TimesOC: Did Anaheim gift stadium, land to Angels owner Arte Moreno?

Good morning, and welcome to the TimesOC newsletter. It’s Friday, Oct. 2.

My name is David Carrillo Peñaloza, the author of the TimesOC newsletter and an editor for Los Angeles Times Community News.

At the 11th hour, the Anaheim City Council voted to keep the Angels in Anaheim until at least 2050.

But was it a fair deal for the city, or Anaheim’s version of a baseball giveaway?

Reporters Bill Shaikin and Ben Brazil covered the almost eight-hour online City Council meeting, which went past 1 a.m. Wednesday. Council members voted 5-2 to approve a revised deal with Angels owner Arte Moreno, selling Angel Stadium and the 150 acres it sits on for $150 million in cash and $170 million in community credits to keep the Major League Baseball team in Anaheim for the next 30 years.

Moreno’s SRB Management company agreed to build 466 affordable housing units and a seven-acre park as part of the $170 million in credits. The units and park will be built where the parking lots are currently located.

The two council members casting dissenting votes — Jose Moreno and Denise Barnes — said the price tag didn’t match the site’s city-commissioned appraisal of around $500 million.

“When we say its market value was $320 million, we don’t know that because we did not open it up for the market,” Jose Moreno said. “We opened it up to one bidder, and that was Arte Moreno.”

A second vote on the matter is scheduled for next week, although Mayor Harry Sidhu and council members Stephen Faessel, Jordan Brandman, Lucille Kring and Trevor O’Neil are expected to vote in favor of the deal again.

For Barnes, she said it was not a good deal for the city, calling it “a gift, not a sale.”

Fidel Bravo throws Zokre into the ropes during Fight Club OC‘s drive-in wrestling show at the Orange County fairgrounds in Costa Mesa on Sept. 24.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Masked performers at Orange County fairgrounds

Last week, reporter Andrew Turner wrote about people sitting inside their cars during a drive-in wrestling show and watching lucha libre wrestlers throw each other around on a stage 3½ feet off the ground.

Now there’s a drive-through event that is supposed to frighten those at the fairgrounds in Costa Mesa.

A drive-through Halloween haunt began this week and reporter Sara Cardine has all the details on the 45-minute experience. She wrote that participants could drive through four experiential zones, each of which combines live performances, dazzling special effects and coordinated lighting and sound in a production that can be enjoyed from inside a vehicle.

The Urban Legends of Southern California show will feature plenty of scary people, all behind masks, to scare you and protect you from the coronavirus.

More O.C. stories

— Columnist Gustavo Arellano writes that President Donald Trump’s war on election integrity follows a racist playbook used in Orange County in the 1980s.

— The Orange County district attorney’s office has charged the driver who drove her car through a crowd of protesters in Yorba Linda on Saturday with attempted murder. Tatiana Turner, 40, an organizer of the rally against police brutality and racism, allegedly ran over a woman’s head and broke a man’s leg.

— The Orange County Health Care Agency said that school reopenings have so far not caused an increase in new COVID-19 cases in the county.

— Eight months after Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and eight other Orange County residents died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, where Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies took photos and shared them, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that makes it a crime for police and first responders to take unauthorized photos of dead people at an accident or crime scene.

— A fishing tournament for 30 veterans in Newport Beach tested its competitors for COVID-19 a week before the four-day competition started and on the first day of fishing. Organizers of the third annual War Heroes on the Water tournament are looking out for the veterans’ health.

— The CIF Southern Section announced that the 2020-21 modified high school sports season is going to start as planned, in mid-December, if it gets clearance from health officials during the pandemic.

— The wife of Costa Mesa High School football coach Jimmy Nolan has awakened from surgery. Taran Nolan was severely injured in a car crash that killed two people, including her youngest daughter, Micki, in South Carolina last month.

— Max Tuerk, a former Santa Margarita Catholic High School, USC and NFL offensive lineman, died in June from an enlarged heart, according to autopsy results from the Orange County coroner’s office.

Get in touch

Have any questions or suggestions for the TimesOC newsletter? Email me at david.carrillo@latimes.com.

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See you next week.