An Inglewood citizen group with the best name ever — Inglewood Residents Against Taking and Eviction, or IRATE — is asking the Los Angeles D.A.’s office to investigate the Inglewood city council for violating open meeting laws in approving a new Clippers arena:

Residents learned about the project on June 15, 2017, at a special meeting of the city council. The documents suggest that backers of the arena may have purposely used a special meeting because it required just 24 hours public notice, while a regular meeting requires 72 hours notice. The meeting agenda didn’t mention the arena or the Clippers, but gave an obscure name of a related company negotiating the deal…

Residents would see only that the meeting involved Murphy’s Bowl LLC, an entity formed in January 2017 in Delaware. It has one member, Steven Ballmer, the owner of the Clippers, according to court records.

The Inglewood City Council’s regular meetings are held on alternate Tuesdays, but there wasn’t one on Tuesday, June 13. Instead, there was a special meeting on Thursday, which only required the agenda to be posted 24 hours in advance.

That is pretty bad, though still not quite as bad as Cobb County officials hiding in hallways to evade open meetings laws while negotiating an Atlanta Braves stadium deal.

The KCET reporting on the IRATE suit doesn’t make clear what the group hopes to accomplish by getting the D.A. to investigate — I mean, clearly it wants to block the arena, but would this be by forcing a re-vote by the city council or what? It all makes Mayor James Butts’ contention that no California residents are upset about the arena that much more laughable, though, and since the internet is driven pretty much entirely by outrage and schadenfreude, please, go ahead and laugh!

And check it out, it’s another lawsuit, this one filed by Madison Square Garden (owners of the Forum in Inglewood) against the city of Inglewood over its plans to let the Los Angeles Clippers build a new arena nearby. Which sounds implausible — since when do you get to sue just because somebody else is building a competing arena nearby — until you get to this line:

MSG’s lawyers claim [Inglewood Mayor James] Butts tricked MSG into giving up the arena’s lease of the city-owned land and then tried to cover his tracks by negotiating with a personal email address and private cell phone.

Now we’re talking! MSG says that Butts got them to give up their option on the land the Clippers now intend to use by telling them he needed it for a “technology park,” which in their eyes constitutes breach of contract, fraud, and contractual interference. As a practicing non-lawyer, I have no idea whether this is a viable legal strategy, but as an unabashed fan of embarrassing public spectacles involving politicians and major sports corporations, I consider the mere existence of this suit a win.

So we have a partial answer to the question of what public aid billionaire Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer will be demanding for his proposed new NBA arena in Inglewood, and it’s “a bunch of stuff that’s worth money to him but isn’t a direct cash subsidy. Per the L.A. Times, which snuck a peek at the team’s draft legislation:

• Any lawsuits against the arena under the California Environmental Quality Act would get fast-tracked to be wrapped up within nine months, and a court would be unable to halt construction even if it found environmental review to be inadequate. (The Sacramento Kings previously got this get-out-of-lawsuits-free card for their new arena, as did Ed Roski for his never-built City of Industry NFL stadium.)
• The bill “would also allow the city to permit more billboards and other signage around the arena than otherwise allowed under the law.” No details in the Times report about how many more billboards, but clearly that’s a potentially large revenue source for Ballmer.

Things we still don’t know: Who would acquire the land for the arena, whether it would involve evicting current residents by eminent domain, if so who would pay for that, who would own the arena and would Ballmer pay property taxes and/or rent and/or money toward maintenance and operations, etc. If fast-tracking legal challenges and a bunch of free billboards is all Ballmer gets, it would hardly be the worst arena deal in history. But there’s still plenty of room to lard on more hidden subsidies as well, so everyone stay tuned.

The Inglewood city council, after voting last month to enter into an “exclusive negotiating agreement” with Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for a new arena, voted again on Friday to do the same thing, after getting a claim filed against it by the owners of Madison Square Garden on Wednesday for — you know what, let’s take this one step at a time:

• Since February, there’s been talk that Ballmer wanted to build his own arena in Inglewood, possibly adjacent to the Los Angeles Rams’ (and Chargers‘) new stadium, so that he (and maybe Rams owner Stan Kroenke) could create his own entertainment district to compete with AEG’s L.A. Live next to the Clippers’ (and Lakers‘) current home at the Staples Center.
• Inglewood councilmembers voted in June to approve that three-year negotiating agreement, which has no funding or operating details beyond “We wanna build an arena, let’s figure this out.”
• Last Wednesday, MSG — which owns the Forum arena, formerly the home of the Lakers and now used mostly for concerts, and which is owned by James Dolan of New York Knicks and terrible singing fame — filed that claim for damages against Inglewood, claiming city officials asked them to give up their lease on parking lots across the street from the new football stadium site in April by telling them it was for a new “business-technology park.” Which, you’d think Dolan and his lawyers could have read the newspapers back in February to see this coming, but okay. MSG’s lawyers said if the city didn’t cancel the deal with Ballmer, they’d file suit.
• Inglewood doubled down on Friday by voting unanimously to reauthorize the agreement with Ballmer, to meet any concerns that the June vote had taken place without public notice (one of the charges in MSG’s claim).
• Friday’s vote was attended by 40 Inglewood residents protesting that the city was considering using eminent domain to force them off of their privately owned land to make way for the arena, or otherwise displace them by helping to gentrify their neighborhood.
• Inglewood Mayor James Butts said no one was being displaced, that the arena would be built entirely on public land.
• An MSG press spokesperson fired off an email to the Los Angeles Times saying that the land Ballmer is seeking contains hundreds of homes, apartments, and businesses, and “there is no question that residents would need to be displaced within this area.”

So, what the hell? The agreement itself includes this color-coded map by owner type:

The white parcels are the privately-owned bits of land, so, yeah, I’d say there should be some concern about eminent domain being used. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’d be impossible to build an arena, let alone a surrounding entertainment district, without obtaining some private land.

Here’s what it looks like on Google Maps:

This is shaping up to be a big-ass mess, and that’s before we’ve even gotten into the question of who’s going to pay for it. Ballmer and Butts are going to need all of those three years, I’m guessing.

Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has been talking for a while about wanting to build an arena of his own — with maybe some kind of L.A. Live–style entertainment district around it — in Inglewood, and now it looks like he’s taken a step closer, with the city voting today on opening talks for a new arena to be built adjacent to the new Rams and Chargers stadium:

The Inglewood City Council is scheduled to vote Thursday on an exclusive negotiating agreement with the Clippers to build a state-of-the-art arena on city-owned land. The 18,000- to 20,000-seat arena would be fully financed by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, sources said. Ballmer, who is worth an estimated $31.8 billion, bought the Clippers for $2 billion in 2014.

So what does all that mean, exactly? “Exclusive negotiating agreement” means that Ballmer would have three years to work out environmental permits, which works well with his timetable in that he has a lease to play at Staples Center through 2024. As for how the financing would work, it sounds like Ballmer would pay for construction, while Inglewood would provide free land (some of which it may have to acquire, possibly by eminent domain), but there are many other variables — would Ballmer pay rent on the land? would this include land for the entertainment district as well? would he receive any tax breaks? who would pay to operate and maintain the building? — and the agreement itself doesn’t answer any of them, beyond a whole lot of legalese that comes down to “We’ll figure that stuff out later.” This is just the opening buzzer, in other words: Figuring out who’s actually winning, assuming this arena ever gets built at all, is still going to take a while.

Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer went and said this this week:

“Last time I checked with any of my friends who are in the real-estate business, you’d better have an option than just going back to your current landlord hat in hand and saying, ‘Please, please, please, sir, please give me the chance to play in your building again.’ So, yeah, we’re going to have real options. We’re out sort of putting together those options today.”

This is being interpreted as an intention to build a new arena just for the Clippers by the time their Staples Center lease expires in 2024, and clearly Ballmer is going to be investigating that. But it’s also clear — both from Ballmer’s statement and from simple economics — that the Clippers owner is looking to create leverage so that he can negotiate a better lease on his current home if that looks like a better option. I.e., same as it was when he first said this back in August.

Ballmer has said he won’t move the team out of L.A., so it looks like his only two options are to spend maybe $1 billion on a new arena just for himself somewhere in SoCal, or to use that threat to extract more money from his Staples lease. This is his right, and more power to him — at least assuming he doesn’t try to play cities off against each other to try to get public subsidies to pay for his new home, which has proven tough in California — but let’s name our threats accurately, shall we?

Been taking some time away from this site to work on other projects, but hey, it’s summer, right? Nothing new ever happens now, certainly not anyone dropping news of an entirely new arena plan out of nowhere—

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has begun to explore potential sites for a new Clippers arena, multiple NBA sources said.

What the whaaaa? The Clippers have long had one of the most stable arena deals in sports, playing in the 17-year-old-but-none-dare-call-it-anything-but-state-of-the-art Staples Center alongside the Lakers and Kings. According to the ESPN report, Ballmer is sick of playing third fiddle to the other two teams, and wants to explore whether he can do better by going it alone:

A new facility owned and operated by the team would afford the Clippers greater power to maximize earning opportunities, from sponsorship to licensing fees. As the owner of Staples Center, AEG retains control over naming rights, the business operations of running the facility for events and other substantial revenue streams like concessions.

Well, yes. You know what else a new facility owned and operated by the team would come with? Around a billion dollars in construction debt, that’s what. And while L.A. is conceivably one of the few places where you could make a good chunk of that back on naming rights and maybe seat license sales — i.e., the Rams playbook — that’s quite a hefty nut to pay off before you start enjoying all your maximized earning opportunities. Plus, L.A. is already bursting at the seams with existing arenas, so it’s not like Ballmer would have an easy time filling dates at top dollar on non-basketball nights.

(I’m not even going to get into the possibility of Ballmer asking for public money to help out, because it’s L.A. — or possibly Inglewood — and he’d have to hold a public referendum, but we probably shouldn’t rule it out entirely, because America.)

Of course, it’s also possible something else is going on here. The Clippers’ lease doesn’t expire until 2024, so whatever Ballmer is up to, it has a long lead time. So this could be a matter of exploring his options, or leaning on the Staples Center to give him a revised lease (or lease extension) so that he doesn’t explore his options, or doing whichever he decides is most lucrative once he gets there — i.e., the Islanders playbook. Only one thing’s for sure: He’s not going to Seattle.

“The Clippers are not going anywhere, ever,” Ballmer said. “I will die owning the L.A. Clippers in Los Angeles.”

Or maybe that just means that Ballmer has an incurable disease and less than eight years to live. Parsing owner statements is endless fun!