Anaheim Asks Angels to Talk With Frontiere About Stadium

It was neither a white flag nor a demand for unconditional surrender.

But what the city of Anaheim clearly signaled Friday was a call for truce in its 5-year battle over Anaheim Stadium by inviting the California Angels baseball team and Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere to sit down and talk.

The occasion was a judge’s ruling this week in the long-running case in which both Gene Autry’s Angels and a development partnership including Frontiere claimed legal rights to Anaheim Stadium’s 146-acre parking lot.

The final decision by Orange County Superior Judge Frank Domenichini reinforces earlier rulings he made: The developers may not stack parking for baseball patrons in high-rise garages; but the Angels cannot stop construction of high-rise buildings on at least 19 surrounding acres.

Something, Not Everything

By scaling back, but not eliminating, the possibility of construction, Domenichini appears to have handed all parties something, but not everything that the city, the Angels or the Frontiere partnership sought.

“The significant difference from what we felt our rights were, is that judge says that parking has to be provided on ground level,” conceded Michael Rubin, lawyer for the city. “That’s important to the Angels. What we’ve won is that we control the parking lot, we can relocate, rearrange and re-stripe so as to accommodate development and in fact develop on areas that are not necessary to meet the Angels’ spaces.”

Autry, backed by Baseball Commissioner Peter V. Ueberroth, claimed that high-rise parking structures would inconvenience fans so greatly that the stadium would no longer be suitable for a professional baseball franchise.

The garages were an integral part of initial plans by Anaheim Stadium Associates, the development partnership. The first phase of development alone would have produced four office towers and parking garages at a cost of $200 million on a 20-acre tract along Orangewood Avenue.

The rights to high-rise development were considered the key inducement for luring the Rams from Los Angeles to Anaheim in 1977.

But while Domenichini, in his judgment, prohibits the use of garages for stadium parking and forbids interference with the Angels’ 12,422 surface parking spaces, he held that the Angels need not even be consulted concerning building on three tracts nearby.

Decision Frees City

And the decision specifically frees the city to re-configure the lots in any way it chooses, so long as the baseball parking is not diminished--a holding that potentially allows for building most of the original Phase One.

Aside from the parking spaces, “Anaheim and ASA are entitled to the use of such property for development without consent of the Angels,” the decision says.

Attention has focused among city officials on these possible building sites:

A 7-acre tract abutting the Orange Freeway which is partly used for parking. According to the ruling, the area is outside the Angels’ original parking lease.

Another 7-acre tract to the northwest of the stadium, now undeveloped but used for overflow parking. The city can do with this land what it wants, according to Domenichini.

A 5-acre tract along the Santa Fe Railroad line, which includes an Amtrak station. The Angels have no rights to the tract.

What will be left after the city reconfigures the parking. The city and ASA have long claimed the Angels’ surface spaces can be more efficiently laid out.

On another key issue, Domenichini’s decision requires all parties to pay their own legal fees, estimated last summer to have reached an aggregate of $17 million. The baseball club, whose representatives could not be reached for comment Friday, will be allowed to recover its court costs from the city, a figure one party suggested might run to several hundred thousand dollars.

A hearing is scheduled before Domenichini on Wednesday, during which all parties will have one last chance to persuade him to alter the written judgment.