2 Stadium Groups Move Toward Unity

A day after the National Football League signaled its desire to bring football back to Los Angeles, members of two competing local efforts were moving to unify behind a single proposal that would drop the campaign for a Carson stadium and join forces to support renovation of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Acting as a broker at the center of the effort is Mayor Richard Riordan, who has approached leaders of both investment groups in the hope of convincing them to merge their resources. Sources said the mayor already has spoken with key members in each camp and is setting up a series of meetings intended to end the competition and allow backers of the Carson effort the chance to sign on with the Coliseum group.

“Our door is open,” billionaire financial services wizard Eli Broad, one of the leaders of the Coliseum bid, said Wednesday. “We’d be delighted to get together and talk about it. I would hope that we would end up with a unified bid behind the Coliseum.”

Hollywood executive and onetime super-agent Michael Ovitz, leader of the Carson group, said it was too soon to say whether a single proposal could be agreed upon. “It’s hard to assess that right now,” he said. “We’re thrilled that L.A. is in the running.”

Ovitz, who said he had not yet talked with Riordan, added that he planned to speak with at least some of his partners Wednesday afternoon.

Earvin “Magic” Johnson, one of those partners, said earlier in the day that the time had come for his group to join with Broad and real estate developer Ed Roski.

“We have to have a meeting here sometime soon,” said Johnson, who appeared with Riordan at an event Wednesday morning and spoke with him before and after. “If it’s the Coliseum, I’m for that. What I want is football, and it sounds like the Coliseum may be the way to get it.”

Although Ovitz and Broad, the two lead investors in the competing proposals, have yet to speak directly about joining forces, sources in the football campaign said quiet progress already is being made to merge the groups.

City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, the Coliseum’s leading proponent, confirmed that he and Ovitz had exchanged letters about the idea. Ridley-Thomas said he believes that an agreement can be reached before NFL officials come to Los Angeles in April for their next visit.

“What you see now are in one way or another the elements that will finally come together to constitute the deal,” he said, cryptically referring to the Roski and Broad partnership that he believes will win the support of Ovitz and Johnson. “The overture [to Ovitz et al] has been made.”

The councilman added: “I think it’s all but decided.”

In fact, Johnson’s comments reflect the strong sense among Los Angeles leaders that a team now is firmly within the city’s grasp and that the Coliseum is the only place that can unify the competing efforts.

Politically, there is no way Los Angeles’ mayor or other elected leaders can drop their support for the Los Angeles site and support Carson’s bid. So, if there is to be a unified effort, the Coliseum offers the only practical alternative. Moreover, many of the city’s leading business executives take their cue from Riordan, himself a multimillionaire investor, so a unified business front behind Carson also seems improbable.

On the other hand, Broad is not only Riordan’s close friend but says he would also welcome the notion of bringing other investors into the fold. As one of the city’s richest men, Broad does not need partners for their money, but their presence would demonstrate some of the civic commitment the NFL says it wants to see.

The two sides will not need any introduction. Ovitz and Broad live just a few doors away from one another, and Ron Burkle, another key member of the Ovitz group, is Broad’s longtime friend. Burkle and Broad vacation together and have cooperated on a number of ventures, including the recently successful campaign to secure the Democratic National Convention in 2000 for the city.

All of the participants in the football effort also know and have worked with Riordan, both as mayor and in his previous career as an investor and philanthropist. In fact, Riordan helped launch Johnson’s business career, giving him important advice in the basketball star’s early forays into investment. Today, Johnson runs one of the most successful movie theater complexes in the country and is continuing to invest in the Crenshaw district.

Coliseum ‘Head and Shoulders Above’

Riordan’s effort to bring the parties together clearly is intended to seal the deal for the Coliseum, as he indicated again Wednesday.

“The Coliseum is head and shoulders above any other venue,” the mayor said. “We’re going to have a team here.”

After first resisting the Coliseum, with its bad memories of Raider games, the NFL owners now seem to be leaning toward the stadium as the most logical place for football in Los Angeles. Now that they believe in the Coliseum, however, some NFL owners have grumbled that they are feeling pressure to accept New Coliseum Ventures, the investor group led by Broad and Roski, as the team’s new owner. That is because Roski has exclusive negotiating rights with the Coliseum.

Roski has offered to waive that right if it stands in the way of football returning to Los Angeles. But the NFL, which is having difficulty getting its way with Los Angeles, may find it hard to nudge Roski aside.

Sources familiar with the views of both New Coliseum Ventures and the Coliseum Commission said Wednesday that there is no sentiment on the commission to accept a deal that cuts Roski out. According to those sources, commissioners believe that the real estate developer has “moved the ball” further than anyone imagined possible.

Those sources added that although it is clear the NFL does not want to be told who its franchise owner would be, it is not certain that the league really cares who controls the venue.

Roski, in fact, may be satisfied with the landlord’s role, particularly since that would position him to profit not only from NFL football, but also from USC games, concerts, outdoor conventions and professional soccer, if--as the same sources say is likely--the Galaxy moves from the Rose Bowl to the renovated Coliseum.

When Broad announced his decision to join the NFL campaign, he said that if he and Roski were successful in securing a team, he would oversee football operations and Roski would be chiefly responsible for the stadium.

Even if that happens, one remaining issue would be the question of public financing. There too, local officials expressed optimism.

L.A. Reluctant to Use Tax Dollars

The Coliseum proposal includes no public cash, but the stadium site--which would probably be leased at low cost for a long period--represents a substantial public gift. Carson has offered to put up public money, but development of that stadium is more complicated, in part because the site contains toxic waste that must be cleaned up.

“There will be no general fund money put up for this deal,” said county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who also sits on the Coliseum Commission, of the Los Angeles offer. “I can’t imagine any situation in which the county or the city would dip into their public treasuries to make this deal happen.”

Some local leaders, including Riordan, say they would support some tax money to subsidize the stadium as long as that money was generated by the football team itself and, therefore, did not cut into existing city services.

Yaroslavsky, a potential mayoral candidate in 2001, said he believes that the current level of public participation is sufficient.

“They’ve already pledged the redevelopment increment tax funds and the ticket tax. Nobody objects to that,” he said. “But in terms of taking money that otherwise would go to policing or toward providing health care to uninsured children in order to finance a professional football team, it’s a nonstarter.”

The reluctance of local officials to dedicate tax dollars to the project reflects the relative insignificance of football to an economy as big as Los Angeles’. Aside from a few economically significant Super Bowls, football’s main appeal is that it adds to a city’s image, not to its bottom line.

“Professional football by itself means nothing to the economy,” one person involved in the negotiations said. “It creates a handful of minimum-wage jobs and further enriches a handful of millionaires. . . . You don’t have 31 zillionaires owning football teams because it’s a marginal deal.”

Times City/County Bureau Chief Tim Rutten and staff writer Beth Shuster contributed to this article.