NFL Ready to Sign Coliseum Lease

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Officials with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the National Football League are expected to finalize a lease deal this week to clear the way for a football team to return to L.A.


According to several sources closely tracking the negotiations, only a few issues remain to be ironed out between Coliseum staff and NFL officials before the terms of a lease deal are finalized, setting up the parameters for bringing a football team to the Coliseum.


“The negotiations could very well reach closure prior to the Super Bowl,” said Richard Lichtenstein, a lobbyist for the Coliseum Commission who is closely tracking the negotiations.


The lease term sheets would then be presented to the Coliseum Commission sometime in February with a goal of getting a vote of NFL owners at their upcoming meeting in late March. Only then would negotiations begin with potential owners of a new or existing team to play in the Coliseum after a stadium upgrade is completed.


However, the NFL is also negotiating a similar lease deal with the city of Anaheim. According to Anaheim spokesman John Nicoletti, the city expects to reach agreement with NFL negotiators early in February on a term sheet similar to the one being finalized in L.A., with a goal of presenting a deal to NFL owners at the same March meeting that L.A. officials are targeting.


During an appearance in Los Angeles late last year, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue raised the possibility that the NFL could put more than one team in the Southern California market.


Yet some still regard the simultaneous talks with both Los Angeles and Anaheim as a negotiating ploy, replaying the scenario in 1999, when the NFL entertained several bids from the L.A. area only to choose Houston for an expansion team.


Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he has told the NFL that he won’t accept L.A. being played off against other cities this time around.


Speaking at a recent meeting with Business Journal editors, Villaraigosa said, “I told them in no uncertain terms, ‘Don’t leverage me with Anaheim, or Pasadena or Carson or anybody else. I won’t be leveraged and the city won’t be leveraged twice.'”


NFL officials did not return calls seeking comment on the status of the negotiations with the Coliseum Commission.


Another strike against L.A. seven years ago was the city’s unwillingness to put up any public money for a football stadium. Now, NFL officials have agreed not to require public funds for a stadium.


Instead, the city and state are moving to set aside funds for road, parking and street improvements around the Coliseum, an effort boosted in late 2004 when Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, D-Los Angeles, pushed through legislation that extends the life of the Hoover Redevelopment Area.


Ridley-Thomas, who was a city councilman representing the Coliseum area in the late 1990s, said the prospects of returning professional football to Los Angeles are better today.


“We’ve been close before, but never this close,” Ridley-Thomas said. “There’s receptivity on the part of the NFL and more due diligence on our part. Also, the clock keeps ticking; the longer the NFL goes without a team here, the harder it will be to re-establish football in this market.”


The Raiders left the Coliseum at the end of the 1993 season to return to Oakland, while the former Los Angeles Rams left Anaheim for St. Louis at the end of the 1994 season.


Now, the focus is on getting a lease deal first, then finding a team to play in the Coliseum.


The lease deal is expected to include term sheets for lease payments that a team would ultimately make to the Coliseum Commission, who would have control over the usage of the site and how many other significant events can be held at the Coliseum besides eight home football games and playoff games.


The Coliseum currently is home to USC’s football games and hosts dozens of soccer matches and other sporting events.


Lichtenstein declined to specify exactly which issues still needed to be ironed out as of late last week, noting that the situation was “very fluid.”


Meanwhile, as a lease deal between the Coliseum and the NFL appears increasingly likely, attention is turning to whether a new team would be created to play at the Coliseum or whether an existing franchise would move here.


NFL officials have remained mum on the issue, saying only that they want to have a team in Los Angeles. But Villaraigosa said he believed the preference is for a new team.


“The economics are such that they (the NFL owners) benefit more from an expansion team,” he said.

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Howard Fine
Howard Fine is a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Business Journal. He covers stories pertaining to healthcare, biomedicine, energy, engineering, construction, and infrastructure. He has won several awards, including Best Body of Work for a single reporter from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers and Distinguished Journalist of the Year from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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