Autry Calls Stadium Parking Lot Plans a ‘Catastrophe’

An office complex on the parking lot of Anaheim Stadium would be a “catastrophe” that would cause California Angels fans to abandon their season tickets, team owner Gene Autry said Thursday in Orange County Superior Court.

“I think it would be disastrous,” Autry said of the Stadium Center, a proposed multimillion-dollar complex with four parking structures and more than 2 million square feet of office space.

“At the present time, we have a lot of season ticket-holders that park on the end of the first-base part of the lot,” he said. It is conveniently near their seats, they meet friends who park and sit in the same area, and the fans are used to the arrangement, he said.

If the construction is approved, those ticket-holders “would have to walk another mile after coming to the stadium,” he said. “A lot of people as old as me don’t like to walk that far. I think we’d lose a lot of customers.”

$100-Million Lawsuit

Autry was testifying for the second day in the trial of Golden West Baseball Co. versus Anaheim, a $100-million lawsuit that he filed in 1983 to halt development of the stadium parking lot.

During the trial, which began in December, Angels attorneys have charged that the city had to promise the Los Angeles Rams the development rights to the parking lot to get the football club to move to Orange County in 1978.

Angels administrators contend that their 1964 ground lease with the city guarantees that any development of the lot must be approved by them first. They say that Anaheim officials consciously violated that 1964 contract with the Angels when they wooed the Rams away from Los Angeles by using the Angels’ parking lot as enticement.

Or as Autry told the court Thursday: “They sold my horse twice. It was my horse. Nobody from the city, nobody from the Rams . . . told me anything. They went to the City Council and they (the council) approved it (the Rams’ agreement) because they’re a bunch of weak sisters there.”

List of Projects

In an effort to show that Autry had delegated most of the responsibility for running the stadium to other Angels officials, Michael Rubin, attorney for Anaheim, catalogued a list of projects that been proposed for the parking lot and asked if Autry recalled them: a drag strip, a railroad station, an airplane runway and a park-and-ride facility.

“I don’t know if I do remember, Mr. Rubin,” was Autry’s usual reply. “But if you’d like to refresh my memory, I’d be happy to try.”

With each negative answer, Rubin presented documents and blueprints that, he contended, showed that the plans existed and that Autry’s staff was involved with the city’s proposal.

“We have already established that Red Patterson and Buzzie Buvasi (two former Angels administrators) knew all about this development proposal in 1978, before it was agreed to,” Rubin said in an interview after Autry’s testimony. “Mr. Autry’s repeated point is that ‘They should have come to me, and the city should have known that what my staff did didn’t make any difference.’

“Having chosen to have the staff run the business from Day One, it’s only to be expected that the people the city would go to in discussing this development would be the people they went to from Day One,” Rubin said.