L.A. City Council Clears Path for NFL Team Bid

Without dissent, or even comment, the Los Angeles City Council on Friday approved plans to remodel the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in a bid to lure an NFL team.

The vote was 12-0.

The council’s action sets the stage for NFL owners, at a meeting Tuesday in Denver, to consider whether to move forward with the Coliseum, with Anaheim -- or perhaps with both. The Southland has been without an NFL team since the end of the 1994 season, when the Rams moved to St. Louis and the Raiders returned to Oakland.

The vote also served as an emphatic demonstration of a point that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and others on the council have stressed recently: that doing business with City Hall is no longer a minefield of petty arguments and personality politics -- obstacles that in the past have given the NFL considerable pause in weighing a return to the nation’s No. 2 television market.

The action Friday capped more than three years of studies and public meetings at which issues as varied as alcohol permits, signage, infrastructure enhancements and architectural design matters were aired. No critics appeared from the dozens of onlookers in the ornate council chambers.

Afterward, Councilwoman Jan Perry called the proposed Coliseum remodel a “catalytic project that will have a positive impact in south Los Angeles.”

Had the council wavered, Councilman Bernard Parks said afterward, the NFL’s session next week in Denver “would not have been a good meeting -- they would have looked at it and said, ‘Oh, we’re back to the same old L.A.’ ”

Instead, he added, “We said we were going to do it. We achieved it. We’re done.”

Villaraigosa, who has been in close contact with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, said in a recent interview with The Times, “This town is different. We really are open for business, and in particular NFL business.”

Owners in Denver are expected to weigh a proposal authorizing Tagliabue to direct extensive design and engineering studies at one or both sites, a plan that would see the league spend $5 million to $10 million. In June, NFL representatives, perhaps including Tagliabue, are due to visit Southern California to measure business support.

The Coliseum would be rebuilt around the historic peristyle end, the 92,000-seat bowl reworked to seat 68,000 for NFL games, 80,000 for USC games and Super Bowls. The NFL would enter into a 25-year lease extendable to 55 years.

Anaheim would sell the league a 53-acre plot in what is now parking around Angel Stadium.

The league would have the option of putting up the stadium as part of a “sports and entertainment complex” featuring 750,000 square feet of commercial space, a 500-unit hotel and, if the Angels’ lease could be modified, up to 700 residential units.

The league’s plan is to pick a site or sites, then later identify a team, or teams, and owners. It is uncertain whether the league is leaning toward expansion or relocation. Play could begin as soon as the 2010 season.

Stadium costs at either site are estimated at about $800 million. Neither project calls for the use of taxpayer general-fund monies.

But, in a California-style example of a public-private partnership, about $25 million in tax increment monies would be available to pay for infrastructure upgrades in and around Exposition Park should an NFL team from out of state go to the Coliseum.

The money becomes available only when a team arrives on the scene.