Relocation/the move … 1/21 – 1/23

Inside The Owners Meetings: How And Why The Rams Were REALLY Able To Move To L.A.

David Rosenthal, CBS Los Angeles

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/01/21/inside-the-owners-meetings-how-and-why-the-rams-were-really-able-to-move-to-l-a/

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Just hours before the NFL owners voted 30-2 to let the Rams and Stan Kroenke move to Inglewood, an “influential league committee” of owners handling the Los Angeles negotiations voted 5-1 in favor of the Carson project.

The six-man committee included Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who supported Chargers owner Dean Spanos and backed the Carson project vehemently.

The committee was chaired by Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II and included New England’s Robert Kraft, Carolina’s Richardson, Kansas City’s Clark Hunt, Houston’s Bob McNair and the New York Giants’ John Mara.

Rooney also sided with the Carson project, while the lone dissenter of the six-man committee, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, said he felt the NFL “would be best served by having less realignment.”

Several owners quietly supported Hunt’s dissent and that showed when they would vote 30-2 in favor of the Inglewood project.

“Carson never had the ‘wow’ factor,” one top executive told Sports Illustrated’s Peter King.

“The Rams project did, and sentiment for that project became a tsunami,” he added.

Once the owners heard the results of the committee’s 5-1 vote, it was their turn to vote.

For any proposal to pass, a three-quarters majority, 24 votes, was required.

Here’s where things got interesting.

According to King, Goodell was approached by six to eight owners who were in favor of a “secret ballot” for the vote.

“[Goodell] knew neither side had the votes to win, but he also felt owners needed to vote their consciences, so proposing the secret ballot was something he felt he had to propose,” one source told King.

Goodell proposed the secret ballot to the owners, needing a majority for it to pass.

When 17 owners raised their hands, and the secret ballot was instituted.

According to King, “There was something about the Rams/Inglewood project, while inconvenient for those who wanted the Chargers and Raiders stadium issues fixed in one fell swoop, many owners knew it was better for the NFL long-term.”

Think about it, the Inglewood stadium will put the Dallas Cowboys stadium to shame.

Construction of the stadium and the surrounding areas could reach over $3 billion.

The surrounding areas will have many office and media buildings, which the NFL and NFL Network plan to use.

The stadium itself will be a fine addition to the Super Bowl rotation, as well as providing a main base for “NFL West,” as King describes it.

Also accompanying the stadium is a 6,000-seat theater, with a similar atmosphere to that of L.A. Live.

The first vote (remember, a three-quarters majority is needed to pass) came out either 21-11 or 20-12, depending on what sources you ask, in favor of the Inglewood project.

The vote absolutely blindsided Chargers owner Dean Spanos, who was reportedly “Utterly shocked — white as a sheet.”

It became apparent that Kroenke’s Inglewood project, with all of its bells and whistles, was most preferred by the owners, who were using a secret ballot to cast their true opinions.

Kroenke’s commitment to throw billions into the project was something the Chargers and Raiders weren’t willing to do.

Since no three-quarters majority was reached on the first vote, Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti suggested a compromise.

Bisciotti suggested giving the owners the option to vote for “Inglewood plus one other team” as well as just the Carson and Inglewood projects.

This kept the door open for the Chargers and possibly the Raiders to move to Los Angeles, appealing to the concerns of many of those who dissented in the first vote.

The six-man committee and Goodell decided the Inglewood project, while also giving the Chargers a one-year option to join the Rams in Inglewood, was the best possible solution for bringing back an NFL team (or two) to Los Angeles.

If the Chargers do not exercise that option, then the Raiders have one year to decide whether or not to join the Rams in Inglewood.

Also, the NFL agreed to give the Chargers and Raiders both $100 million if they could reach new stadium deals in their existing markets.

Kroenke reportedly wanted to have the Inglewood stadium to himself, but if allowing a team to join him meant having the league’s blessing for the project, Kroenke was all for it.

The Rams owner also agreed to a revenue split if a team does join him in Inglewood, which would allow the second team to keep all game-day revenue in and around the stadium.

He also agreed that the second team would receive 18.75 percent of all other “lucrative deals associated with the new stadium — such as signage and stadium naming rights.”

This time, the vote passed by an overwhelming majority: 30-2.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was allegedly a major supporter of Kroenke’s Inglewood project.

Jones wanted to the deal to be about the owner who had the deepest pockets and the most commitment to making NFL in LA work.

Spanos now faces a difficult decision: to rid himself of all financial worry and move to Los Angeles, or to improve the stadium in San Diego and keep the team there.

Rams’ top priority for move is getting players settled

Nick Wagoner

http://espn.go.com/blog/st-louis-rams/post/_/id/26196/rams-top-priority-for-move-getting-players-settled

EARTH CITY, Mo. — Over the next few months, the Los Angeles Rams will begin moving their business and football operations to their new home in California.

Along with that, they have a roster full of players who have to move individually. In the interim, some players will have to sell homes in the St. Louis area and others will look to more permanently relocate from other parts of the country to southern California.

But according to Rams coach Jeff Fisher, the most important part of the process is making sure the players get settled in and are ready to go in time for the offseason program, which is slated to start in April.

“I don’t know if I can pick one,” Fisher said of the team’s priorities regarding the move. “It’s get the players settled. We have to figure out where we’re going to train and all those kinds of things. And then it’s get out in the community and make the players available, whether it’s rallies or whatever we want for those that are maybe on the fence to really get to know us because it’s going to be a special team.”

Reconnecting with the Los Angeles fan base hasn’t looked like much of a challenge so far. The Rams announced on Wednesday night that they’d already received 45,000 deposits for 2016 season tickets. Each of those deposits allows for the purchase of up to eight tickets, so depending on how many of those putting down deposit money follow through on the tickets, the Rams already figure to have a strong chance to sell out the majority of the seats for the Los Angeles Coliseum next season.

For now, the Rams plan to be in St. Louis through the end of March, when they’re expected to shutter Rams Park and make the actual move across the country. It’s expected that they’ll end up in Oxnard, California, from April to July, then move to a different practice facility for the season. They’ll locate the site and build a permanent practice facility after that, though it’s possible that won’t be in place until 2018.

With all of those moving parts, it figures to be difficult for Rams players to settle into the Los Angeles area until they know where they will be training and spending most of the offseason.

“The No. 1 goal is transitioning the guys that are most important, and that’s the players,” general manager Les Snead said. “So that when they do report for offseason workouts, it’s an efficient process, they’re comfortable and ready to work. So we can focus on the product that all of the fans are going to come see.”

Fisher has long been clear that he doesn’t care for the NFL’s rules on offseason programs under the most recent collective bargaining agreement. Teams already get less time with their players and it’s possible that the Rams will have to figure out ways to make attendance for the offseason program easier by offering players lodging.

“It’s interesting because in the NFL now, when our players check out for the offseason, we can’t have any contact with those guys,” Snead said. “They get a vacation, and that’s via the collective bargaining agreement. So the first time we can chat with those guys is obviously when they report back. But we can communicate with them via all of the technology and get them the best plans possible. And when they get back is basically April, when we will see our players again.”

The Rams already know the when but figuring out the where must crystallize sooner than later to maximize what’s going to be an important offseason.

How St. Louis lost the Rams

David Hunn, Jim Thomas

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/how-st-louis-lost-the-rams/article_817208e5-377c-5ffd-baf7-41d00f25e8a0.html

ST. LOUIS • There was still hope for St. Louis football on the day the region lost the Rams.

The plan to build a new stadium here had strident support. Michael Bidwill, owner of the Arizona Cardinals, had worked for weeks to round up votes among his National Football League colleagues. Jerry Richardson, owner of the Carolina Panthers, lobbied so ardently he had even flown to visit some owners.

At midday on Jan. 12, the influential NFL Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities recommended 5-1 that the league’s 32 owners approve a stadium project in Carson, Calif. That would move the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers to Los Angeles. Rams owner Stan Kroenke would be stuck in St. Louis.

But as the hours passed in Houston, optimism disappeared.

The committee’s Carson pick was expected. And most thought it would take several ballots for one side to gather the 24 votes necessary for league approval.

It didn’t. The first vote killed the Carson project. Owners voted 21-11 in favor of Kroenke’s sparkling Inglewood stadium. It was just a matter of time to reach 24.

By day’s end, the vote was 30-2.

St. Louis stadium officials were left wondering what went wrong.

“I thought we had a good shot,” Dave Peacock, co-chairman of Gov. Jay Nixon’s stadium task force, said late that night. “Obviously, tonight, we learned otherwise.”

No one moment killed the effort to keep the Rams in St. Louis. But task force members, league and team executives — past and present — as well as multiple owners agreed that three factors, above all others, sunk the St. Louis effort:

• A secret ballot.

• A resistance to a vote of residents or state legislators.

• And one clause in the Rams’ 21-year-old lease.

A tipping point might have come the week before the Houston meeting. Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff presented Kroenke’s stadium plan — round after round of dazzling full-color renderings — to 17 owners on three committees in New York City. Owners say now that the display went exceedingly well.

“We’re sitting there in New York, and I’m watching this presentation on Inglewood, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Holy (expletive),’” said one owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I said, ‘There is no way that the owners in that room are not going to approve this project. This is pretty spectacular.’”

Even committed Carson-backers left New York City worried.
THE FINAL HOURS:
THREE SECRET BALLOTS

Walking into the Houston meetings, Chargers owner Dean Spanos and his supporters thought they had lined up about 20 votes. Spanos was well-liked by owners, who also sympathized with his long fight for a new stadium in San Diego. Richardson had been “aggressively” lobbying for Carson, one owner said — so aggressively, in fact, that league executives got calls from owners who said they felt “bullied.”

Several asked Commissioner Roger Goodell about a secret ballot. Goodell put the issue on the day’s agenda. The owners took it up and voted. It passed 19-13.

In the NFL, secret ballots occur about as often as Rams playoff berths.

In this case, it opened the door for Kroenke.

“In the almost 30 years I was behind those doors at those meetings, the only instances in which I recall the use of the secret ballot were the selection of the commissioner and the selection of Super Bowl sites,” said former Raiders CEO Amy Trask, now a CBS Sports analyst.

“It was tremendously significant,” she said. “And also somewhat surprising.”

It’s one thing to tell an owner he’s got your vote. It’s another to look him in the eye and say he doesn’t. Former Rams President John Shaw has said on more than one occasion that when he walked into owners meetings in 1995 in Phoenix, he felt he had 18 votes in favor of moving the Rams to St. Louis. Turned out he had three.

In Houston, the impact of the secret ballot was immediate. Owners voted 21-11 in favor of Inglewood. Someone flipped for Carson in the next vote, and it went 20-12.

Just like that, eight or nine Spanos votes had disappeared. Owners took a break. It was time to broker a deal. By day’s end, Kroenke’s Inglewood palace won, 30-2. The league gave Spanos a one-year option to move in with Kroenke; Raiders owner Mark Davis could move if Spanos didn’t.

The secret ballot didn’t carry the day alone. Some owners and executives now say Demoff’s New York presentation got even better in Houston. Some say the rare appearance of Seattle Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — who urged owners to pick the best stadium project — swayed the room.

“Paul was vocal,” one owner said. “And more so than I’ve ever seen him at a league meeting.”

Over six hours, the league had done something it almost never does: Overruled a committee vote.

“Again, in all my years in that meeting room,” said Trask, the former Raiders executive, “I can count on one hand, with fingers to spare, the numbers of times the membership as a whole did not endorse the recommendation of a committee.”

“It is extraordinarily rare.”
THE LAST MONTHS: A CASCADE OF FAILED PLANS

Two years ago, Goodell and NFL Executive Vice President Eric Grubman urged Nixon to go public with his support for a new stadium.

But Nixon waited at least 10 months to announce his task force, until the day after the November 2014 election. The day before, a new county executive was elected.

The county would prove to be more opponent than ally.

In January 2015, Nixon’s task force revealed plans for a $1 billion riverfront stadium. A key tenet: no new tax dollars. St. Louis, St. Louis County and the state could all instead extend annual payments — $24 million in total — that cover debt and upkeep on the Edward Jones Dome, where the Rams played.

Nixon was worried that there wasn’t time for a public vote, especially since the NFL decision was proving to be a moving target — once projected for the fall, then December, then January. In addition, leaders weren’t sure a vote would pass. Polling in the city showed roughly a 50-50 split among voters. If Kroenke funded opposition, results could be worse.

So Nixon — who was already ignoring calls for a vote of the state Legislature — sought to sidestep St. Louis and St. Louis County laws requiring elections.

That March, Nixon met with County Executive Steve Stenger to talk about his role. Stenger told Nixon that the county charter would, in his eyes, require a public vote for any direct support of a new stadium.

Nixon’s team shifted gears, Stenger said. Could the county instead cover Jones Dome upkeep, or the remaining $115 million in debt?

The county’s role, however, “was never formalized,” Stenger said Friday. The task force suggested the county could support the stadium “in some other way, other than through public financing,” he said.

At the end of March, Nixon cut the county out of the stadium financing plan.

Nixon and Peacock shrugged off the loss. But the county represented one-fourth of the stadium’s anticipated public financing. It was money the task force would never recoup.

With every revision, every plan released publicly, the NFL protested.

The task force secured $158 million in stadium naming rights, and proposed using that to fund construction. The NFL argued naming rights were club dollars.

The task force suggested using game-day tax revenue — on tickets, parking, hot dogs, etc. The NFL cried foul again: The city had waived ticket taxes for the Cardinals and the Blues. Why not the Rams, too?

Finally, the day before a key vote by the city’s Board of Aldermen, the plan changed one more time. The task force proposed sending ticket taxes, too, back to the NFL, in exchange for higher stadium rent and $100 million more from the league.

Two days later, Goodell wrote to Peacock saying the $100 million was “fundamentally inconsistent with the NFL’s program of stadium financing.” The league had no plans to pay it, he said.

But the letter was misleading to the general public. League owners and executives had multiple conversations with the task force about such an offer, both sides acknowledged. And the league did have plans to pay that money — a fact which became clear after the owners vote in Houston. There, the league offered Spanos and Davis $100 million extra toward new stadiums in their hometowns.

Kroenke would have gotten the same deal, executives said after the Houston meeting, had he lost the vote and stayed in St. Louis.

Another blow came just days before the Houston meeting.

In a report sent to owners Jan. 9, Goodell said there are “significant concerns about the certainty and long-term viability of the Task Force’s stadium proposal to retain the Rams,” according to an excerpt obtained by the Post-Dispatch. Moreover, he said, the Rams have the right to relocate.

Nixon told the Post-Dispatch that, in the end, few of those criticisms mattered.

“Even if we stopped and did those things, we’d still be here, and the team in LA,” Nixon said on Friday. “I do not believe a few million dollars on either side would have changed the outcome.”

Still, an airtight stadium plan was the last hope for the task force. It had to be perfect in the league’s eyes.

And it wasn’t.
20 YEARS AGO:
A DESPERATE CITY

None of this would have mattered were it not for a few paragraphs among hundreds of pages in the Rams lease.

At the end of 1994, St. Louis had just lost its bid for an expansion franchise. James Orthwein, a Busch heir, had sold the New England Patriots — the region’s backup plan — to business magnate Robert Kraft. And a downtown football stadium was one-third built.

The Rams were months into negotiations with regional leaders hoping to lure the team east.

In November, attorneys for all sides met in secret in La Jolla, Calif., a tony beachside neighborhood north of San Diego.

Rams President Shaw was worried about stadium upkeep. It was a problem in Anaheim, where the team had played since 1980. He knew St. Louis hadn’t funded a new stadium for the football Cardinals, who had fled to Phoenix seven years earlier. He didn’t want such issues to become a problem if the Rams moved to St. Louis.

In Shaw’s mind it wasn’t as much physical obsolescence as economic: A team’s ability to make money was rapidly changing. Club seats, luxury suites and other extras were cutting edge, as were in-house advertising and stadium naming rights.

Shaw told his attorneys before they met in La Jolla to make sure the St. Louis stadium could adapt to changing revenue streams.

Three main parties were negotiating the lease. Greg Smith represented the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission, which would run the dome. Attorney Richard Riezman and his firm, then called Riezman & Blitz, spoke for FANS Inc., the group of civic leaders trying to lure the team. The Rams were represented primarily by L.A. attorneys Milt Hyman and Marty Gelfand, as well as sports consultant Marc Ganis.

It’s unclear who introduced the now-infamous “first-tier” clause, which required the stadium to be among the top eight facilities in the league after each 10-year increment. Shaw and Ganis have both said the Rams brought it up. Most say they now forget. Some think it was actually a St. Louis attorney.

“It might surprise you, but I favored it,” said former convention center director Bruce Sommer. “I had been managing the Kiel and St. Louis arena. I learned that if the public owns it, likely they’ll never put another dime into it. And in a number of years, it won’t be a very good facility.”

But regional leaders refused to guarantee a dollar figure on the upgrades — they didn’t want to commit future tax dollars.

The parties went back and forth on the subject.

At one point in negotiations, Hyman pushed away from the table. “‘Guys, do I need to remind you? There’s only one NFL corporation that wants to move,’” Sommer recalls him saying. Then Hyman pulled his chair back to the table. “‘Now let’s get reasonable.’”

The St. Louisans had little choice, Sommer said. “What are we going to do, sit here with an empty $300 million stadium, and be the laughingstock of the country?”

Neither Hyman nor Gelfand returned calls seeking comment.

In the end, they worked out a deal that allowed the Rams to leave the dome if the parties couldn’t agree on top-tier upgrades and arbitrators ruled in their favor.

“Believe me, I tried to convince the St. Louis parties not to do it even though I was representing the Rams,” Ganis said. “I knew then, and I explained to them then, that this was going to be a major mistake they were making. I told them.”

“We weren’t looking to be pigs,” he continued. “We just wanted the building updated on a regular basis over 30 years. That’s all we were looking for. We knew that St. Louis was a challenging market compared to many of the other markets in the NFL. So we had to have a first-class building.”

Smith, the convention center attorney, chuckled some last week when asked about the clause. It didn’t, then, really seem like something they had to worry about.

“My recollection,” he said, “was we thought we had plenty of time to figure that out.”
KEY MOMENTS FOR ST. LOUIS RAMS

Feb. 1, 2013 • Arbitrators rule in favor of Rams’ $700 million proposal to reach first-tier status at Edward Jones Dome.

July, 2013 • Regional leaders reject Rams’ $700 million plan. “We simply don’t have the money to do it,” convention and sports complex authority head Jim Shrewsbury says.

January, 2014 • Rams owner Stan Kroenke buys 60 acres in Inglewood, Calif. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell tells St. Louis not to overreact: “There are no plans to my knowledge of a stadium development.”

Nov. 6, 2014 • Gov. Jay Nixon announces formation of task force headed by former Anheuser-Busch executive Dave Peacock and attorney Bob Blitz to keep NFL football in St. Louis.

Jan. 5., 2015 • Kroenke’s plans are made public to build an 80,000-seat stadium in Inglewood, partnering with Stockbridge Capital Group on a multi-faceted 300-acre project.

Jan. 9, 2015 • Stadium task force reveals plans for an open-air riverfront stadium on the north edge of downtown St. Louis.

Jan. 26, 2015 • Rams convert Edward Jones dome lease to year-to-year status.

March 2015 • St. Louis County taxpayers are removed from stadium financing, stripping plan of $6 million a year and raising questions about viability of the project.

Oct. 6, 2015 • Proposed St. Louis stadium gets a $158 million name: National Car Rental Field.

Dec. 6, 2015 • Task force cuts deal to fill financing hole, giving stadium naming rights money to NFL. but keeping anticipated tax revenue.

Dec. 9, 2015 • NFL executive Eric Grubman says on a local radio show: “St. Louis will surely fall short of having a compelling proposal that would attract the Rams.”

Dec. 10, 2015 • Aldermanic committee votes 7-2 to send stadium financing bill to full Board of Aldermen.

Dec. 16, 2015 • Houston Texans owner Robert McNair tells Houston Chronicle: St. Louis is “getting pretty close, in my opinion, to being an attractive proposal. And if they do come up with an attractive proposal … I don’t think the Rams will receive the approval to relocate.”

Dec. 17, 2015 • Goodell warns Nixon and his task force that the NFL has no plans to contribute $300 million toward construction of a St. Louis stadium.

Dec. 18, 2015 • Aldermen approve funding plan for stadium construction, 17-10.

Jan. 5, 2016 • Rams file for relocation, blasting the St. Louis market and stating that any NFL club agreeing to stadium proposal “would be well on the road to financial ruin.”

Jan. 9. 2016 • In a report sent to NFL team owners, Goodell calls the St. Louis stadium plan inadequate, suggests that Rams have met relocation guidelines.

Jan. 12, 2016 • League owners meet in Houston, approve Rams’ move to Los Angeles, 30-2.[/quote]