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“Defeats & Disappointments”

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I am a big believer in the infrastructure of your city.

I believe you need to invest in your city, help its industries, and take care of its citizens.

Building a football stadium and a convention access helps make your city a better place to live and work, but doing that, spending resources on that, when tax money raised could be used for police hirings, emergency vehicle purchases, and street repairs, are probably just as important.

As the Chargers Stadium Measure C went down to defeat with horrible early voter returns, you had to weigh the wants of a rich owner, and the needs of a city, that still has internal problems.

Somewhere, somehow, sometime, San Diego has to find the resources to build a new NFL stadium.

It’s equivalent to building an office building for a banking center that might be here.

You don’t want to run off Bumble Bee Tuna and its business here. You surely don’t want to run off the Chargers either, for they are an industry, that employs people.

But this morning, we have police protection shortcomings, a homeless citizen problem, and multiples of other issues.

So the tug of war between needs of the community vs the wants of the owner of the football team, will continue to take place.

Why did Measure C go down so badly, (61%) No…(39%) Yes?

People weren’t educated enough. They put out a 114-page book detailing the plans. Who has the time, much less the intellect to read something of that magnitude.

The Chargers will tell you they spent 7M-advertising Measure C, but other sources say a large part of that was spent on gettlng people to sign the initiative, to put it on the ballot, not so much educating the voters.

Can’t tell you how many people I came across who thought they’d be taxed for a stadium, failing to understand it was a tourist hotel tax, not a tax on you and me.

Chargers history has lots to do with this failure. Dean Spanos’ sanctioned scorched earth policy put out by Mark Fabiani.

Add to that a year long romance trying to move his franchise to Los Angels, so he could make more money before he put it up for sale. Selling a 2B-franchise in LA brings bigger return than a 1.6B team in small market San Diego.

Add in the confrontation crisis with the hotel industry, the convention people, tourism, and so many others, and you see why this thing failed.

The solution is simple. Everyone gets a seat at the big roundtable in the Mayor’s office, and everyone gets input into what a new stadium and annex should look like, and where it should be located, and how it should be financed.

Easier said than done, going forward.

But where we have just come from, is worse than what we are facing this morning.

Time for the city to rally behind the Chargers. Time for Team Spanos to realize they need to be a better business partner with the city of San Diego also.

No time for a blame game now. Time to go forward with a better plan.

Defeats and Disappointments. That’s all the Spanos family has known in 32-years of ownership of this franchise, and the relationship they have had with the city.

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