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The National Football League is a heartless, unreliable lover, as the star- struck city councils of Carson and Inglewood will no doubt find out.
The Carson City Council Tuesday night approved a vague proposal for a stadium that, local dreamers hope, will provide a home for transplanted Oakland Raiders and San Diego Charger teams. With just as little debate, the Inglewood council earlier approved a stadium plan for the St. Louis Rams on the Hollywood Park racetrack site.
The three teams are trying to bludgeon their home cities into providing them with new stadiums. It’s a reprise of an act that has been done in past years by other teams hoping for a better deal.
The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Logan and Nathan Fenno wrote how the Carson proposal, approved 3-0, lacked details and quoted a city-funded report saying, “As of the date completion of this report, no official project design documents have been provided by the stadium developer.” All that is really known is that the proposal includes a three-way land deal involving the Chargers, Carson and the property’s current owner.
Anyone who has covered a city hall knows that a three-way land deal is so full of loopholes, twists and turns, unfathomable clauses, and escape hatches that it usually amounts to a give away to one or more of the parties.
I learned about sports contracts when I wrote about the long, secretive negotiations that preceded the construction of the Staples arena in Los Angeles—secret until opened up by then-Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs with some help from me and my column.
My colleague Henry Weinstein and I dealt with the NFL and the Raiders on a daily basis when the Raiders were moving to LA. The hard-nosed and slick league officials and team owners stonewalled us until we found an executive who, because he liked the Times, told us pretty much the truth.
Secret deals by Carson and Inglewood officials are shaping this. The NFL likes the secrecy. The league uses it to attain its only goal, stadiums financed by taxpayers one way or another. On its way, the NFL may leave a trail of broken hearts in Carson and Inglewood, which is already mourning the losses of professional teams that played in the Forum and the horses that used to run at Hollywood Park.
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