December 11, 2009

Chargers bait-and-switch: Oh, yeah, we want money, too

After years of saying they'd build a new stadium with no public money, just free land, San Diego Chargers officials did a public about-face yesterday, saying when they said "no" they actually meant "some." "It's almost certainly going to involve some sort of taxpayer money," with team stadium czar Mark Fabiani told a local chamber of commerce, adding that it was better to get this out on the table now rather than during a voter referendum campaign: "We have no interest in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, even into the millions, on this site, and then finding out that nobody wants to support it."

To be fair, some form of public funding has been on the table for a while: In addition to the free land, the Chargers had talked up kicking back property tax money to help pay for stadium construction. Still, it's worth noting that in a post to this very website, Fabiani argued that renovating the Chargers' current home of Qualcomm Stadium wasn't feasible because in San Diego "there is no public funding for stadium improvements" and "there is simply no way to privately finance such a renovation." It's 6 am in San Diego right now, but I have an email in to Fabiani; I'll post a followup here if he gets back with an explanation of how this jibes with his new stance.

UPDATE: Fabiani replied to my email (still not even 7 am in San Diego!), though he didn't respond directly to my question of whether it still makes sense to argue against Qualcomm renovations because they'd need public funds, instead writing: "No one, so far as I know, has expressed any interest in renovating Qualcomm." On the switch to a public subsidy demand, Fabiani said this was because San Diego's proposed stadium site wouldn't include land for additional development, as the team was previously seeking; as for the type of public subsidies that would be required, he wrote that that's "the subject of a CCDC-sponsored study by stadium finance expert Mitchell Zeits," and so "too soon to say."

Fabiani added that voters would need to "agree that an investment downtown will result in significant returns for taxpayers elsewhere" such as reusing the Qualcomm site to "generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue" for the city. Hey, I remember that one!