When the stadium task force announced this week it would pursue Mission Valley as the site of a proposed new stadium for the Chargers, there seemed to be some confusion about who wanted what.
Advisory group chair Adam Day said it was the media that suggested the Chargers and special counsel Mark Fabiani preferred a downtown site. But that wasn’t just a rumor or gossip-fueled misconception.
In fact, Fabiani explicitly told Scott Lewis on our show a few weeks back that the Chargers considered building a multi-use facility downtown “the only possibly feasible way to get this financed,” and that the team planned to again present what he called “our” idea for the downtown facility to the task force.
We wanted to clear a few things up with Tony Manolatos, spokesman for the stadium task force, on the podcast this week. Manolatos said Fabiani had told the task force in February that the team was “agnostic” about the prevailing location options for a new stadium. “So it’s frustrating for the advisory group then to see him lobbying reporters, mostly on background but definitely on the record as well in the last couple weeks, about their real preference is downtown,” Manolatos said. “Well, that’s not what he shared with the advisory group.”
Some other noteworthy points: Manolatos told us there isn’t going to be a tax increase in the financing plan, meaning we won’t be looking at a two-thirds vote for this, and that labor’s input has been taken into consideration even without a representative member on the task force. We also asked Manolatos about the weirdness of the task force’s funding, as Liam Dillon pointed out this week.
Also on the show: Keatts takes issue with San Diego’s so-deemed “best” neighborhoods, a bit of a reality check for U-T sports columnist Nick Canepa (read Scott Lewis’ 2007 column that pre-emptively debunks Canepa’s theory here) and why even we childless San Diegans can get something out of Mario Koran’s new project, The Learning Curve.
Listen to the podcast here, on Stitcher or on iTunes.
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