We got them.
Our Scott Lewis, with a hearty tip of the hat to our attorney extraordinaire Felix Tinkov, compelled the city to release previously secret documents describing the deal San Diego is offering the NFL for a new Chargers stadium. The documents, which also include a response from league officials to the city, don’t seem to reveal any blockbusters. But they add details to how the city is expecting the project to go down.
In essence, Lewis reports, the legal documents are designed to limit the city and county’s contribution to the stadium to the $350 million the governments have said they’d be willing to provide — assuming voters say yes to the deal. The documents do reveal that the county is willing to put much of its contribution, $125 million, up front to jumpstart construction.
The NFL has some thoughts:
Turns out, the NFL’s concerns mirror the Chargers’. The city and county cannot guarantee the team a new stadium or provide a timeline on when it would happen.
As unreasonable as it might seem, this has been the basic argument from the Chargers for many months: There’s a race going on to move to Los Angeles, and the team is not willing to pull out of that race unless it’s guaranteed to get something adequate in San Diego.
“The steps needed to achieve project certainty (or to understand that the project is not achievable) and the timing for doing so remain unclear,” reads the NFL’s response to the city’s offer.
This is a good place to remind you that the public investment that Mayor Kevin Faulconer and County Supervisor Ron Roberts is proposing for a new stadium is much greater than we spend now.
Meanwhile the Chargers are really bad this year. So bad that U-T sports columnist Kevin Acee says Coach Mike McCoy is, arguably, an “inept coward.” Acee says McCoy needs to go at season’s end.
Remember Todd Bosnich?
He was that guy who accused then-Congressional candidate Carl DeMaio of sexual harassment and bribing him to stay quiet – accusations that upended DeMaio’s campaign against Rep. Scott Peters last year. And then in June we found out that Bosnich lied about a key element of his story, fabricating emails that he said bolstered his claims. On Monday, Bosnich was sentenced to five years’ probation for lying to investigators, the AP reports.
• Peters’ vote last week for a GOP-backed bill to further restrict Syrian refugees’ ability to gain asylum in the United States is still reverberating. A prominent L.A.-area donor said he was done with Peters and other House Democrats who supported the measure, reports the Los Angeles Times.
At Least It Was Free
Something’s brewing with San Diego’s energy provider San Diego Gas & Electric and the city’s plans to reduce its carbon footprint. KPBS reports that a city-backed study designed to examine if San Diego could go energy independent was late and incomplete. (It did have the benefit of being free to taxpayers.) A new study is in the offing. SDG&E is already planning to argue against any energy independence plan.
Our Andy Keatts has explained why SDG&E is getting riled up about the alternative energy plan, known as community choice aggregation, and why the debate is key to the city’s primary environmental initiative.
School Suspensions Down
A new study from UCLA shows that school suspensions are down for all ethnic groups over the past three years following a concerted effort to change discipline practices across the state, EdSource reports. A state law passed last year forced San Diego Unified to curtail its use of a controversial catch-all provision for suspending students, though the district was already trying to grapple with the problem.
In Other News
• San Diego now has the fourth largest homeless population in the country. (U-T) That’s up from fifth last year and 12th in 2007. The city did celebrate some homelessness news Monday. Its new interim shelter is housing more people than old solutions did, according to a Twitter stream from Councilman Todd Gloria.
• Hundreds of people marched at San Diego State University Monday protesting an alleged hate crime against a Muslim woman last week. (U-T)
• Petco, one of San Diego’s most well-known companies, sold Monday to a private equity group and a Canadian pension fund for $4.6 billion. (U-T). This is only the latest in big San Diego company sales. Last week, craft brewer Ballast Point sold out to beer behemoth Constellation Brands (Corona, Pacifico) for $1 billion.
• Cal Western’s Innocence Project scored another legal victory after a L.A.-area judge exonerated a man sentenced to prison for three rapes 16 years ago. DNA evidence showed the rapes were committed by someone else. (AP)
• Violent crime arrests are up in the county. (City News Service)