"Send us a team, NFL," Los Angeles councilman Paul Koretz said right before Tuesday's council vote.
Despite being the nation's second-largest city, Los Angeles has been without an NFL franchise since the 1994 season, a city official said, and Tuesday's vote marked the latest chapter in the city's saga of trying to regain a pro football team.
The council approved a memorandum of understanding with Anschutz Entertainment Group Inc. to develop a stadium, build new parking structures and modernize the city's convention center.
The cornerstone of the agreement is that the football stadium would be built without "a single dime of public money," as one council member put it.
The plan calls for an NFL team to be playing in a new stadium in downtown Los Angeles by the 2016 season, officials said.
"We plan to kick off in 2016, and if a team were to want to move here before then, they could play in the Rose Bowl or the Coliseum" during the interim, AEG spokesman Michael Roth told CNN.
The city staff will spend the next several months putting together a final deal for the City Council to consider next year. The developer is aiming for a groundbreaking on the overall project next June, a city legislative analyst told the council Tuesday.
The city will retain ownership of the downtown property on which the stadium will be built and "will receive a fair market ground lease payment that will escalate annually," councilwoman Jan Perry said in a Monday letter to the council, in which Perry urged approval of the agreement. The stadium would be in her district.
Under Tuesday's agreement, "no documents will be executed to implement this project until an NFL team lease has been executed," Perry wrote to the council.
The developer will have to complete an environmental impact report and put together a public benefits analysis, Perry said.
Before casting her vote, Perry, who's also council president pro tempore, said the proposal would show that the city is "serious about getting more tourism ... and bringing football back to Los Angeles."
"We got to this point by being cautious, and we will proceed with vigilance and caution," Perry told the council.
The $1.2 billion stadium project would create 6,300 new permanent jobs and 14,000 construction jobs, said Eva Kandarpa Behrend, Perry's spokeswoman.
Several council members have been skeptical of the proposal. But the agreement approved Tuesday "does not have a single dime of public money" for the football stadium, council member Paul Krekorian said.
Before Krekorian voted for the proposal, he told the council that he had doubts about financial viability of the project: "I was skeptical, and I am skeptical, and I shall remain a skeptic. And frankly, that is the job that all of us have, is to be skeptical."
But he was going to vote yes because the city's financial risks "are minimal if not nonexistent" and the council's staff will still examine the project's effect on water and air quality, parking and other matters, Krekorian said.
Councilman Bill Rosendahl said he was "no longer a skeptic." Tuesday's agreement "is the beginning to putting the deal together," he added.
"Maybe we can share in the (TV) revenue" if an NFL team returns to Los Angeles, Rosendahl said.
Koretz noted how a few council members were initially skeptical of the stadium proposal, but he was satisfied with Tuesday's memorandum of understanding.
"There's no doubt that this project would be a real touchdown for the city and everyone else involved," Koretz said.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Airtel Nigeria.
No comments:
Post a Comment