Mayor may not be burning down Chargers stadium
The Chargers await and are working for Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s blessing and hope his implied disapproval never becomes outright opposition.
The team’s stadium crew is supplying the mayor’s staff with information as requested. Being forthcoming and keeping the faith is paramount. This whole thing is a longshot, and the Chargers know it. From the start, there has been an acknowledgement that they won’t get a stadium built without support of the mayor.
To that end, the Chargers are exercising patience.
Certainly more than Chargers fans are.
The most vocal and operative among the activists want Faulconer gone, because they believe he is going to stand in the way of the team’s stadium/convention center initiative.
Chargers stadium: Complete coverage
While no candidate for mayor has endorsed the Chargers’ initiative, a coalition of stadium and Chargers fan groups plan to release next week a democrat-heavy list of city office candidates they stand behind on the June 7 ballot. Their mayoral endorsement will basically be, “Anyone but Kevin Faulconer.”
Their belief Faulconer will eventually be a full-blown road block is fostered by the hostility shown the Chargers’ proposed project by a number of the mayor’s allies and financial supporters, as well as the mayor’s silence on the matter.
Indeed, we would be silly to not be looking for the fire somewhere beneath that smoke. Perhaps we would not even be surprised to find it was revealed the mayor (or one of his operatives) is holding a kerosene rag.
But then, there is another explanation for this process sputtering what looks like smoke but is really steam.
That explanation is this is a complex deal that will take time to scrutinize. The same people angry at Faulconer for saying nothing are rightly upset with other politicians and candidates for saying they opposed the initiative without fully understanding it.
The Chargers spent a lot of time attacking the city’s stadium plan last year on the basis of it being a rush job. We don’t need to rehash the merits of said plan. Just recall that Mark Fabiani was incredulous at a lack of due diligence and that sort of thing.
Well, now the Chargers have proffered a proposal that has some suppositions and uncertainties. To be clear, the Chargers contend that their conservative estimates protect all parties. But by their admirable admissions, there are questions yet to be answered.
That’s understandable. They composed this thing in six weeks. Their stadium front man, Fred Maas, often cites an initiative he got on the ballot in 1998 that was the product of 18 months’ toil.
So it makes sense Faulconer wants to vet this thing. It’s the largest bond offering in city history. This city has a history of screwing these things up.
Let’s just ponder a couple examples that had to do with the Chargers.
Did someone think back in the mid-1990s when the city agreed to remodel Qualcomm Stadium to research whether it would still be rendered antiquated five years later? And what about the ticket guarantee that cost the city about $36 million and significantly contributed to setting back efforts toward a new stadium last decade?
The mayor better take a stand this summer. By sometime in July, he’d better have a banner endorsement or a good reason why he doesn’t support the Chargers’ plan to stay. That will have been long enough for him to understand what’s at stake and whether the Chargers project makes sense for the city.
For now, if you’re listening, it’s difficult to not give merit to what he told me last month: “Some of the people who have sat in my chair before have made some pretty bad decisions by not reading things. … This is a very important financial decision. My job is to get all the facts.”
That said, far be it from me to get in the way of a movement. This is America. You go, San Diego Stadium Coalition! God Bless ya, Save Our Bolts!
But please understand that, as the Chargers were reminding us several months back, these things take time to figure out.
I thought about writing this column a few weeks ago. Then some other stuff came up. Things that were more fun and certainly timelier to write about. I figured, “Eh. What’s the rush?” Truthfully, it could have waited even another week or so.
The Chargers’ initiative is going to get the required signatures by June 9. It will get on the ballot. No one in the know has ever disputed that notion.
Sure, it may be convenient for Faulconer that there is enough opposition to the project that he doesn’t need to say anything. But there is also the matter of this being a citizens’ initiative, which by definition is an initiative by the citizens. Understand? Not the politicians. Regular citizens.
So let’s allow that a little more time.
