STADIUM PROCESS REMAINS MURKY PICTURE COULD CLEAR UP AFTER NFL MEETINGS.

Byline: Billy Witz Staff Writer

The road to Los Angeles has been a long and twisted one for the NFL, one that's been traveled so often over the last 10 years that it's hard to tell sometimes whether there really is an end to it.

Often enough it looks like a circular journey, the scenery familiar if not exactly the same, the way the same grove of trees bloom in the spring and stand leafless in the fall. The landscape hasn't really changed much, just the context.

When NFL owners meet in Washington D.C. on Tuesday and Wednesday, the plan is for them to whittle down the stadium sites - Anaheim, the Coliseum, Carson and the Rose Bowl - by at least one, and then tell the staff what to do with the rest.

That could mean lots of things. The NFL could focus on one site, perhaps the Coliseum or Anaheim, while keeping the other in the mix. Or both could head down parallel tracks. The Rose Bowl could join the crowd in a couple of weeks if its city council agrees that the benefits of a deal with the NFL outweigh the negative environmental impacts.

The only decision that seems set in the NFL's brand of perpetually wet concrete is that Carson, with the myriad complications involved, will be eliminated.

If that's the only real ``action'' taken, then the NFL - for all its paper-pushing due diligence, negotiations and timelines - is precisely where it was a year ago in absolute terms: Looking at three sites. The only difference, on paper, is that Anaheim has been substituted for Carson.

So, how's that for progress?

We should begin to find out soon. The last two years of exploration in Los Angeles has been strictly a staff-driven affair run mostly by NFL vice president for strategic planning Neil Glat. Two of the league's heavy hitters, executives Eric Grubman and Roger Goodell, have weighed in on occasion, and it's also worth noting that Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson was replaced last year as chairman of the owners' committee on Los Angeles by NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

When Glat delivered a just-the-facts-ma'am update on the four sites to the owners in March, the general reaction may as well have been delivered by teenagers flipping their hair.

Whatever.

The owners have been preoccupying themselves with issues that hit much closer to their pocketbook than Los Angeles - TV contracts, collective bargaining, a makeover for their revenue-sharing plan, and how much to put in the kitty of the G-3 stadium loan program. Oh, and in New York, New Orleans, Indianapolis, San Diego, Minnesota, San Francisco, Dallas, Kansas City and Buffalo, stadium deals of their own.

This presentation, which is expected to take place Wednesday - after discussions on revenue sharing, the CBA and the G-3 - is expected to be more pointed, though Glat declined to say if his report would deliver a recommendation or facts that imply one.

``With each of the sites, there are still some open issues,'' Glat said. ``But by and large, the staff has assembled enough information that they can cut one site or cut as deep as they're prepared to based on the information we have. How far they'd go is going to depend on the timing of other broad strategic issues we're dealing with.''

If you can judge expectations by the size of a site's delegation, then the Coliseum must be anticipating something big - or why else would it plan on sending general manager Pat Lynch, commission president Bill Chadwick, city councilman Bernard Parks and his deputy, Bernard Jr., and consultant Richard Lichtenstein? To make sure every couch in the Ritz-Carlton lobby is occupied?

The NFL and Coliseum have been working on terms for more than a year, and obstacles that may have looked like impediments - such as rent that would cover the cost of expenses at Exposition Park or agreements with USC - have dissipated if not disappeared.

``There's very, very little that's unsettled,'' Chadwick said. ``There's one or two things that they're not happy with, but there's nothing that's a deal-killer.''

Except perhaps the Coliseum Commission itself. The recent fiasco in Anaheim, where councilman Harry Sidhu hijacked what was supposed to have been a glossy portrayal of the NFL's opportunities in Anaheim, was pretty much a monthly routine during the expansion process of the late 1990s. Nine commissioners, nine different press conferences.

Now, the Coliseum Commission members are trying to convince the NFL they have been good boys and girls. They're willing to sub-lease the Coliseum, removing the commission from day-to-day management, and there's been little name-calling.

``We have assiduously refrained from getting into a rhetorical game as long as we're close to getting a deal,'' commission member Zev Yaroslavsky said. ``If the NFL comes here, they'll no longer be the big boogeyman from New York. They'll be a stakeholder in Exposition Park.''

And if not?

The commission showed last week that sometimes it is more assiduous than others when it directed Parks to write a letter to USC president Steven Sample complaining about a report that David Carter, a sports business instructor at the school, wrote for Anaheim. In examining sponsorship opportunities at the four sites, Carter had the audacity to suggest in a bar chart that the Coliseum's patrons had the worst demographics.

Oooooh!

``I believe life should be made uncomfortable for the reconstructor,'' said Mike Roos, who like others on the commission showed great restraint in not invoking the names of George Wallace, Strom Thurmond or David Duke.

It was without a hint of irony later that Parks, acknowledging that NFL owners don't fully trust the warmer, fuzzier commission yet, attributed this to the simple fact that ``they're not used to it.''

Apparently, the NFL isn't the only one.

Meanwhile down in Anaheim, they are nothing if not consistent. The city will send no one to Washington this week, keeping with its 10-month long message: We want the NFL, but we don't need it.

City manager Dave Morgan said in March that if there wasn't a deal done at this meeting - or clear signs that one could be reached in a few months - then Anaheim would move on to other plans for the 45 acres on the Angel Stadium parking lot that the NFL is interested in purchasing. That hasn't changed.

``We want to see progress,'' said city spokesman John Nicoletti. ``We can't be sacked for a loss. We have to keep gaining positive yardage.''

Glat said the main issue in Anaheim is economic. ``That's not surprising. Most of them come down to economics,'' he said.

Translation: They're haggling over the cost of the land.

If the land were sold for high-density housing, it could fetch about $150 million, according to several real estate investment brokers in Orange County. It's also the number Sidhu says the city should get for it from the NFL.

The problem is the land is zoned for either an NFL stadium or a hotel and some combination of office and retail facilities. To change it to housing the city would have to get permission from the Angels, whom they are currently suing over the team's name change.

``That land is worth nowhere near what the councilman is talking about if it's zoned for office land,'' said Rick Hamilton, a commercial broker at Cushman-Wakefield's Irvine office. ``If you're looking at a difference of $1.5 million an acre to $4 million an acre, that's a big delta.''

More significantly, it's not clear if the city would be interested in a high-rise development when Lennar Corp. plans to build six towers - one as high as 33 stories - bordering Angel Stadium. What's mixed use if there's no mix of uses?

Also, the high-rise market is still on the speculative side in Orange County, where live-work-play developments were not so long ago anathema in a place that defined suburbia.

As the Coliseum and Anaheim reach for a deal, the Rose Bowl will send general manager Darryl Dunn and former mayor Bill Thomson to Washington just so the owners don't forget about the Rose Bowl.

After watching the proposal fight to stay alive before the city council the last few weeks, they're buoyed by stadium deals in places like Cleveland, Dallas and Green Bay - football hotbeds - that squeaked past opponents.

For Carson, it looks as if the end is near. Cleaning up the former dump site is so complicated that a stadium wouldn't be ready before 2010, and the NFL and developer Steve Hopkins, who controls the site, can't reach an agreement that is economically beneficial to both parties.

Where else the NFL goes this week is a matter of reading tea leaves, which around the NFL are capable of scattering in 32 different directions.

Billy Witz, [phone]

billy.witz(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1) COLISEUM

(2) ROSE BOWL

(3) CARSON

Box:

FOURTH DOWN?

- Billy Witz