Way Is Cleared in Coliseum Plan

The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank and city officials have reached a preliminary agreement on a key financial link in a plan to bring an NFL team back to the Coliseum, officials said Wednesday.

A final agreement would put a potential Coliseum deal with the NFL on track to be worked out by an Oct. 25-27 league owners’ meeting.

Last year, Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles) authored, and Gov. Schwarzenegger signed, AB 2805, a law designed to help finance certain infrastructure improvements around the Coliseum. But a city ordinance was needed to implement the law.

Earlier this month, I-Bank staff said conditions of the ordinance proposed by city officials should be tightened so that funds for roads and water lines and the like outside the Coliseum would not be available should one of the three NFL teams already in California desire to move to the venue.

The Raiders, San Francisco 49ers and San Diego Chargers are all looking for a new or refurbished stadium, although none had signaled interest in moving to the Coliseum.

“This sends the NFL a signal that we are all on the same page,” Ridley-Thomas, a longtime Coliseum proponent, said.

Said Pat Lynch, the general manager of the Coliseum: “We’re very pleased that we’ve resolved our issues. We feel it’s very important symbolically for the NFL that we can all work together, that everyone is cooperating -- city, county, state -- and we continue to present this unified front.”

Phil Angelides, the state treasurer and a member of the I-Bank board, said, “The right thing to do is to give the city of Los Angeles the ability to attract an NFL team and redevelop the neighborhood. That’s what I pushed for and that’s what I believe is right.”

The Los Angeles area has been without an NFL football team since after the 1994 season, when the Rams left Anaheim for St. Louis and the Raiders left the Coliseum for their original home, Oakland.

The Coliseum and Anaheim are under consideration again as NFL sites. Backers of both locations have been working for months to present the outline of a deal to the NFL by next month’s meeting.

The NFL, if it selects the Coliseum’s proposal, would invest $500 million or more to rebuild the Coliseum inside the historic venue’s existing walls. An Anaheim stadium would be built next to Angel Stadium.

An NFL official declined to comment.

“There was some fine tuning we needed to do,” said Anne Sheehan, chief deputy director of the state finance department and another I-Bank board member. “We wanted to be able to help facilitate this and to do it ... legally and properly and not just rush it through. We wanted to make sure the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed.”