The Chargers announced today the team officially filed for relocation to Carson. The Dean Spanos video announcement is here.
No surprise, Twitter lit up as a result.
Leading the reaction was a series of tweets from SDUT Opinion Editor Matthew Hall, which Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Lee Jenkins touted as “the best use of Twitter” he’d ever seen.
Hall tweeted:
Dean Spanos: “We’ve had nine different proposals that we’ve made, all of them were basically rejected by the city.” OK, let’s list the nine.
1. A 2003 proposal to redevelop the Qualcomm site had drawings and a conceptual $400M financing outline: Chargers to pay half for free land.
2. An offer from National City for the team to develop 52 acres controlled by the Port and railroad that collapsed with no formal team plan.
3. A study of land in Chula Vista paid for by the Chargers that found two possible stadium sites but involved no formal team financing plan.
4. Discussion of building a stadium and office space in Oceanside, an idea that doesn’t pencil out and thus never includes a financing plan.
5. A suggestion from a national developer to build an Oceanside stadium and shopping center, all together now, with no team financing plan.
6. The possibility of buying a bunch of land in Escondido in 2009 to cobble together a stadium site, which quickly falls apart with no plan.
7. A plan hatched in 2009 to transform several East Village sites, including an operating busyard, into a stadium built with team/NFL $400M.
8. The 10th Avenue Marine Terminal site plan pushed most publicly by then-U-T ownership in 2012 without support from city or team officials.
9. Public officials’ new Mission Valley idea, which the team met with opposition, refusing to negotiate let alone consider a financing plan.
If those are Mr. Spanos’ nine proposals, I hope he explains his logic or redoes his math. First, they clearly weren’t rejected by one city.
Second, any definition of “proposals that we’ve made” ends with the 2003 Q proposal and maybe the 2009 East Village site, which had no plan.
Hall wasn’t the only one fact checking Spanos. Tony Manolatos, the guy who should be credited as the leading rebutter of Mark Fabiani’s ongoing scorched-earth, anti-San Diego PR effort to get the Chargers out of town, tweeted:
Spanos: “This current process proposed by the Mayor runs past the timeframes where you need to have an answer.”
Manolatos provided a reminder:
But when the Mayor proposed a January vote, which would have met the timeframes, the Chargers walked away from the negotiating table.
Manolatos also shared with Twitter followers a comment from a former County Chief Administrative Officer:
“The notion that they studied and did detailed analysis on nine sites over 14 years is nonsense and has always been nonsense.” –Walt Ekard
Comments 2
Let them go, show them the door and call UHaul for them.
As NFL owners go Spanos is a slum lord. He has only ever been willing to accept a San Diego stadium plan that was a 100% gift to him, no money out of pocket. He’s angry because in 14 years nobody in City Hall was willing to hand him a free stadium. He’s been holding out for the same kind of white glove treatment he received from Susan Golding.
We have infrastructure to pay for. We don’t need a taxpayer funded white elephant stadium that sees eight games a year and maybe 1-2 super bowls per decade. Let’s build that contiguous convention center expansion instead.
The Chargers are a business, even more of a private business than Qualcomm or Illumina since there are no stock holders. Spanos was always free to buy any available land at market value and build himself a place of business. He chose not to. No free lunches here Dean.
I wish the players well, they just want to play. Spanos, Fabiani, Goodel and the business side of the Chargers and NFL can go “#” sand.l
It has always been a BS claim. At least during the first 4-5 years there was never an actionable plan (or even a plan on how to get to an actionable plan) presented to the supporters the Chargers would have needed to line up to get a deal done. A few meeting of 100 of your closets friends to see some images but nothing resembling a coordinated effort – even after the organization was basically IMPLORED to get one started. When the story is written essentially the Chargers have operated as a private, profit maxing business (and that is good old fashioned capitalism) and we shouldn’t for a minute kid ourselves that they haven’t always been 100% committed to looking out for #1.