[Elvis]

http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp ... story.html

Political infighting could cast Carson in poor light in NFL stadium race

By NATHAN FENNO AND RICHARD WINTON contact the reporters

The day after a chaotic Carson City Council meeting that included allegations of corruption and threats of litigation, one of the most vocal proponents of the city's proposed $1.7-billion professional football stadium said toxic politics could undermine the project.

"This could jeopardize an NFL stadium being built here," said Jim Dear, mayor of Carson for more than a decade before stepping down in March after being elected city clerk.

Though Carson's City Council unanimously approved a ballot initiative in April to move forward with the proposal, the discord casts the city in an unwelcome light in the midst of the competition to return the NFL to Los Angeles.

Dear's comments came less than 24 hours after his outburst at Tuesday's City Council meeting in a dispute stemming from uncounted ballots cast in the June 2 election to fill one of two vacant council seats.

During the meeting, Mayor Albert Robles led an unexpected effort that appointed Jawane Hilton, a local pastor, to the council for the seat Robles vacated in April to become mayor.

One of the three councilmembers, Elito Santarina, walked out in protest and accusations flew between Robles and Dear.

Over the weekend, Dear, accompanied by two sheriff's deputies, changed the combination to the safe in City Hall where the ballots reside. Robles expressed suspicion while Dear said the combination hadn't been changed since the 1990s.

As the confrontation at the meeting continued, Dear shouted and strutted around the council chambers.

"I'm going to answer the false accusations and lies that this corrupt little Al Robles has brought," Dear said.

Dear promised a lawsuit. He called former Carson Mayor Vera DeWitt, a longtime adversary, "Vera the evil DeWitch." He threatened to embarrass Robles.

"There's a lot more I know about your background that will be revealed in due time," Dear said. "The people of Carson will not put up with this tomfoolery."

Onlookers booed. Dear later stormed out of the meeting and didn't return.

"I've seen a lot of stuff, but I've never seen anything like that," Robles said Wednesday. "I was embarrassed for our city and just disappointed."

In an interview, Dear said Robles' actions endangered the stadium for "political gain."

"It is horrible for our image," said Dear, who more than quintupled his $22,000 salary as mayor by moving to clerk.

"They are behaving as though the NFL deal is dead for Carson. I think we have a chance but they are damaging our chances by their behavior. They are showing the NFL and the world that Carson is rampant with corruption. Which football team ownership builds a stadium in a city with corrupt council members?"

While the histrionics convey a sense of Carson's fractious political landscape, they're unlikely to have any practical effect on the stadium project that's racing ahead. Dear joined four other members of a city authority overseeing the stadium site in approving a $180,000 contract with a consultant Tuesday to oversee its environmental remediation. It's one more step toward building the 70,000-seat stadium.

The San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders, which would share the privately financed stadium, have agreed to reimburse Carson for all expenses connected to the effort.

Dear had previously been effusive in his public support of the deal. Robles said the political turmoil is of "no consequence" to the deal.

"He's trying to create the perception that if the NFL decides not to come to Carson, that it's because of this political turmoil and therefore, as the mayor, I would be responsible for it," said Robles.

"We're looking into ways to circumvent the city clerk because he will not hold the city of Carson, its residents or the project hostage for his own political gains. This project is going to proceed."

Mark Fabiani, point man on stadium issues for the Chargers, said the matter is an "internal issue" in Carson.

"We don't anticipate that the dispute will impact our progress there," he said.


But a solution doesn't appear to be at hand. Dear said Tuesday's move is designed to allow Robles to fill the final vacant seat in the five-member council, avoid an election and control the panel.

Faced with what the Robles-led council saw as repeated delays in certifying Hilton as the winner of the June election, two of the three members voted last week to hire a former Compton city clerk to complete the count.

Dear, who had been attending a conference in Riverside last week, responded to the move with a plan to seek an injunction to block the count. That led to Robles' end-around during Tuesday's meeting by appointing Hilton to the second vacant seat rather than waiting for the certification of his election.

Hilton, who leads the June 2 election by 18 votes pending a hand recount next week, blamed the verbal sparring on Dear trying to run the city from the clerk's office.

"This is Jim Dear losing his power," Hilton said. "It's a new day in Carson and he's not excited about it. … We're going to look better because he is not leading our city."

Dear, however, doesn't think the council had a quorum to appoint Hilton — only two members remained after Santarina departed — and plans to sue.

Robles is upset by the entire situation.

"Why [Dear] insists on postponing, on delaying the inevitable is beyond my comprehension," he said. "It makes absolutely no sense."

On Tuesday, the politicking didn't end when Dear left the council chambers.

Long after the departure, Councilmember Lula Davis-Holmes proposed removing Dear's name from the boulevard that runs through the 157-acre former landfill where the stadium would sit. Dear spearheaded an effort to rename the street after himself in 2011. Davis-Holmes wants the name erased.

Applause filled the room.

[Elvis]

[BuiltRamTough]

Loll at the rant.

[bubbaramfan]

An inside look at the antics city officials in Carson. This kind of stuff goes on all the time here in Carson. Monday's townhall meeting should be a real dog and pony show. Word is Carmen Policy will give a presentation, but will not field questions, Mayor Robles will be the only one to answer quesitons.

[OldSchool]

An inside look at the antics city officials in Carson. This kind of stuff goes on all the time here in Carson. Monday's townhall meeting should be a real dog and pony show. Word is Carmen Policy will give a presentation, but will not field questions, Mayor Robles will be the only one to answer quesitons.

Interesting strategy there Cotton, hire a PR guy and not let him deal with the Q&A part of a PR fluff piece.

[The Ripper]

An inside look at the antics city officials in Carson. This kind of stuff goes on all the time here in Carson. Monday's townhall meeting should be a real dog and pony show. Word is Carmen Policy will give a presentation, but will not field questions, Mayor Robles will be the only one to answer quesitons.

Interesting strategy there Cotton, hire a PR guy and not let him deal with the Q&A part of a PR fluff piece.

It's probably because they cant't control him anymore. He said when he was hired that they could start in December of this year which was the talking points and then he said late fall of 2017 which is against the teams stated time line.

[BuiltRamTough]

An inside look at the antics city officials in Carson. This kind of stuff goes on all the time here in Carson. Monday's townhall meeting should be a real dog and pony show. Word is Carmen Policy will give a presentation, but will not field questions, Mayor Robles will be the only one to answer quesitons.

Interesting strategy there Cotton, hire a PR guy and not let him deal with the Q&A part of a PR fluff piece.

It's probably because they cant't control him anymore. He said when he was hired that they could start in December of this year which was the talking points and then he said late fall of 2017 which is against the teams stated time line.

Exactly, none of them know when they could break ground so they all give different answers lol.

[Hacksaw]

Doesn't sound like a solid plan to me. Nobody can even agree what is going on. I mean they could at least get their story straight. That should be a lot easier than building a stadium on a toxic waste site.

I have been amazed at how much dysfunction and deceit there has been going around during this process. I mean flat out lying. It's actually gotten a bit ugly. Then there is Dear. Dude was going off. He seems to have bigger issues with the city or mentally but I loved the rant against one of the alleged Rams to LA foes.

I sure hope the Rams are more successful in the relocation game than they've been on the gridiron.

[Elvis]

Bad city, bad team, almost sounds like a perfect match:

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik ... olumn.html

San Diego nightmare: Tell me again why any city would do business with the NFL

One thing you have to say about San Diego's civic leaders in their dealings with the National Football League Chargers is that they've done their best.

Only a month ago they put forth a financing plan for a 65,000-seat, $1.1-billion stadium to keep the team from relocating to Los Angeles County that involved at least a half-billion dollars in contributions from city and county taxpayers, squeezed out without the nicety of taxpayer votes.

At the time we observed that it set "a new standard for allowing the league to exploit municipal panic and using financial sleight-of-hand to make the process look painless." We also speculated that the Spanos family, the Chargers' owners, would "reject this deal, if they think the public isn't putting up enough."

That's what's happening. As my colleague Sam Farmer reported this week, San Diego is grousing that "even though the city and county have gone out of their way to try and accommodate the team...the Chargers have thrown up one road block after another." Those are the words of Tony Manolatos, spokesman for San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer's stadium task force.

San Diego has a right to be appalled. It doesn't have a right to be surprised. This is how the NFL and its teams operate when they're trying to get themselves a new stadium. To their incumbent cities, they dangle their interest in staying on a string; to wanna-be cities, they dangle their interest in relocating. The city of Carson, which is hoping to become the Chargers' new home, should sign up for San Diego's correspondence course in surviving the NFL.

Oh, sure, the Chargers say their discontent with the San Diego offer stems from Faulconer's plans to hold a city-only taxpayer vote despite the original financing proposal. (There are no plans for a vote by county taxpayers, who would be on the hook for at least $121 million.) Chargers spokesman Mark Fabiani says the city vote, scheduled for December, wouldn't meet election and environmental law requirements and would lead to "significant time-consuming litigation founded on multiple legal challenges, followed by a high risk of eventual defeat in the courts."

The fed-up civic leaders see this as mere pretext. They would be totally within their rights to conjecture that if the Chargers really wanted to stay in San Diego--and if the taxpayers put up more money--they'd find a way to do so.

The reality is that the Chargers have a free path to leaving San Diego. That's the consequence of a sweetheart deal the community granted the team that has allowed them to break their lease without consequences every year since 2007. They've stayed, at considerable cost to San Diego, which has had to pay for the upkeep of Qualcomm Stadium. Unless you believe that the Chargers, who have appeared in one Super Bowl in their history (and lost), bring some glitter to San Diego that translates into economic gain, the Chargers have been a deadweight loss to the community. Indeed, given its existing drivers of economic growth, including tourism, high-tech industry and the military, San Diego is the very model of a place that doesn't need the NFL.

That hasn't kept the team from swanking around as though San Diego might cease to exist without it. The Chargers' treatment of the community is nothing short of contemptuous. Responding to accusations that the team is "sabotaging" the talks, Fabiani said, "Why would we need to sabotage anything?... Long ago, we satisfied the NFL’s relocation guidelines. We don’t have to go to meetings and pay lawyers to study proposals." Then he suggested that the city hadn't moved fast enough to come up with its taxpayer handout.

These are the people whom the city of Carson thinks it can do business with. Good luck. But don't say you weren't warned.

[snackdaddy]

So much going on with all that. Meanwhile, Kroenke sits quietly going about his business of bringing the Rams back to LA. Love it.