One Sure Way to Pass on Paying for a Football Stadium

The snake-oil salesmen from the National Football League are at our door again, offering L.A. a pro team if we’ll just build them a new stadium.

And a group of successful local business leaders are asking City Hall for the tax subsidies they need to break ground on the project ASAP. They even have a site picked out downtown, around the corner from Staples Center.

This is getting serious. It’s time for a new Proposition N.

For those who have forgotten, Proposition N was a charter amendment passed by Los Angeles voters in 1978. It prohibited, with a few narrow exceptions, the spending of any city funds in connection with the 1984 Olympics.

It was a controversial measure when it was approved, but it also was consistent. Just a few months earlier, L.A. voters had been in the forefront when the state electorate approved Proposition 13, setting off a tax revolt whose political echoes resonate to this day.

However shortsighted Proposition N may have seemed at the time, in retrospect it was one of those tough but necessary stances by local leadership that eventually helped make the 1984 Games the rousing success they were, with a profit exceeding $220 million.

It helped convince the elite snobs who ran the International Olympic Committee that Mayor Tom Bradley, Peter Ueberroth--who was head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee--and other local leaders were serious when they said Los Angeles would not pay for the kind of overblown Olympics the IOC had grown accustomed to staging.

Even before the vote on Proposition N, IOC officials were promising that the Los Angeles Games would be “spartan” and not run up billion-dollar deficits as Montreal did in 1976. But the 76% vote in favor of the amendment put the force of law and the will of the people behind assurances that taxpayers’ wallets would be protected.

It is easy to forget all this amid the fond memories shared by those who were here during that remarkable summer of 1984. But it is no exaggeration to say that, almost until the day they opened, the 1984 Olympics were regarded with the same mix of apathy and hostility that most Angelenos now feel regarding the possible return of the NFL. Then, as now, the prevailing attitude was: They need us more than we need them.

Which may provide some solace to the honchos of Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns and operates Staples Center, and their partners in the group negotiating with the NFL for a new franchise in exchange for a new stadium.

The AEG partnership showed off its plans for a new football venue last week, a 64,000-seat monstrosity that could cost as much as $450 million. And they insist that it can be done without any cost to the taxpayers. But L.A. taxpayers need more than assurances.

That’s why City Council members are drafting resolutions and introducing motions aimed at protecting the city treasury from raids by sleazy NFL owners like the odd couple this city tolerated far longer than we should have: the Rams’ Georgia Frontiere and the Raiders’ Al Davis.

But there’s a better way to show the NFL, once and for all, that L.A. is serious about not spending any public money on a new football team or a new stadium to put it in.

Another Proposition N.

Granted, an ordinance or charter amendment barring the use of public funds to bring the NFL back to L.A. would constrain city officials. But who among us would really want to send a waif like Mayor James K. Hahn into the same room with the hustlers who run the NFL without a little protection?

Besides, it would strengthen the hand of the private-sector group negotiating with the NFL, just as surely as the original Proposition N helped strengthen the hand of Ueberroth and the others who ran the LAOOC.

So let’s draft another Proposition N. We should even call it that to remind everyone what it’s about: nada for the NFL.