If San Diego or Oakland move to LA....
Mike
Angeles. While Majestic officials say the NFL has told them to work
quietly, the list of teams in financial difficulty and perhaps
available for purchase or a potential move is thought to include
Jacksonville, St. Louis, Minnesota, San Diego, San Francisco and
Oakland.
An uphill climb that just might land the NFL back in L.A.
By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1, 2009
CITY OF INDUSTRY, CALIF. -- On the side of the freeway to Pomona is a
hill covered with grass and weeds. It is an unlikely place, one of the
few left unblemished by a bulldozer's blade in this valley of one-
story office parks and distribution centers east of downtown Los
Angeles. Yet it is here where a billionaire developer named Ed Roski
can see a football stadium of 75,000 seats and luxury suites.
To those who have followed the 14-year saga of the efforts to bring a
National Football League franchise back to Los Angeles, this must be
something of a joke. After all the bickering and cajoling and trying
to find the perfect location close to Hollywood's glow, the best
solution has come to be a city of fewer than 1,000 residents, where
curbs are painted no-parking red to give a clear path to the armada of
semis rumbling past its warehouses and manufacturing operations.
In fact, for the longest time it was a joke. No way, people in
Southern California felt, would the NFL want to play in Industry, 30
miles from the ocean's edge. And yet while everybody chuckled and
scoffed at the hill of brush that Roski's Majestic Realty rented for a
different project years ago from Industry, he quietly steered his
privately financed stadium through all the minefields that have blown
up proposals in more desirable places such as the Los Angeles
Coliseum, and the parking lots of Angel or Dodger stadiums. Suddenly
he seems to have not just the best proposal for building a stadium in
Los Angeles, but the only proposal for building a stadium in Los
Angeles.
"He has the land and he has the complete clearance and the green light
to move his stadium forward. No one else has that," said David Carter,
the executive director of the Sports Business Institute at the
University of Southern California, who has consulted on several of the
Los Angeles NFL stadium proposals, including this one. "They've been
doing this methodically, methodically and then one day you wake up and
they're lining the field."
Ever since the Rams and Raiders moved away following the 1994 season,
citing inferior stadiums as the cause, bringing a football team to
this area has been an obsession for the men who run the NFL. The
failure to place a club here has often been said to be the greatest
negative of former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's tenure. Not having a
team in the country's second-largest metropolitan area since 1994, or
a Super Bowl in the city since 1993, means the NFL has not been
getting the maximum amount of exposure possible in a region of nearly
18 million people for almost two decades.
Which is why the NFL, while being cautious, is not laughing at Roski's
stadium project. Especially with as many as seven franchises currently
in insufficient stadiums or severe financial difficulty or rumored to
be for sale. The time to bring a team back to Los Angeles might never
be better.
"At this stage it is clear he has a project that can be built. The
trick now is to be able to do it in a sound financial way,"
Commissioner Roger Goodell said Oct. 13 at the NFL owners' meeting in
Boston.
'I'm telling you it's done'
The final roadblock disappeared in September when Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger (R) signed a bill allowing Roski to waive the
traditional environmental impact review for the stadium, mainly
because Roski already had such a study done for a previous project.
This is not a small thing. Completing an EIR in California is a long
and complicated process that can take years. Among the long-considered
sites in the city, only the Coliseum has one finished, and the
Coliseum has long been officially declared dead as a potential home
for a new NFL team.
In theory, they could start building tomorrow.
"It's done, I'm telling you it's done," said John Semcken, a vice
president at Majestic who helped Roski and businessman Phillip
Anschutz build the Staples Center a decade ago and is the point man on
the Roski stadium project.
"By next week we will work with the league to find a team and move it
to Los Angeles," Semcken said in his office not far from the stadium
site, a few days before Schwarzenegger's announcement.
He paused. "There will be a team playing in this stadium in 2013," he
declared. "The only thing that can derail it is if the league doesn't
want to put a team in Los Angeles for some reason. And I don't think
that will happen."
Something has happened for more than two decades, ever since Al Davis,
who owned the then-Los Angeles Raiders, promised to move the team to
Irwindale in the late 1980s only to wind up back in Oakland. New
proposals rise and new proposals die. If there is any constant in Los
Angeles, it's that there will always be a new plan for a football
stadium that eventually will fall apart, just as one that Roski had
for the Los Angeles Coliseum crumbled 10 years ago.
"It's like 'Groundhog Day,' " Carter said.
The problem has always been finding a way to build an appropriate
stadium -- one filled with all the suites and club seats to make
millions for the league and its owners. Political infighting squelched
some projects, and cost destroyed others. Building a new stadium or
remodeling an old one in Southern California has been estimated at
more than $1 billion, easily the cost of trying to buy a franchise and
move it here. And in a state where the climate does not exist for
spending public money on sports facilities, the possibility of
professional football here has seemed dead for two years now.
Then came Roski's proposal. He will fill his land with a stadium,
practice facility, parking lots, retail space and office buildings,
and he will pay for it himself. The catch is he wants to own at least
40 percent of the team that comes to play in his stadium. Otherwise,
Semcken said, the deal wouldn't be worth it.
But if that can happen, Semcken added, they will build the stadium.
And they are sure they can do it for just $793 million.
This is because their architect, Dan Meis, who also designed the
Staples Center, had an idea. Instead of scraping down the hill and
erecting a stadium from the ground up, why not build it into the hill?
Doing so would cut steel and concrete costs considerably. There
wouldn't be a need to flatten as many inclines or bury pilings deep
into the earth. The stands would essentially lay on the side of the
hill.
Semcken was thrilled. Together the men dug through a clay model of the
site, scooping out a hole for the stadium and inserting the plastic
model of the stadium Meis had previously designed for flat ground to
see what the whole thing would look like.
They found it could work. Meis redrew an asymmetrical stadium with the
bulk of the stands on one side, built into the hillside, and a giant
tower of luxury boxes rising on the other.
'Seat at the table'
But can Roski afford to build the stadium? Forbes Magazine recently
said he lost 40 percent of his worth in the past year, dropping from
163rd on its rankings of the 400 wealthiest Americans to No. 236. His
value, the magazine said, is $1.5 billion.
"Absolutely, we can finance this," Semcken said.
Majestic still has more than 90 percent of its vast commercial empire
leased, he added. And he is convinced that fans and businesses will
beg to be a part of the new stadium.
Already, Semcken said that more than 50,000 people have filled out
requests on the stadium's Web site requesting information about
purchasing suites. And several groups of people have contacted them,
willing to buy into both the stadium and a team.
Yet in this economy, will people be willing to invest?
"Are you kidding me?" Semcken replied, laughing. "In L.A.? We will
have a bigger problem telling people no."
The only issue now, he said, is finding a team to buy and move to Los
Angeles. While Majestic officials say the NFL has told them to work
quietly, the list of teams in financial difficulty and perhaps
available for purchase or a potential move is thought to include
Jacksonville, St. Louis, Minnesota, San Diego, San Francisco and
Oakland.
The league remains subdued about the subject. It acknowledges that
Majestic's proposal has gotten further than any other, but it will
wait to announce that it has solved the Los Angeles issue until Roski
can get a team and prove he can finance the stadium's construction.
Goodell said that Roski's ability to finance the stadium and the
purchase of a team might well be contingent on the looming
negotiations with the NFL Players Association over a new collective
bargaining agreement. Can the league, which has helped to finance
other stadiums in the past, find a new way to generate enough income
to assist Roski?
"All this does is get them a seat at the table," said sports marketing
expert Marc Ganis, who does work for the NFL and is familiar with the
way the league's owners think. "But they don't get to deal the cards."
It will be hard for Roski to get someone to sell him a team, Ganis
said. And even if he could line up enough partners to buy one, there
will be moving issues and probably expensive stadium buyouts in the
city that is losing the team. Not to mention the costs of the stadium.
"In Dallas, Jerry Jones is doing it on debt service of half a billion
dollars and he gets to own the team," Ganis said, referring to the
owner of the Cowboys, who this season opened a $1.15 billion stadium.
Who, Ganis asked, is going to sell Roski a team simply so the
developer could move it to the most lucrative market left?
Still, with the NFL eager to expand its revenue base and dearly
wanting a team in Los Angeles, the only option appears to be Ed
Roski's hill on the side of the freeway to Pomona. Only time will tell
if Roski's plan turns out to be real, or just another scene in a long-
running Hollywood drama.