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan,” said one person with a long history in the state-local relationship at the Coliseum. “For all these years where nothing was going on at the Coliseum, you didn’t hear anyone talking about having the state move in. Now, when something’s happening, suddenly the state wants a piece of it.”

Meanwhile, local leaders remain puzzled and confounded by the NFL’s continuing insistence that any plan to bring football to the Coliseum should be accompanied by a proposal to build 25,000 parking spaces at Exposition Park--an idea so farfetched that officials say it is simply impossible.

State help could ease the way for additional parking at Exposition Park, which is owned by the state, but even the most hearty football boosters acknowledge that building spaces for 25,000 cars at the park would be prohibitively expensive and would so radically alter the park’s look that it might antagonize neighbors and invite the opposition of historic preservationists.

As a result, local officials hope to persuade the NFL to back off its parking requirement. USC, which is across the street from Exposition Park, has indicated its willingness to supply thousands of parking spaces on game days, and local football boosters hope the NFL will agree to a parking plan that includes those spaces.

At last month’s NFL owners’ meeting in Atlanta, former Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz presented the owners with a plan that sketched out a vision of how 25,000 spaces might be built at Exposition Park. That plan, which also includes a splashy vision for the stadium, turned many heads, including Tagliabue’s, but it has some conspicuous weaknesses.

Critics say it can’t be built without huge sums of public money, that it invites opposition from historic preservationists, and that building huge parking decks around the periphery of Exposition Park would turn the park into a sort of walled-off fortress, insulated from the local community.

Eli Broad, who leads the other group trying to get a team, has recommended a parking alternative that relies in part on the USC spaces. Although neither he nor Ovitz will comment on the status of their discussions with the state, sources close to the talks believe the state government ultimately will endorse something closer to Broad’s ideas for parking than Ovitz’s original plan. Those sources add that Ovitz himself is backing away from proposing that the park house all 25,000 spaces.

Tagliabue is expected to come to Los Angeles this week, as part of the NFL’s determination to conduct “due diligence” on the competing stadium and parking proposals before the league. When he does, local officials say, they want to impress him with the complications involved in providing 25,000 spaces at the park itself and instead try to convince him that some compromise needs to be struck.

Making that case may fall to Chadwick, the latest entry in the NFL talks and one of the few who has won the confidence of both ownership groups. In the weeks since he was tapped to represent the state, Chadwick has conducted a sort of shuttle diplomacy, reaching out to rivals as he attempts to protect the state’s interests and help secure a team.

“A team needs to be brought together,” Chadwick said Saturday. “As the representative of the state, I view my role as trying to be the leader of that team.”

Members of the rival camps join in praising Chadwick’s work, in part because the prospective owners have grown weary of dealing with the Coliseum Commission, the panel that holds a lease for the stadium. Although supportive of the football effort generally, the commission has occasionally rejected terms that it says are too generous to the billionaire would-be owners, earning the panel the disfavor of the two camps.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has been a particular irritant in this respect, some officials say, aggressively questioning some proposals that he says have been too generous with state and local resources. Yaroslavsky was not available for comment on this story.

The NFL also has clashed with the commission, repeatedly expressing frustration that it is not sure whom to negotiate with, because the commission holds a lease for the Coliseum but the state owns the land around it. What’s more, the commission’s lease for the Coliseum runs out in 2006, so any deal that it cuts for a team will have to involve the state government, too.

That’s where Chadwick comes in, sources say. An experienced and respected lawyer, investment banker and deal-maker who generally avoids politics but who met Davis during last year’s gubernatorial campaign, Chadwick has been in regular contact with state agencies, prospective owners and the league.

But although he impresses insiders with his knowledge and determination to cut a deal, in the end, he may not have what either the prospective owners or the NFL is looking for: money.

Broad is well connected to Davis, and so is Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate who is the big money behind Ovitz. But the governor has shown no interest in using state money to subsidize billionaires trying to buy a football team, and leaders of the Legislature have shown even less.

“If the NFL wants to come to Los Angeles, that would be great,” said Michael Bustamante, the governor’s chief spokesman. “But the governor is not interested in spending any state money on this deal.”