San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders has hired N.Y.-based Lazard Ltd.'s George Bilicic "to help city and county officials draft a plan to pay for a Chargers stadium in the East Village," and he "hopes to have the public vote on the project in 13 months," according to Matthew Hall in a front-page piece for the SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE. For the first time, Sanders "gave a rough estimate of the potential public contribution to the venue: $38 million a year." An aide later said that that arrangement "over 30 years could cover a bond that generates half of the funding for an $800 million stadium." Sanders said that his goal is for Bilicic to "draw up a proposal for Chargers approval next year." Chargers Special Counsel Mark Fabiani said that the retention of a stadium adviser "won’t stop him from advocating for a new stadium with convention space instead of separate Chargers and convention center projects." San Diego downtown redevelopment arm Centre City Development Corp. "paid $160,000 to investment banker Mitchell Ziets" to explore stadium financing for the city, but his work "ended quietly last year without a final report as stadium talks slowed" amid the NFL's labor strife. Sanders’ office said that it is retaining Lazard Ltd. for "less than $250,000, most of it to be paid contingent on a deal being worked out with the Chargers." Sanders said, "We can’t keep just saying we really want to keep you. We really have to present something. They’ve got some big decisions coming up, and we need to say, 'Hey, here’s another piece of the decision.'" Sanders also indicated that Chargers President Dean Spanos "knows he prefers to handle the stadium and convention-center projects separately, but that he hasn’t met with Spanos in about a month or told him about his new approach" (SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE, 10/13).
IN HIS OWN WORDS: Fabiani recently addressed fan questions on stadium issues and noted from the "perspective of San Diego taxpayers, the problem" with the current stadium is "the use of 166 acres of prime, publicly-owned land in Mission Valley to host an aging, seldom-used stadium is a very bad financial deal for the City." He added from the perspective of the Chargers, "the problem is that the aging stadium does not allow us to generate sufficient revenue to remain financially competitive over the long haul with the top teams in the NFL." Fabiani: "We hope that our new idea for downtown will generate an open and forthright public debate, but there are already those who are trying to shut that debate down. If the debate does get shut down, then we will obviously need to regroup and figure out if other funding sources are potentially available to us. But the bottom line is that the downtown idea is now very much up for grabs" (CHARGERS.com, 10/11).
