What About the Chargers?

With Gaylord Entertainment now saying it’s out of Chula Vista, there’s sure to be an impact on another group looking to possibly break ground there: the Chargers. Except it’s not really clear how it impacts the team’s push for a new football stadium.

After all, now there’s a big chunk of land and a $308 million subsidy freed up.

Team advisor Mark Fabiani says the Chargers have been watching the Gaylord situation closely. And the company’s exit from Chula Vista isn’t a positive, he says.

“It can’t be a good thing, because it throws the whole bay front into tremendous uncertainty. It’s never a good thing for an ambitious development project like ours. The best thing for the Chargers would’ve been Gaylord going through,” Fabiani says. “The infrastructure improvements would’ve been paid for.”

So that opening up of land and money isn’t a good thing?

Here’s Fabiani again:

The people who are making that kind of assessment are making it prematurely. The effort for Gaylord took many years and is the result of intense community participation, and what the community is going to want to do with that land is very much up in the air. To presume what the community is going to want to do is not fair to the process that resulted in the Gaylord project.

Also, the Chargers land-use report that consultants in Chula Vista were supposed to originally deliver in April has now been postponed until August, in part because of the Gaylord uncertainty.

— ANDREW DONOHUE