San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and three advisers today will leave for a “three-day nationwide tour of downtown sports and entertainment districts to get ideas for what might work locally,” according to Matthew Hall of the SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE. They plan to visit K.C., Indianapolis and Denver. Sanders spokesperson Darren Pudgil said, “The mayor doesn’t want to make any decision in a vacuum. He wants to see what other cities have done to see whether they’ve succeeded and where they may have failed. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if there are concepts out there that we think may benefit San Diego.” Sanders will be joined on his trip by Fred Maas, a former San Diego redevelopment official who yesterday was named “special assistant to the mayor on a sports and entertainment district project for San Diego.” Maas said, "We're not on a trip of folly looking at a bunch of facilities that are not replicable here in San Diego." AEG “wants to lock in a team and begin construction within a year” on a proposed a downtown L.A. football stadium, and the Chargers reportedly “might be on the move because [their] lease is the easiest to break among seven teams seen as potential tenants.” Hall notes the Chargers are able to end a deal with the city to use Qualcomm Stadium through '20 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.” Chargers Special Counsel Mark Fabiani said that the “timing of Sanders' trip is as significant as the trip itself.” Fabiani: "The public demonstration is important at this point because of all the questions that have been raised about Los Angeles in recent weeks" (SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE, 8/17). Fabiani said, “What this national tour does is make that strong commitment known to a wider audience, especially to Chargers fans. In addition, the tour will allow the Mayor and his staff to see the tremendous amount of jobs, new tax revenues, and economic development generated by sports and entertainment districts in downtowns across the country” (CHARGERS.com, 8/16).
