DALLAS • National Football League team owners arrived here Tuesday with their eyes on Los Angeles, even as St. Louis officials labored at home to lock down plans for a new riverfront stadium.
Owner committees, including the league's Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities, began meeting Tuesday. The full ownership meets Wednesday and has set aside the afternoon to discuss L.A.
Officials expect the six-man L.A. Opportunities committee to focus discussions on key points of the current competing stadium construction proposals — in Los Angeles and in team hometowns — hoping to identify make-it-or-break-it questions for each plan.
Some involved in the process have called it a critical week. Owners, while unlikely to vote on relocation this week, are forming opinions, and could schedule a vote for January.
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"This thing is reaching its crescendo," Dave Peacock, co-chairman of Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's St. Louis stadium task force, said Tuesday morning. "The flurry," he continued, "is happening now."
St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke's Inglewood stadium proposal may still be the frontrunner in the race to Los Angeles. But recent events make some predict that the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders joint proposal in Carson, Calif., just south of Inglewood, is catching up.
Last month, a new Federal Aviation Administration report said Kroenke’s $2 billion stadium proposal is so tall, so shiny and so close to LAX runways that it may interfere with plane-tracking radar. Not a day later, the Raiders and Chargers revealed a new partner in their project: Walt Disney Co. Chairman and CEO Robert Iger will direct the stadium's vision, lending weight and celebrity to the effort.
Moreover, relocation rhetoric has recently shifted. — that they would not approve a team's move to L.A. if that team's hometown was still working on a viable stadium proposal.Â
Some league and team staff have, in private conversations, also begun to acknowledge such possibilities.
"We're being taken more seriously," Peacock said.
On Monday, Kroenke met with Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon regarding the task force's stadium plan. It was a rare meeting between the two.
At the same time, the NFL still has a few nagging concerns about St. Louis financing and timing.
League officials think the St. Louis stadium could be more expensive than expected, and they worry that Nixon's task force isn't prepared for cost overruns.
Some owners also don't like the task force plan to use stadium naming rights proceeds as a source of bond funding. Nor do some think the team should have to pay an amusement tax to the city on ticket sales. AÂ city ordinance seems to officially waive such charges when teams commit to spending $200 million on new stadiums, as did the St. Louis Cardinals when building Busch II.
Finally, the St. Louis city funding package — the last unresolved piece of Nixon's proposal — was supposed to be done last month. It is now, instead, stuck in the city Board of Aldermen's Ways & Means Committee. The eight committee members have held three public forums but have yet to pass the bill.
For the bill to stand a chance of passage, an alderman needs to amend the legislation to add the city's proposed minority participation guidelines.
The board goes on winter break Dec. 11. If the committee doesn't vote this week, the bill would have to wait until after the board returns on Jan. 8.
