With Los Angeles in play, NFL hears both sides of relocation argument

By Ken Belson, New York Times News Service

Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2015 | 8:41 p.m.

The NFL season is just past the halfway mark, but team owners are already preparing for the biggest decision of the new year: whether to allow one or two teams to move to Los Angeles in 2016.

Representatives from Oakland, San Diego and St. Louis — three cities that could lose a team — were at NFL headquarters on Wednesday to brief team owners from the finance, stadium and Los Angeles committees — 17 owners in all — about what they were doing to keep the Raiders, the Chargers and the Rams from leaving town.

The teams have announced plans to build stadiums near Los Angeles if at least 24 owners allow them to move. Stan Kroenke of the Rams said he would build a venue in Inglewood, California; the Chargers and the Raiders would build a stadium jointly in Carson, California, farther south.

The teams are expected to apply for relocation in early January, with the owners voting thereafter. Woody Johnson, the New York Jets’ owner, said the owners may take until March to make a decision.

On Wednesday, Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Co., said that he would serve as the nonexecutive chairman of Carson Holdings, the company that would build the stadium for the Chargers and the Raiders, assuming they were allowed to move.

In return for hiring a president for Carson Holdings and offering strategic direction and leadership, Iger would be given an opportunity to buy a minority stake in the Chargers or the Raiders after he retired from Disney in 2018. A spokesman for Carson Holdings declined to provide details on what price Iger would be able to pay for his shares.

The owners will not make any formal decisions Wednesday, and they appeared to be far from determining which of the two proposals they preferred.

Several owners have said Kroenke’s stadium could provide more glitz for the NFL, but they are reluctant to abandon St. Louis — a home to several key league sponsors — a second time. (The Cardinals left St. Louis for Arizona after the 1987 season.)

Other owners favor the proposal for Carson because it will allow the Chargers and the Raiders, who play in two of the league’s oldest stadiums, to move into a new building, though that would require leaving Oakland and San Diego, two vibrant NFL markets.

“I do not have a feel for where this is going to end up,” said one owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the meetings. “There are too many variables, and it will take a lot of politicking before we get to a final decision.”

Jerry Richardson, the owner of the Carolina Panthers, is one of the few owners to state publicly which project he backs, telling The Los Angeles Daily News that he favors the Carson site.

The Dallas Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, has sided with Kroenke because he believes the Inglewood proposal is more robust.

All of the owners are obligated to follow the league’s relocation guidelines, which state that teams should not be allowed to move if their host cities are making a good-faith effort to keep them. By that standard, St. Louis has the best shot to keep its team.

A proposal to build a $1 billion stadium by the Mississippi River is backed by the governor of Missouri and the mayor of St. Louis, and has passed several judicial roadblocks. Enterprise, the car rental giant, has also agreed to buy the naming rights, and bonds used to pay for the Rams’ current home could be reissued to help pay for the new stadium.

Dave Peacock, a co-chairman of the committee developing a new stadium in St. Louis, said he told the owners that his group was eager to find a tenant.

“We acknowledged we are ready to sit down with a club to talk details,” he said.

Oakland has been viewed as the least likely to keep its team because the city and developers have been slow to push a credible replacement for the Raiders’ current home. The city’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, though, said that while she would not ask taxpayers to contribute directly to the construction of a new stadium, she was willing to improve infrastructure at the stadium site.

Schaaf also told the owners that after years of inaction by her predecessors, her government was looking at alternative ways of paying for a stadium including tax increment financing and selling development rights.

“We recognized we are behind the other cities, but considering where we are, it was well received” by the owners, she said, referring to her presentation on Wednesday. “We’ve tried to communicate very clearly that we’re really changing our approach.”

Fans were able to sound off last month when NFL executives visited Oakland, San Diego and St. Louis. Although public officials from Oakland have said they are unable to contribute any money to help build a new stadium for the Raiders, fans there insist the team still has plenty of support.

“We believe that Oakland meets the most important test of the NFL’s relocation criteria, that it has a thriving, vibrant fan base,” said Jim Zelinski, a co-founder of Save Oakland Sports. “If there’s any fairness in the world, the Raiders should stay in Oakland.”

Despite their woes, St. Louis has largely supported the Rams as well. In the past three years, 86 percent of the seats at the Edward Jones Dome have been sold for Rams home games even though the team has not had a winning record since 2003.