Monday June 18, 2007 | Likely intentionally lost in translation of City Attorney Aguirre’s “Debunking the Chargers’ Myths,” is the critical point that America’s Finest Circus has never entertained the apparently novel idea of negotiating any and all aspects of the Chargers new stadium proposal but rather took it as an “as is non-negotiable proposal” which it clearly was not.
Then again, I take that back, since in February of 2005, the San Diego City Council vetoed hiring independent stadium consultants at a cost of $200,000 to negotiate on the city’s behalf and thus effectively ended new stadium discussions on the existing Qualcomm site before they even began.
Simply stated, the city of San Diego has never made an attempt to negotiate a win-win new stadium proposal as part of a legitimate public effort to retain a major regional asset. And nothing has, nor is, preventing it from doing so except for the lack of political leadership and the future vision to do so. Instead, we get ill-served self-promoting self-serving uninformed public sound bites from our hopefully soon-to-be-unelected city attorney.
Regardless of the public spin promoted by Aguirre, the city’s failure to even make a good-faith attempt to respond to and negotiate on the Chargers new stadium proposal at Qualcomm is an “unspinnable” public documented fact and I will never forgive or forget our City Council’s and our less-than-strong mayor’s failure to do so.