Watch Out for Sneak Play in Massive Redevelopment Plan

Let me begin with the football stadium, which keeps popping up in connection with a $2.4-billion makeover for downtown Los Angeles.

Not even with a gun to our heads should we fork over one dime of public money to plan, clear the way for or build a football stadium in downtown Los Angeles, just so a coterie of billionaires can have an NFL franchise to play with.

We shouldn’t put up one box of nails or a single bag of cement. Even if you happen to believe for some reason that L.A. needs an NFL team, building a stadium near Staples Center makes no sense, particularly as part of a downtown revitalization effort.

A gargantuan concrete bowl would gobble up several dozen acres and sit vacant roughly 340 days out of the year.

No one is going to open a restaurant across the street from this moon crater to cash in on eight Sundays worth of business.

I’m well aware the L.A. City Council claims that a football stadium ain’t part of the plan it breathlessly rubber-stamped Wednesday by a vote of 12 to 3. But the same council couldn’t bring itself to approve a ban on the use of redevelopment money for a stadium.

So if you smell something, you’re not alone. Some council members admitted that the new redevelopment plan could conceivably facilitate a stadium project.

Meanwhile, as the sad sack San Diego Chargers moved their training facility to a Carson site owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, the guy behind Staples Center, Anschutz and his pals were in New York to chat up a local franchise with NFL bosses.

Connect the dots, comrades.

Anschutz’s crew has said it would build the stadium with private money, but stadiums seldom get built without taxpayers getting their pockets picked.

“Generally the public pays for about one-third of the cost, or around $75 million, in land acquisition and infrastructure,” says Neil deMause, author of a book called “Field of Schemes, How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit.”

As sports complexes go, a football stadium is the worst kind of welfare for billionaires, deMause says, because there simply aren’t enough games to promise a return on the investment. A baseball stadium makes more sense, but even then, do we want to help pay for a rich man’s playpen?

So you might have a terrific helmet-smashing ballgame out there some day, with $10-million quarterbacks and slinky cheerleaders and $7.50 beers and billionaire owners grinning like thieves over the TV deals alone. But in every neighborhood of the city, Johnny’s school might be short on books while class size balloons to 50 because there’s a drain on public funds.

So if these guys want a stadium, the first thing to do is put it on the outskirts of downtown or somewhere else altogether. And if the owners don’t think it makes financial sense to pay for it themselves, that should tell you everything you need to know.

Now let me get to the rest of the redevelopment plan.

Yeah, I’d love to see a vital, vibrant downtown, and with such a huge stock of spectacular vacant buildings, the potential transformation is greater in L.A. than in any other city I know of.

But it’s precisely because there’s so much at stake that I have a problem with what looks like a rush job on a mammoth plan, with largely unspecific goals other than to create thousands of residential units, jobs and social services.

Special redevelopment districts are risky propositions, says UCLA researcher David Runsten, who was appalled by the mixed results and lack of accountability in the last major downtown revitalization project.

These things tend to be planned by a tiny group of public officials, Runsten said, with little critical analysis of whether planners are pitching “what the community wants, or what’s being proposed to them by developers.”

Look, maybe this plan is a work of genius. But how would we know?

Why did the City Council order the plan to be done in half the typical 18 months, particularly when there were so many questions about who benefited from the last major so-called redevelopment downtown?

What are the guarantees? What are the risks to citywide services if tax dollars ordinarily shared by everyone are plowed back into the downtown project?

“My concern is the lack of public participation in the process,” says Councilman Jack Weiss, one of the three who voted no. “The Community Redevelopment Agency says there was substantial opportunity for public comment, and I believe them. But there’s an extra level of analysis I would have benefited from.”

Absent that, Weiss was left with nothing but questions. And we know he couldn’t have gotten much help from Mayor Slim Jim Hahn.

“I’m still studying it,” Hahn told the Daily News in a comment that included half-hearted support of downtown redevelopment.

Still studying it?

What else is on his docket, fine-tuning that bold idea for more left-turn lanes?

This is the biggest downtown redevelopment plan in history, it’s already out the door and the mayor is still studying it?

What he’s really doing, in another chapter of profiles in courage, is refusing to take a leadership role downtown because he fears it’ll cost him in the secession-minded Valley.

So let me fill in for him.

If the redevelopment goal of creating 13,000 new residential units works out, and that’s a huge if, it would be a good start.

You can’t remake downtown Los Angeles or any other big-city downtown without tens of thousands of people living there.

If all you’ve got is a bunch of sports hooligans gassing in to spend three hours at Staples Center and then having dinner at Hooters in the planned sports-entertainment complex, you don’t have a real city.

You’ve got another Universal CityWalk, and don’t get me started on that.

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Steve Lopez writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.