In the first public discussion about the Angel Stadium land sale in months, Anaheim City Council members on Tuesday night traded a series of insults and allegations about whether there was a conspiracy to privately sell the stadium to team owners.
Ooh, “insults and allegations,” this sounds good!
To recap briefly: Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno and the Anaheim council are currently facing two separate challenges to their 2020 agreement to sell Moreno $500 million worth of stadium land for $150 million to help finance stadium upgrades. First, California’s state housing department has declared the land sale to be illegal under the state’s Surplus Land Act, because Anaheim didn’t seek affordable housing developers for the site first, as the 2019 law requires. And second, a separate lawsuit is charging that the sale violated public meetings laws by being secretly approved by the council in private, with both former city manager Chris Zapata and councilmember Jose Moreno testifying that the council agreed to the deal before holding any public meetings at all.
That royally pissed off Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, who launched into some of those aforementioned insults and allegations at least night’s council meeting:
“What you said in your declaration … is absolutely embarrassing to the city and it was misinformation,” he said. “You have violated our closed session agenda item that was there to discuss and you have never got the authority from the council to discuss with anybody outside of the council.”
Calling out a councilmember for violating the secrecy of a closed-doors meeting that you’re getting sued for holding in secret is pretty ballsy, to say the least. (The Voice of OC’s Spencer Custodio also notes that Sidhu hasn’t filed any formal court declarations contradicting Jose Moreno and Zapata’s statements, preferring to take his argument to the court of public insults and allegations.) The city of Anaheim also published a Facebook post last Friday that claimed to catch Jose Moreno in a contradiction for saying at a December 2019 council meeting that that was “the first time we’ve had a chance to discuss, deliberate, understand fully together in public — actually just with each other — the major deal points here,” so how could anything have been decided before that in secret, huh? Especially not at that secret meeting that the council hasn’t authorized anyone to talk about!
Jose Moreno fired back last night: “It’s disappointing the public information office has been politicized and been used to say a council member has not been truthful. In a disturbing and peculiar action, the city is arguing … it is not allowed in court. How will the public know if the city council violated a public meetings law if the violation occurred in a secret, sacrosanct meeting?”
There was more squabbling at the council meeting, which you can read in Custodio’s full article if you like. Both the court challenge and the state ruling are likely to come to a head soon, with the lawsuit set to go to court on February 14, while the city has to respond to the state’s Surplus Land Act verdict by February 7, either by proposing an alternate solution (there have been no reports of any in the works) or by agreeing to pay a $96 million fine, which would reduce the city’s take on its $500 million in land to a mere $54 million. Here’s a question: If Anaheim pays the fine, then loses its lawsuit and has to undo the sale on secrecy grounds, does it get its $96 million back? Has the council authorized anyone to answer that, or is it a secret?
No comments?
Seriously California?
Anybody there?
All their comments must have been redacted by the council.