Chargers planning cross country tour for stadium ideas - Ingles

In his strongest show of support yet for building the Chargers a new football stadium, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and three advisers will leave Wednesday for a three-day nationwide tour of downtown sports and entertainment districts to get ideas for what might work locally.

They'll visit Kansas City, Mo., Indianapolis and Denver.

Sanders said the trip "is about learning what has worked in other cities and what hasn’t worked ... and how you put together a plan so that we can move forward on the ballot in November 2012 with an issue to take to the voters."

The announcement of Sanders' trip comes one week after the Los Angeles City Council gave tentative approval to a $1.5 billion deal to build a football stadium and renovate the convention center in downtown L.A. The developer behind the project, AEG, wants to lock in a team and begin construction within a year, prompting many onlookers to speculate that the Chargers might be on the move because its lease is the easiest to break among seven teams seen as potential tenants in a Los Angeles stadium.

The Chargers are able to end a deal with the city to use Qualcomm Stadium through 2020 by paying an early-termination fee every year between February 1 and May 1. Next year that payment would be $24 million, which AEG has said it would pay.

On his trip, Sanders will be joined by chief of staff Julie Dubick, deputy chief of staff Aimee Faucett and Fred Maas, a former San Diego redevelopment official who has advised Sanders for months on the stadium issue privately. Tuesday, Sanders is naming Maas special assistant to the mayor on a sports and entertainment district project for San Diego. The position is unpaid and Maas will pay his own way on this week's cross-country tour, Sanders aide Darren Pudgil said.

Pudgil said the cost to the city for the three others will be about $2,500 and that the trip has been in the works for months.

In the last 15 months, Maas has visited Indianapolis and toured two new National Football League stadiums used by the Dallas Cowboys and jointly by the New York Giants and Jets.

Maas said the scale of those two places isn't "applicable to where we are." The three areas being visited this week at his suggestion offer more relevant lessons, he said.

"We're not on a trip of folly looking at a bunch of facilities that are not replicable here in San Diego," he said.

Sanders' Wednesday trip to Kansas City will visit a district that is home to more than 200 restaurants, nearly 80 art galleries and the Sprint Center, which was built in 2007 and visitkc.com brags here is one of the busiest arenas "on the planet." No major league sports team plays there currently but it hosts many concerts.

Thursday, Sanders will visit Indianapolis Wholesale District where the Colts got a new stadium in 2008 as part of a project that included a massive renovation of the city's convention center. "All in all," visitindy.com purrs here, "the Wholesale District is a vibrant destination where the business deals get done during the day, and the celebrations and memory-making happen at night."

Friday, Sanders will stop in Denver to visit Invesco Field, where the Broncos have played since 2001, and away from that venue, the LoDo (Lower Downtown) District, which promoters say here "is the place in Denver to eat, shop, and stay." Lodo.org raves, "A vibrant mixed-use neighborhood, LoDo offers something for everyone, from the day tourist to the lifelong resident."

Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani, who has spearheaded the team's search for a new stadium since 2002, said the timing of Sanders' trip is as significant as the trip itself.

"The public demonstration is important at this point because of all the questions that have been raised about Los Angeles in recent weeks," Fabiani said.

He added: "I think it shows the mayor's seriousness, which is something we've seen privately for quite some time. It enforces what we already understood, which is he'd really like to find a solution here in San Diego, as would we."

Fabiani called AEG's desire to have a shovel in the ground by June "really far-fetched" and suggested San Diegans view the dueling Los Angeles football stadium proposals -- Majestic Realty has proposed one in nearby City of Industry -- as "hovering out there but not something that's breathing down your neck."

Despite AEG's hope to begin construction within a year, the developer still needs to complete and get approval for an environmental study of project impacts on the area. It also must land a team, a deal that would likely require a split ownership between the developer and the team's current owner as well as a possible relocation fee of up to hundreds of millions of dollars assessed by the league for the right to play in the nation's second-largest media market.

Pudgil said it's premature to speculate about possible public funding sources for any San Diego stadium plan that may evolve from conversations following the mayor's trip. Fabiani has suggested for years a stadium could cost $800 million and said the league and team might be able to contribute $300 million but that public money would have to be part of the equation.

That has caused a debate among taxpayers and fans that is sure to pick up if and when any financing plan emerges in the months ahead. The Chargers and the Mayor's Office said they would like to put a plan before voters in November 2012.

Picking up on the theme of a public subsidy, Pudgil summed up why the mayor was taking three days away from his other duties for his coming trip.

"Before hundreds of millions of dollars of public money are spent, we have to do our due diligence," Pudgil said. "We have to look at other facilities and learn what went right and what didn't."

He added: "We're looking at attracting more people to downtown and having more events downtown by building a multi-use stadium. We're talking about much more than eight to 12 football games a year. We're talking about different uses that bring more people to downtown." This article was written by Matthew T. Hall and appeared in The San Diego Union Tribune.