L.A. Has Just Weeks to Get Moving on a Football Team

It’s time to stop fingerpointing and meet the National Football League halfway as we demonstrate Los Angeles has the best plan to attract the 32nd NFL franchise team. World-class cities like Los Angeles offer their citizens the best in cultural and sports venues. We have baseball, basketball, hockey, a great orchestra and superb museums, but no football. Why should San Francisco, Chicago and New York and 28 other cities have NFL teams and not Los Angeles?

Make no mistake about it; we have a lot of work to do in a short time. The NFL selected Los Angeles and the Coliseum as the place for its next team last April, and gave us until Sept. 15 to develop a workable plan. That’s less than three months to put aside differences and work with the NFL to find solutions--at no net cost to taxpayers--to the legitimate issues that have been raised.

But let’s start with the premise that football will be good for Los Angeles. NFL football at the Coliseum will generate additional tax revenues for the city, county and state. It will squeeze more value out of existing public and private investments in the Coliseum and surrounding area. And it will bring new business and jobs into the city. It will also revitalize the neighborhood around the Coliseum.

An NFL team will generate an estimated $200 million annually in ticket, concession and other sales, all subject to state and local taxes. And, let’s not forget that the team’s projected $100 million annual payroll also will be taxable. If the owner of a company thinking about locating in Los Angeles tempted our political leadership with those statistics, we’d work overtime to find a way to ensure the enterprise ended up here.

Much of the investment needed to develop a plan both the NFL and Los Angeles can live with has been made. In the past five years, state, federal and local governments along with USC and the business community have invested nearly $6 billion in the greater downtown area, including $111 million in seismic retrofits to the Coliseum after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.NFL football will bring other benefits to Los Angeles as well. It will be good for the area surrounding the Coliseum by reinvigorating the USC area and the Figueroa corridor, and by helping to restore a formerly grand neighborhood to prominence. An NFL team will help bring more than a million visitors a year to the city’s urban core.

Once again Los Angeles will host Super Bowls. Each Super Bowl will bring thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions in economic benefit to the city. Millions more will visit Los Angeles to attend other entertainment events held throughout the year at the new Coliseum. In fact, some will come just to say they’ve seen to the exciting new Coliseum, which will be an attraction itself.

These visitors will spend significant amounts of money at new and existing businesses in the community, which in turn will help to create hundreds of jobs for local residents. With these jobs and the income they generate will come safer neighborhoods for families in the community, rising values for residential and commercial property in the area, and an overall rejuvenation of the whole district.

Now add NFL football at the new Coliseum to a growing greater downtown mosaic that includes Staples Center, the largest convention center on the West Coast, a robust business community, a cultural district anchored by the Music Center, with the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, a new Roman Catholic cathedral and we have the kind of city center that is necessary to be world class in the 21st century.

The involvement of Gov. Gray Davis, who has appointed Bill Chadwick as his point person, is a welcome step in the right direction. A host of other political leaders have pledged their support for the Coliseum bid.

Now is the time for city, county and state officials to show leadership, to close ranks, and to forge a plan to meet the NFL halfway.

Let’s stop bashing the NFL and get our act together. We have lots to do and little time in which to get the job done. The NFL and Los Angeles must work together if we both want to be successful.

If we are successful, the NFL will have a franchise where it wants it, in the second-largest media market in the country. And, Los Angeles will have a winning football team in a spectacular new facility with significant economic benefits.