Heckling Begins Over Plan to Help Pay for NFL Team

The New Coliseum Team, as it calls itself, will be playing before a tough crowd in Sacramento. Already, you can hear the hisses, jeers and boos echoing through the state Capitol.

It’s the same team, headed by super-rich developers Ed Roski Jr. and Philip Anschutz, that just won L.A. City Council approval to build a $300-million downtown hockey and basketball arena. Now, it wants to refurbish the old Coliseum at a cost of $280 million and bring a National Football League team back to Los Angeles.

The game plan is to recruit the help of state taxpayers. Precisely what will be asked of the taxpayers hasn’t been firmly decided, but so far the huddle talk has been about free land and sales tax subsidies.

It goes like this: The state, which owns all of Exposition Park, would lease the Coliseum, Sports Arena and parking lots to the developers for $1 a year. The running gag of critics has been, Hey, I’ll double the offer and pay $2.

More important, the state would create a “zone”--call it an entertainment zone, a revitalization zone, a subsidy zone, depending on your spin--for several blocks around Exposition Park. Within that zone, most of any increase in sales tax revenue attributable to the Coliseum overhaul would help the developer/team owners pay off the construction bonds. To be exact, 60% of this tax increment would go to bonds and 40% to public schools, because K-12 schools are entitled to at least that slice of any new revenue increase under Proposition 98.

Listen to the heckles before anyone even has seen a bill:

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“I think it’s intolerable,” says veteran Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco) of the sales tax subsidy. “It’s brazen. I’ll oppose it with all the might I have.”

Kopp is one of those hustling pols who likes to get in an opponent’s face. But, OK, it’s fair to point out that the senator is not a Southern Californian and, in fact, even vehemently opposed a $100-million revenue bond that San Francisco voters narrowly approved in June to help the 49ers build a new football stadium. What about a legislator from, say, San Diego?

The New Coliseum Team wants to let all cities into the game so it can win wide fan support. The tax zone play could be used anywhere--for example, in San Diego, where the Padres are demanding a new baseball stadium. A lawmaker from there, Sen. Dede Alpert (D-Coronado), heads the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee. Her father was a high school football coach, and she describes herself as “a real sports nut.” But she’s not buying it.

“These rich owners insist they’re losing money,” Alpert says. “Well, cut the players’ salaries! They don’t want to downsize the way other businesses have done. They just ask for government handouts.”

What about L.A.? Any rooting legislators there? Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) is chairman of the Business and Professions Committee, which includes a subcommittee on professional sports.

“I’m a tough sale,” Polanco says. “I’m not going to stand by while we subsidize multi-

multimillionaire football players and owners. We just finished a debate on welfare, and here they are coming to the state for welfare. They’re going to have to pay their own way.”

To be straight up, Polanco’s district does include both Chavez Ravine and South Park, two other potential NFL sites. The only fan of the Coliseum concept I could find was its own assemblyman, Democrat Rod Wright, and he wasn’t exactly cheerleading.

“I think it needs a lot of work,” Wright says. He wants to make sure the other Exposition Park “constituents”--the museums--aren’t hurt financially by tax diversions.

Anyway, he’s not really optimistic that NFL owners will agree to relocate a team in the Coliseum. Says Wright, an African American: “Essentially, we’re talking about a group of white men who think if you’re a community of color, that’s not good for business.”

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The New Coliseum Team’s quarterback, John H. Semcken (executive vice president), agrees that some NFL owners have a “misperception” about the area. He blames rowdy Raider fans of the past.

Semcken insists, “You can’t build a football stadium without public participation.” The NFL franchise fee alone will cost the new owners more than $250 million, he notes. The sales tax revenues they want for the building bonds wouldn’t even exist without the new stadium, he argues.

Nonsense, responds state finance Director Craig Brown. If people weren’t spending their money around the Coliseum, they’d be spending it elsewhere. And then all the taxes would be spent on police, parks and the public.

Brown adds: “I have a personal bias that government ought not to be subsidizing pro teams.”

And that’s the pregame chant in the Capitol.