Chargers vs. City
I call it a ‘Cease-fire’. I don’t know what they call it. But if they stop calling each other names, then it should be a positive. Anything is better than what we came thru last week.
The Chargers and the City are indeed on the clock, to try and find a way to finance a new Stadium, likely in the East Village, adjacent to Petco Park.
It started well a week ago, but it ended badly in one single day. All the enthusiasm about the Stadium Task Force, loaded with business people with a wide variety of accomplishments on their resumes, was knocked off track by a Panza division all out assault by the Chargers hired gun, Mark Fabiani, the spokesman for owner Dean Spanos.
It was four days of sniper fire and it created real divisions in the city, and led to despair if anything could get done. All this followed then by the broadside announcement that the Chargers, weren’t just monitoring things in Los Angeles, they were negotiating things in Los Angeles, this land option purchase, the linkage with the business group carson2gether.com, and the affiliation with the troubled Raiders.
That was some week of violent actions taken by the franchise in Murphy Canyon, living and working out of the city gift of office space given them years ago in the last Stadium renovation.
Then the mayor returned fire, ripped into Fabiani, and demanded a ‘sit-down’ meeting with Spanos, though it did not have “Godfather movie” implications about a sitdown.
Everyone emerged using new words, “working jointly, expedient, good faith”, etc.etc. We shall see where all this goes next, though the owner impressed upon the mayor, he needed a Stadium idea sheet sooner than later. Kevin Faulconer hopes to have it done within 90-days, right around June lst.
So Spanos may have won a concession on timing, but he sure didn’t win anything else. Read the Letters to the Editors columns in the Union-Tribune. Listen to to the brutal boos when the name ‘Chargers’ was mentioned at music concert and a hockey fan fest over the weekend.
Words like deceit, extortion, hatchet men, ring out in lots of conversation.
Today could be a big day. The Task Force meets with the County Supervisors, and they want to explore a City-County way to use a hotel tax that might help pay for a Stadium.
There’s no guarantee of a deal in San Diego yet.. There’s no final solution yet in Oakland either, just alot of negative vibes there in exchanges involving the mayor, the county and the franchise. And in Carson, all the cheesy pep rally press conferences don’t mean much unless there are written documents about where all this funding is coming from to build on that land dump.
But at least at this hour, there is quiet in San Diego. No one seems ready to trespass back into No Man’s Land. Will be interesting to see where the week takes us, if Fabiani can keep his antagonistic mouth shut, and if Faulconer, Ron Roberts and others have the juice to connect the dots, and what the wildcard guy, Stan Kroenke in St. Louis does next.
Cease Fire-maybe. Surely not a peace treaty yet.
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