By Norma Damashek
How about taking a break from our city’s inane preoccupation with a behemoth sports palace for the San Diego Chargers?
And let’s give ourselves a break from the fiasco called a “Convadium,” a zany proposal to link a convention center annex to a new football stadium just down the street from our 18-acre ballpark. Talk about blocking pedestrian access! Talk about walling off the heart of downtown!
What self-respecting city in the USA would fall for such a ludicrous proposal?
So let’s NOT to take a break from simple questions like: Why are we even thinking about cramming a mammoth new football stadium into our modestly-proportioned, pedestrian-starved downtown streets? What rational person would want to do such a dumb thing to our city? Are we nuts, or what?
And while we’re at it, how about taking a clean break from convoluted (fraudulent?) financing schemes involving hotel taxes and bonds and subsidies and giveaways that inevitably come back to bite San Diego taxpayers and residents?
Think back to the last John Moores promise to San Diegans that his “more than a ballpark” would pay for itself. Turns out we were sold a bill of goods. Hotel taxes (TOTs) notwithstanding, the city is bleeding millions of dollars of public money out of the General Fund to pay off Petco Park debt. “More than a ballpark” turned out to be more of a ripoff – a financial net loss for the city.
Which means let’s take a break from signing any ballot initiative or supporting any ballot
Surely we all deserve a break from San Diego’s heavy-hitters and influential manipulators and major league players who’ve been leading us around by the nose and knocking us silly with their concussive games of power and greed.
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This brings us to a related matter – though (and I hope you’ll bear with me) it may be hard to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) the connection at this very moment.
You may have noticed that last week, on the 6th floor of the San Diego Superior Court Hall of Justice, in the courtroom of Judge Timothy Taylor, 12 jurors in a court of law dismissed sexual harassment and battery charges lodged by a city parks worker against former mayor Bob Filner.
It turns out – according to last week’s jury – that suing a mayor for giving you the creeps, for taking hold of your hands, for casting a leering look in your direction, or for putting his arm around your shoulder (even if it startles you) doesn’t necessarily add up to a hill of beans. The jury didn’t think it warranted an award of half-a-million dollars, though the accuser and her lawyer did. Not even one dollar, as it turned out.
Does it make you wonder whether other San Diego juries might have dismissed the piling-on of sexual harassment and battery charges leveled against our former mayor, had they been given the opportunity to hear all sides of the story?
Does it make you wonder if there’s a bigger, juicier, more intriguing story behind the multiple accusations that led to the ignominious ouster of former mayor Bob Filner?
Does it make you wonder how high were (and are) the stakes for the city’s heavy hitters and influential manipulators and major league players that they had to force mayor Filner out of office ASAP?
And doesn’t it make you wonder whether the full Filner saga – still waiting to be told – is destined to be an eye-popping exposé, a high-jinx blockbuster, a surprising political thriller.
Meantime, while we’re waiting, regular San Diegans can keep track of the saga of the San Diego Chargers in the comics section of our daily newspaper.
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Every time I see Faulconer’s sonny-boy picture, the one where he’s at water’s edge, his tie loosened, jacket thrown over his shoulder… or the other one, shot from below, so that a halo seems to rise just above His Blondness… I think of public relations people, from which he arose, an impeccable cipher, unknown and clean as a new car. Public relations people are touting his upcoming run for Governor. San Diego will vote for him. Outside the city limits no one will understand what he means, nor imagine what he thinks. We’ll vote for just about anybody with clean white teeth.
KF is the perfect vanilla frontman. The County GOP still calls the shots, deep state style, through Boss Sanders (who saved their asses for the time being).
Also, Filner was mugged and tried by accusation in the media, that’s machine politics.
The County Democratic Party needs to get its shit together.
And, it will be interesting to see how “San Diego Inc.” handles the alliance of the NFL and bond issuer, probably Goldman Sachs, the out-of-town forces behind the stadium proposals.
YOu are right on about the football stadium. The T-U is backing the rich guys as usual and their biased “Polls” show it. Has anyone considered asking the local real people who live in the area and the thousands of out-of-town visitors what would make them happier? Urban planning by developers and football club owners is really bad policy. Look at Petco; the East Village’s worst neighbor. How about banning cars from Fifth Ave and turning it into a pedestrian walk? How about open spaces for people, places to walk, bike and so on? We need people based urban planning not planning based on the bottom line of the 1%.
The Padres are there . The Chargers deserve the same
Nonsense, unless you believe in throwing good money after bad & trampling on downtown residents who didn’t move there to have access to Boltmania. But I digress. Let’s face it, baseball is America’s pastime, while professional football is an interloper from the Cold War & underfunded colleges & universities. Oversized bodies with undersized brains have tainted our higher education system while blowing up its cost. Pretending to educate professional ringers while scrambling their brains from hard knocks is hard hypocrisy. Cut off the NFL from its collegiate patrons & watch it shrink to its pre-steroid level. America will be a gentler & smarter place.
How much more proof do we need that Filner’s ouster was a coup d’état engineered by the usual conservative suspects & abetted by gullible liberals? As for the Charger stadium, how much more do we need to know beyond knowing that betting on an enterprise that has peaked in popularity is just foolhardy? Hey, the games in the Roman Empire ended & so will the official game of the American Empire. FYI, the most popular sports in the USA on the eve of the 20th Century were cycling & walking races. Not football, not basketball, not track & field, not even baseball. Radio & TV birthed our current pastimes way out of proportion to their hold on the popular attention span.
I have always felt that the Charger’s owners were hell-bent on getting to the LA market one way or another. Hence the mega-stadium impossible-to-build plan. They have one more year at the Q and then several years at least in the Rams new stadium. It seems they will move to LA and work on a location while enjoying the perceived benefits of being in the LA market. When the NFL inevitably begins its decline in popularity either because a new sport-du-jour comes along (I’m betting on Bubble Soccer or Who’s Smarter than an Orangutan Challenge Course) or the cost of brain-damaged players in skilled nursing facilities, the Charger owners will sell, but by then, nobody will care.
Charger owners are counting on the “Last Fool In” law to walk away loaded from the mess they’ve created. They just have to talk the talk while our civic leaders walk the plank with our money block around their ankles.
The City of San Diego still owes $50 million in debt on Qualcomm Stadium which according to the heavy hitters is a tear down. But they won’t tear up the bonds of indebtedness. Plus we are still on the hook for $6 million a year for operations and maintenance.And the Chargers want the City to take on 1.15 billion in new bond debt. Whoopee!
Looks more and more like the Chargers are a convenient diversionary tactic to keep our eyes off the main prize – big development projects in Mission Valley.
JMI/ John Moores sewed up unprecedented development rights in East Village when he won his ballpark battle. He seems to have been quietly working on sewing up development rights in Mission Valley for several years already. As usual, the public is the last to find out about what’s being planned for them. The joke’s on us, for a change.
Keep in mind that the city has already designated Mission Valley as a major urban node to accommodate the city’s growth (how green was my valley…). And maybe, as others have suggested, the downtown stadium hype is just a ploy to keep public attention focused on the wrong ball.