Pay dirt may lie beyond the end zone
People who were there say Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle’s face collapsed like a soggy circus tent. He and other city representatives had just finished telling people at a news conference why their town would be the best choice for a new NFL franchise, when rookie Councilman Harry Sidhu got up -- unannounced and uninvited to speak -- and begged to differ.
Sidhu said the proposed site in the Angel Stadium parking lot would deliver much more bang for the city’s buck if it were commercially developed. His spiel must have sounded to some ears like the drunk who stands up at a wedding and says the bride and groom each could do better.
That was in May 2005, and Sidhu was both celebrated and scorned for his dissent. To some, he was his own man; to others, a guy who just didn’t get it.
The rookie now is a couple years into his council life and feeling more than a little vindicated. That’s because a developer is offering a reported
$150 million-plus to build a
retail-office-residential complex on the site, three times the reported offer from the National Football League.
Let’s not get overly hung up on numbers, because they have a way of rising or falling or disappearing as time moves on. But for the moment, it surely means that Sidhu wasn’t just whistling “Dixie” 19 months ago. Four other developers also have made offers to the city, but none at this point approaches the dollar figure proposed by Archstone-Smith and Hines, a company with national reach.
“I’m leaning more toward this kind of development,” Sidhu said late Friday afternoon. He wasn’t referring specifically to the Archstone-Smith proposal, but to commercial development instead of an NFL franchise. “This makes more sense because comparing what economic engine the NFL can produce to what these can, it [development] is far better and much more viable for the city and taxpayers.”
I’m not here to argue that today, because a pro sports franchise isn’t all about dollars and cents, and even Sidhu notes that the developers’ proposals are just that -- nothing is etched in stone yet.
“I would not say it’s the end yet, because they still have lots of things to be ironed out on land use, the amount of retail space, the number of hotels, the rooms they want, the number of office buildings. All these items need to be put on the table and negotiated.”
And it’s not that the NFL is a dead issue in Anaheim, where the Pringle administration badly wants another sports franchise to augment the Ducks and Angels in the area around the burgeoning Platinum Triangle.
To hear the Pringle camp tell it, you’d think the absence of the NFL would turn the area into the Polonium Triangle.
And with a new Anaheim council member replacing a staunch NFL supporter, it’s not even clear if the three votes needed to back a franchise still exist. “It’s hard to say [what the council’s pleasure is],” Sidhu says, “but now the NFL has to work harder than before to show they’re better than these proposals that came in.”
Despite his public dousing of the NFL at last year’s news conference, Sidhu insists he isn’t anti-NFL. “I was never opposed to the NFL,” he says. “I always wanted to be fair to everybody.”
As miffed as Pringle was at Sidhu, it was probably less because of the latter’s manners and more because of the substance of his remarks. The football bandwagon has been rolling at City Hall for quite some time, but pooh-poohers need to be heard too.
Without mentioning any wars by name, we’ve learned in national politics what happens when a minority view doesn’t get aired in a timely way. And although I like football, I’ve never gotten the sense that Orange County -- or even Anaheim residents, themselves -- are clamoring for a team to replace the long-gone Rams.
Nice to have, but, as Jerry Maguire of movie fame came to learn, show me the money.
Like I said, that’s a debate for some other time.
For now, $150 million for a plot of parking lot ground sounds like a lot of dough for Anaheim. That’s how Sidhu sees it, but I applaud him as much for doing his civic duty in May 2005 as for his economics.
“I got elected to do what is the right thing for the taxpayers, what’s right for the city,” he says, when I ask if he feels vindicated by the big-ticket proposals coming in.
“That’s when I’ve spoken and raised my voice. Even though I was a loner, I was always taught the time will come.”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana
.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.
