Things in Anaheim continue to move at lightning speed in the wake of last week’s release of an FBI affidavit charging that an unelected “cabal” ran the city’s decision-making under Mayor Harry Sidhu, and that the mayor himself had approved a Los Angeles Angels stadium in part as an attempt to solicit a $1 million campaign contribution: Yesterday, Sidhu resigned, effective immediately, without even waiting for the FBI to formally charge him, saying he wanted to “allow this great City to move forward without distraction.”
That could be complicated, given that Anaheim now has a temporary mayor, councilmember Trevor O’Neil, and a political process thrown into question by the FBI allegations. “Our next step is to determine how do we make decisions and who should make decisions that the public can trust,” councilmember Jose Moreno, one of Sidhu’s most consistent critics, said yesterday.
So, farewell to the mayor who singlehandedly restarted the talks to give Angels owner Arte Moreno half a billion dollars worth of stadium land for way less than that after his predecessor, Mayor Tom Tait, spent several years blocking the council from going forward with it. We will always have the pictures of Sidhu throwing Easter eggs from his (allegedly) illegally registered helicopter.
As for the Angels land deal, that’s now totally up in the air, if not back to square one. Arte Moreno has demanded that the council approve the sale by June 14 or else it’s off; the council now seems likely to call his bluff there, with councilmember Avelino Valencia saying yesterday: “In addition to what has come to light in the affidavits, the mayor’s resignation just further strengthens the argument for needing to terminate the deal.” While Moreno hasn’t been accused of anything in the FBI probe — there’s apparently no evidence he actually paid the bribe, just that Sidhu intended to solicit one — “entire stadium deal was just part of an insider scheme to get a million-dollar check” has bad optics, as the kids say, so it would not be at all surprising to see Sidhu’s deal scrapped entirely.
At which point the ball would be back in Moreno’s court, with a lease that runs through 2029 and a burning desire to extract some kind of gift of public money or land or something before extending it. The Angels owner could threaten to move to a laughably small site in Long Beach again, or Tustin, or somewhere new entirely; or he could just threaten to sit on the land and not build anything there, which would be cutting off his nose to spite his face but would also frustrate the council’s desire to see the land developed. Either way, it’s a spectacular implosion of a massive public stadium subsidy deal that was thought to be done, all apparently because the local mayor got greedy and decided to ask for some cash to sweeten the pot instead of just settling for a Verified Top Fan badge on the Angels Facebook group. Hubris is totally a thing, and fans of democracy should be glad of it, because without it corruption would be a whole lot harder to ferret out.
So a new deal that is 15% worse for the Angels?
Or 15% better…. you never can tell. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from decades of corrupt sports stadium deals, it’s that municipalities who terminate negotiations with extreme prejudice often end up handing over more taxpayer money when negotiations resume than they initially drew their line in the sand over.
Here’s hoping Anaheim’s new acting/temporary/relief/assistant/deputy mayor is that rare exception and sticks to a relatively hard line (which, in this case, could be a 50% discount on FMV for the land, let’s not forget).
Apparently the now-former mayor never heard of the old axiom: “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”
Thanks to recent Supreme Court decision, the Mayor could have loaned his campaign a million dollars, then had the Angels donate to his campaign, and somehow it would have been OK. He just jumped the gun.
There are dozens of ways he could have set up a shell corp or vaguely charitable committee to receive the money and had accountants and investigators either approve or just not be able to demonstrate malfeasance.
You have to be either lazy or stupid not to be able to sell influence in our current version of dimocracy without getting caught.
Which one is ex-Mayor Harry? (My vote is vor both)