A group of local development figures will be without one key endorsement today when they unveil their plan to build a new football stadium: the football team.
The Chargers informed the developers in a letter yesterday that they do not believe the plan is realistic because it would be unacceptable to the Mission Valley community and incompatible with its infrastructure.
“The Chargers respectfully request that you cease referring to our organization as you attempt to promote your project,” wrote Mark Fabiani, the team’s special counsel.
A group calling itself Citizens for Qualcomm Site Redevelopment Task Force plans to formally announce today development plans for the 166 acre Qualcomm Stadium site.
The Union-Tribune’s Tim Sullivan detailed in a column last week the developers’ initial plan:
It calls for some 5,000 residential units, 3.5 million square feet of office space, 500,000 square feet of specialty retail, 1,000 hotel rooms, 500 units of San Diego State student housing, 100,000 square feet of SDSU classroom and office space, 30 acres allotted to parkland and, conceivably, an eventual bullet train station.
Plus, one nifty new NFL stadium.
Scheduled to speak at the group’s press conference: Perry Dealy, Dealy Development; Charles Black, a Luce Forward real estate attorney who led John Moores’ development around Petco Park; Gordon Carrier, architect with Carrier Johnson; and real estate advisor Gary London.
In his letter, addressed to Dealy, Fabiani said the team has spent more than seven years and $10 million trying to find “a publicly acceptable stadium solution.”
In all likelihood we are now much closer to the end of this process than to the beginning. For that reason, we believe it is essential that the energies and resources of the entire Chargers organization – and of all other parties genuinely interested in finding a solution – be focused on potential solutions that have a realistic chance of success.
I identified one potential problem with the early development plans last week in this blog post:
The development plan, Sullivan writes, would rely on getting the stadium area turned into a redevelopment zone.
That would allow the city to capture a much greater share of the taxes there instead of having them passed on to the county or state. But to do that, you have to be able to prove that the area is blighted.
And that’s the problem.
The Chargers first proposed the redevelopment idea when they offered their original stadium proposal back in 2003. Shortly thereafter, everyone pretty much agreed that it’d be near impossible to get that redevelopment designation, so the idea was scrapped.