Hold the Line on NFL Deal

Have Los Angeles and California officials done everything within reason to bring a new professional football team to the city? It’s a good question, since the National Football League’s mythical Sept. 15 deadline for a deal in Los Angeles passed last week with little notice.

Generally the grade for the local effort is a good one. However, there were problems. First there was the unwelcome rivalry between backers of a Carson site and those rightfully behind the Coliseum as the best venue for a team. And very little effort was made to persuade Angelenos of the potential economic benefits of bringing pro football back to a newly revitalized downtown. And in retrospect, the take-it-or-leave-it pitch to the NFL by Bill Chadwick, Gov. Gray Davis’ representative, might have been hurried and ill-considered.

That said, every sensible offer that can be made to the league at this point has been made. There is wide agreement among local and state officials that there should be no big public money giveaways to attract a team. Yet there remain ways, for example ticket taxes or user fees, to make a deal worthwhile to both Los Angeles and the NFL owners, though some might say otherwise. We say don’t listen to what the league says. Watch what it does.

It’s instructive to examine what has happened with other recent NFL franchises. Take the actions of Cleveland and Ohio, for example. Public money was poured into a sports arena and a baseball stadium, and public funds paid for 70% of the cost of a $283-million football stadium. This in a city that has a 30% poverty rate and a struggling public school system, a city that went bankrupt in 1978. But, as a Cleveland columnist once put it, Mayor Michael White dared not go down in history as the man who lost professional football.

In Baltimore, the state and local governments have spent $210 million for a baseball stadium and an additional $200 million for a football stadium. The city has proposed a $200-million arena, though it doesn’t have a team to use it. The NFL and other sports leagues are comfortable with these situations. Some states and cities are willing to ignore social needs and/or fiscal sensibility and dig deeply into the public coffers to place themselves on the national pro sports map.

What also drives the NFL owners’ hard bargains is, in a word, debt. It has reached epic proportions in the league. Baltimore Raven owner Art Modell was trying last week to sell up to a third of his NFL team because it’s buried in debt. The team has already defaulted on $55 million in loans this year. Two-thirds of Daniel Snyder’s record $750-million purchase of the Washington Redskins and their stadium was borrowed. The team’s annual operating income won’t cover his bills, according to a Forbes magazine report.

So, the path the NFL is likely to take regarding a team in Los Angeles will have nothing to do with the Sept. 15 deadline. News reports had defined the quest for a new team as a struggle between Houston and Los Angeles, but what the clubby NFL in fact is trying to do is to solve several problems around the league. Owners of the Minnesota, Buffalo, New Orleans and Arizona NFL teams, among others, are pressing for new stadiums and more public money. What better leverage to use on those cities than the idea that the owners might bolt to Texas or California?

The path for Los Angeles and California officials is simple and straightforward: They should stand their ground. If Los Angeles and California stay the course, professional sports might forsake the national competition involving cities and franchises that too often comes at the expense of the public coffers. In football, there can always be sudden death, but this game isn’t over yet.