REMEMBER, ANAHEIM ALSO COURTING NFL.

Byline: Billy Witz Staff Writer

When the Coliseum had the environmental-impact report for its proposed renovation certified this month, it was hailed by supporters as a significant step in their bid to land an NFL franchise.

After 19 months of rolling up their sleeves and slogging through the minutiae of traffic flow, mitigation measures and the merits of retaining ``historic vomitory tunnel entrances'' - no doubt an ode to the commode of choice during the Raiders' years - they were ready to celebrate.

After all, the Coliseum commissioners said, it put them at least a year ahead of the Rose Bowl or Carson in presenting a ready-to-start-digging proposal to an NFL team, the league or a developer.

And, left unsaid, it finally drew them even with ... Anaheim?

The City That Walt Built (And Georgia Left) currently is not a player in the discussions to return football to Los Angeles, which tells you something about the whole process. That is, the Coliseum, for all its wheel-churning over the past half-dozen years, is in absolute terms right where Anaheim is: ready, willing and able to begin construction on a state-of-the-art football stadium.

Anaheim has in hand a certified environmental-impact report of its own, for a 70,000-seat football stadium that would be built on the Edison Field parking lot.

It was done in 1996 when the city agreed to renovate then-Anaheim Stadium for the Angels as part of a proposed sports-themed complex along with the Pond and two stadiums, that would include retail, dining and entertainment development. Fantasyland already taken, the proposed development was named Sportstown Anaheim.

A few retail plans have come and gone over the years, and other than a brief but serious flirtation with the Seattle Seahawks shortly after the Rams left, Anaheim officials have focused their effort on bringing an NBA team to town and a high-speed rail line that would link the city with Ontario International Airport.

The NFL plans have been put in the cupboard but not forgotten.

``The shelf life (of the EIR) is ongoing,'' said Greg Smith, executive director of the Anaheim Convention Center. ``It's good as long as you don't eliminate a street or something like that. It's a key part in any sort of deal because you can get a team, get an agreement and get all those things negotiated, but if it can't hold up to study, it won't happen.''

Anaheim, which gets more than half its general-fund revenue from travel- industry taxes, has taken a substantial financial hit since 9-11. A city that has been criticized for its willingness to part with taxpayer money in pursuit of sports teams and stadium deals isn't in position to get in the game.

``If you're asking is Anaheim interested, yeah,'' Smith said. ``We have not had any planning or conversation with anybody else. We've internally had thoughts. Of all the potential sites, we feel Anaheim is the best possible site for the NFL.

``We were in it before and it was good for our community and good for the whole County of Orange. It's been a matter of priorities. It's not that we didn't want to or didn't have an interest. We're just trying to deal with things that could be accomplished over the short term. A football deal is a major undertaking that's going to take several years to accomplish.''

If nothing else, the nine years that have lapsed since the Rams and Raiders left Los Angeles have demonstrated how much time, architectural renderings, attorney's fees and newsprint can be spent on ... what?

The Coliseum and Carson are on their second go-around in the stadium game. There have been proposals at Hollywood Park, Dodger Stadium, the Rose Bowl, several sites near downtown and in Anaheim as well.

Expansion possibilities

The weather here might not change with the seasons, but the climate does - and often. If nothing is a sure thing, then anything is possible.

In the past six months, if there was one notion that seemed to be accepted as a universal truth it was that an expansion team would not be coming to Los Angeles. That with the league set at a nice, tidy 32 teams (that's eight, four-team divisions) it would be an existing franchise that would relocate.

Then Bob Costas reported last week in an interview with NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue that the next team in L.A. likely would be an expansion team after all. ``The expansion fee would be substantial and the owners would prefer to collect it,'' Costas said the commissioner told him.

Seeing that the expansion fee paid four years ago by Houston Texans owner Bob McNair was $700 million - or more than $23 million per club - no wonder.

Except that Costas didn't make the proper read of Tagliabue's comments, the NFL now says. ``That decision is really more for the future,'' NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said. ``There's got to be a stadium first.''

Some believe Tagliabue's comments are being explained away as politically correct - that he can't publicly suggest that cities with lease problems, notably San Diego and Indianapolis, will leave. Others aren't so sure.

``The NFL's investment here is too big,'' said sports attorney Jerome Stanley, an adviser to the Coliseum. ``If it's not an expansion team, they can't control who the operators are. San Diego will get solved, Indianapolis will get solved. None of them are great operators. That's why they want out.''

If the NFL is as interested in retaining control as Stanley insists, it might be why the league still is involved in Carson after negotiations between the glazier's pension fund - which owns the land - and a developer presented to the league by Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz dissolved over the summer.

The NFL has continued discussions with the glaziers, who have been trying for years to unload the former toxic-dump site on which the league is considering building a new stadium. An architecture firm retained by the league's construction consultant, Hammes and Co., is drawing plans for a stadium, according to one source.

``They're looking at compaction issues, the construction approach that would be required, the type of remediation of contaminants,'' Carson city manager Jerry Groomes said. ``They're trying to determine how much will it cost to build and how much time will it take to build. Those are the basic questions they're trying to answer.

``There's nothing that's detrimental to the Carson project. We're confident it can be done. They have to be confident, too. Everything we hear from them so far has been positive.''

Bloom off the Rose

Expressing more concern these days are Rose Bowl officials. They were as giddy last spring about their prospects as Coliseum officials are now. But as they work through alterations in the stadium redesign that must be included in the EIR - trying to satisfy preservationists and the NFL - they have other problems, too.

Negotiations over a lawsuit with an environmental group, Spirit of the Sage Council, have bogged down - something that could land the project in court.

Spirit of the Sage Council filed suit last spring after the city released an EIR for its Arroyo Seco master plan, which calls for dozens of projects throughout the canyon and had been 15 years in the making.

The problem is that the plan, which divides the Arroyo Seco into five segments, does not account for an NFL team. City officials have argued they must only revise the EIR for the segment that includes the Rose Bowl, though that is sure to invite more suits on the grounds that playing NFL games at the Rose Bowl would impact the entire canyon.

The city and Spirit of the Sage Council have been given until Dec. 29 to settle or their case will move forward.

``It's a no-brainer that you don't approve an EIR if you don't know what all the project impacts are going to be,'' said Leonna Klippstein of Spirit of the Sage Council. ``The city has been in denial. They want us to jump through hoops. If we don't settle, it's going to hold this case up for another three years.''

In other words, before Pasadena worries about the NFL, it's got to take care of the Southwest Arroyo toad.

The baseball angle

Then there are those with warts of a different sort. Boston developer Frank McCourt's bid to buy the Dodgers, which some believe could be the first step in an eventual land swap that would leave Los Angeles with a new baseball stadium downtown and a football stadium in Chavez Ravine, is undergoing increased scrutiny.

Baseball owners are expected to vote on whether to accept his heavily leveraged bid next month. By then, Casey Wasserman, once a partner in a proposal to build a football stadium near Staples Center, might have sold much of the land on which the stadium would have been built.

``I want to make money,'' said Wasserman, when asked why he recently put the land on the block.

As the calendar keeps turning, eventually it starts repeating itself. So, too, do the pages in this story, where the promise of today is rarely the promise of tomorrow. But check back again in a week.

There are no architectural plans for a stadium in Anaheim, only the footprint of where it can be built - in the southeast or northwest corner of the parking lot.

Yet, the Dodgers and Angels - each of whom drew 3 million fans this season - have demonstrated there could be room for two in the market. And, if Angels owner Arte Moreno were willing, he is a man with a net worth of $940 million, according to Forbes Magazine - or more than twice that of McCourt.

Billy Witz, [phone]

billy.witz(at)dailynews.com

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Possible stadium site

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