Jay Nixon: We’ll be proactive

By Nick Wagoner |

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/12306008/missouri-gov-jay-nixon-says-state-proactive-st-louis-rams-future-air

sT. LOUIS — As momentum builds toward a new stadium project in Los Angeles that could take the NFL out of St. Louis, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon is ramping up the urgency for a stadium in the Gateway to the West.

Speaking at a news conference to announce the clearance of a couple of logistical hurdles on the St. Louis stadium project, Nixon made it clear that while he won’t venture to guess the future of the Rams in the city, he knows what inaction will yield.

“I’m not going to handicap this other than to say that if we do nothing then we’re not an NFL city,” Nixon said. “If we do nothing, then $10 million a year of taxes is gone. If we do nothing, then people will stand right here 10 years from now and that [dilapidated building] will look exactly like it looks right there.

“This is our chance to get a dual benefit of using tax dollars appropriately [and] get the redevelopment of an area of the downtown that has been very hard to redevelop. Doing nothing, it’s really easy to see what’s going to happen.”

Even with work being done on the Inglewood, California, site partially owned by Rams owner Stan Kroenke, Nixon and his task force of local businessmen Bob Blitz and Dave Peacock have continued to forge ahead on the St. Louis project.

On Tuesday, Nixon announced that the region has cut a deal with Ameren Missouri power company and the Terminal Railroad Association to make alterations to their respective power sources and rail lines that currently fall within the proposed stadium’s footprint. That means relocating Ameren’s power lines and transmission towers and curving part of Terminal’s railroad to the west to create space for the stadium.

The power lines and towers move would cost $20 million and the railroad move would cost $3 million. Both are contingent upon the stadium deal being finalized. That $23 million was already accounted for in the initial proposal submitted by Peacock and Blitz last month.

“To get a site ready that has issues involving railroad lines and power stations, those are basically the two hardest things of infrastructure to deal with,” Nixon said. “These folks can never have a break in service. They can never have a redundancy in all of their issues. To get the organizations behind me to jump to that quickly, I would argue are among the most difficult tasks on the front end.”

As Nixon went on to point out, there are still plenty of obstacles to clear before the St. Louis stadium could become a reality — namely, finalizing the financing plan. According to the current proposal, $450 million would come from a combination of $250 million from Kroenke or the owner of any team that would occupy the stadium, and another $200 million would come from the NFL’s G4 loan. The rest of the money would come from public sources, including the extension of the current bonds on the Edward Jones Dome, with a price tag of between $460 million and $535 million.

Nixon said Tuesday that the hope is to have the financing finalized by the fall, and he offered some insight into how that might get done, potentially without a vote at the state level.

“The financing options at the state level will be consistent with the laws approved by the legislature, and the legislature would obviously also need to appropriate the annual bond payments as they have been doing for a couple of decades over here,” Nixon said. “There are a number of financing options available to the city and the county, some of which would require a public vote, and if it does, the public will be heard. At the state level, due to existing authority in state law, a vote of the people would not be required.”

As for the private financing, Nixon said he has not had any conversations with Kroenke but has been in regular communication with the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell, with the two speaking as recently as last week.

Nixon said he continues to get positive feedback from the league, but knows there is no time to waste.

“We are just on a time frame here that requires us to move forward,” Nixon said. “So I feel that with the discussions we’ve had with the league and others, we’re in a positive framework to get redevelopment and progress here.”

Nixon to announce progress on new riverfront stadium

• By David Hunn, Tim Bryant

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/nixon-to-announce-progress-on-new-riverfront-stadium/article_b8b0907a-01be-5d7e-a68e-893e92aded1c.html

ST. LOUIS • The effort to build a new football stadium along the north riverfront is creeping forward.

Gov. Jay Nixon is set to announce Tuesday that regional officials have cut deals with Ameren Missouri and the Terminal Railroad Association concerning land the two agencies own in the proposed stadium’s footprint.

Railroad association President Mike McCarthy said Monday that the association has a nonbinding letter of intent to move the rail line that bisects the proposed stadium’s site. The plan is to curve part of the line westward to accommodate the stadium. McCarthy said railroad engineers have looked over the plan and found it doable.

“We have yet to come up with anything that looks like a fatal flaw,” he said.

The lines carries about 15 freight trains a day, McCarthy said. If relocated, it would have a gentle enough curve to accommodate the faster Amtrak trains proposed to run to Chicago. Walkways over the relocated line would connect the stadium to parking lots.

A spokesman for Ameren, which has power lines running through the site and a substation taking up a block, declined to comment.

This fall, Nixon appointed former Anheuser-Busch President David Peacock and current Edward Jones Dome attorney Robert Blitz to craft a proposal for a new stadium, in hopes they could keep the St. Louis Rams from leaving the region.

In January, Peacock and Blitz unveiled plans for a 64,000-seat, open-air arena along the Mississippi River north of downtown.

And last week, the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority hired its first consultant, John Loyd, to pin down details of the plan.

Meanwhile, Stan Kroenke, owner of the Rams, is making strides toward construction of an 80,000-seat stadium in Inglewood, Calif., just south of downtown Los Angeles.

The National Football League insists relocation decisions must go before team owners. A committee of owners from six teams — Kansas City, Boston, New York, Houston, Carolina and Pittsburgh — has worked for months on stadium options in Los Angeles.

Jacob Barker of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

joemad wrote:

Hey, somebody hijacked my post… I know my diction is not the best and can use some edits from time to time….. but I’m not wrong!!!

Sorry, that was me. I unaccountably and accidently hit edit instead of quote. I fixed it though. (No mod here would just hijack-edit another poster’s post.)

Here’s what I MEANT to do.

I meant to say–in response to you–

The Giants were not 1-3 when Warner was benched, they were 5-4. Correct, the G-men had a terrible line.

Yeah sorry I just put that wrong. I meant to say they had gone 1-3 in their last 4 games when they benched him. I read up on that year because the issue came up so much in discussions. The best thing I read on it went on about how the Giants OL had fallen apart.

Though it is also true that after 2002 Warner was not quite the same until the glove.

joemad wrote:

so either he elevated a very lousy Giants team or Eli sucked badly his rookie year.

But he didn’t elevate them…in fact he started going backwards. They were 1-3 when the benched him. The thing was, the NY OL was a wreck. He kept trying to hold the ball to make plays and the result was massive fumbling (he still hadn’t figured out about the glove yet).

wv wrote:

Well, we could always start following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Mobile

University of Mobile
Motto The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom
Established 1961

Colorado State.

rfl wrote:

I guess I can understand the counterargument, that discussions of the same theme can become fragmented. But I don’t find that argument convincing. It doesn’t happen often, and it has a charm in itself.

Always good to discuss things.

In terms of LA threads, this has a history. Basically we had declared that we were keeping LA/relocation threads to a couple per page, and at the time there was good reason for that. It was possible, early on, before the Inglewood revelations, that some people were just going to start several relocation threads per day…whether anyone responded or not. In that atmosphere it was actually volatile. After Inglewood, a lot of that seems moot. So always be careful what you wish for. You personally would restrain what you did to a board front page, but do you honestly think everyone would? Often when there are board policies in effect, you have to look beyond your own perspective and ask, what would this look like if it were abused. (And it came close to that at one point much earlier on.)

But that’s just the history on LA stuff.

Also. Basically, I merge threads because people keep starting new threads on existing topics, and it wasn’t because they were making choices or being libertarian or any of that. Again YOU don’t do that but that DOES occur. And basically, it was because they didn’t read the board. As a result they reproduced things that were already there. In terms of mergings, the very few times people have complained (and I took the complaints seriously) struck me as minimal in comparison to the number of times conversation was stimulated.

But then it’s also possible that several weeks ago I overdid it a mite. If that happened it was over a long time ago. In general, all that was and was very minimal. And even then, when people said something, I listened. Plus more frequently now, in some key cases I ask. If it’s no, more often than not that’s cool.

But behind this is other things. It also depends on whether one wants to be a conversationalist in a community or a series of pronouncers. Being a mod is just a different perspective. You start looking at larger dynamics, and people don’t quite get, I think, how much work this board is. Anyway, to me it’s not really being a board if 6 different posters start “well that sucked” threads after a loss. That drives good threads off of page 1 and to me looks way too “PD board.”

All existing Rams boards merge threads, and for good reason. Well not all. The PD board doesn’t. The result is chaos. We do it lightly here. Light touch. Asking (in some cases) is part of that. To me, the boundaries on how and when and why to do it are fluid. It won’t go away…not everyone is self-consciously on top of these issues, and as a rule on all boards, if you don’t restrain it a little, you will see multiplied repetition of topics because some people snatch an hour from a busy day, come on the board, and just post. It’s a human habit.

And all of the above is of course open to discussion with all voices welcome. Here, or in email: zackneruda@gmail.com

Inglewood football stadium developers run a hurry-up offense

By Tim Logan and Angel Jennings

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-inglewood-stadium-20150209-story.html

Inglewood football stadium backers are slicing through red tape in hopes of getting the project underway soon

By the plodding standards of big development in Southern California, the plan to build a football stadium in Inglewood is moving at a brisk pace.

The developers aim to slice through red tape that normally entangles major projects — often for years — by using a quirk in the way the state election and environmental laws work together.

They have proposed zoning changes for the stadium through a ballot initiative, which would allow them to skip lengthy reviews that civic and environmental activists say protect surrounding neighborhoods.

It’s unclear how soon full-scale construction could begin, but developers want to break ground on the 80,000-seat, billion-dollar-plus stadium at the former Hollywood Park racetrack by year’s end. That would give St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke, a partner in the project, a big head start in the race to bring an NFL team to Los Angeles, though neither he nor the league has committed to moving a team here.

“It’s moving forward pretty fast,” said Inglewood resident Katrina Anderson, who attended a recent neighborhood meeting on the project. “I’m still not sure what we’re signing or voting on.”

In just 18 days, the developers collected 22,000 signatures, more than twice what was needed to put the measure on the ballot. The county is expected to finish certification by the end of the month, and city officials say an election could be held as soon as June.

There is one potentially even quicker option.

The Inglewood City Council, under initiative law, could bypass an election entirely and simply adopt the measure itself. City Council members would not discuss their intentions. They either did not return calls seeking comment or referred questions to Mayor James T. Butts Jr., a strong supporter of the stadium.

“I’m not prepared to make a commitment as to what way we are going to go,” he said.

The city is ordering its own studies of economic and environmental impacts, due by early March. Those reports will be released, and public comment taken before any vote, he said.

The ballot initiative has become a popular strategy to fast-track major projects, especially in small municipalities where signatures can be gathered quickly, said land-use attorney Kristina Lawson, a former councilwoman in Walnut Creek, Calif.

“It’s really in large part a CEQA-avoidance strategy,” she said, referring to the California Environmental Quality Act, which mandates a lengthy investigation of potential environmental impacts and can trigger litigation that’s even more time-consuming.

Whether to hold an election is a political calculation, Lawson said. Neighbors can organize against the project. Rival developers could finance a “no” campaign. But skipping one can anger residents who want a say.

“It’s always a strategic consideration,” Lawson said.

The Inglewood council would be on solid legal ground if it decides not to call an election. The California Supreme Court in August ruled that the City Council in Sonora could bypass the environmental review for a planned Wal-Mart store without a vote of the public.

Now developers and city councils have a clear path around CEQA reviews, said Juliet Cho, an environmental lawyer in San Francisco. But, she said, they still have to deal with public opinion.

Sentiment at town-hall meetings on the Hollywood Park project has been mixed.

At a recent gathering of the Around the Block Club, a neighborhood group near the Forum, people asked about parking, signage and public use of parks on the 298-acre site, but generally expressed support. Several signed the petition at the meeting.

“The stadium will change my neighborhood and my income,” said James Burt, the group’s president and a retired electrician who now works security at the Forum. “I wouldn’t say 100% of people around here support it, but 98% or 99% do.”

At another meeting, opponents voiced concerns about the hasty environmental-review process.

“It seems like you guys are not doing enough research before you’re committing to do this to our city,” one man shouted from his seat.

As a project spokesman tried to respond, the man cut him off.

“This idea about building a stadium has only been out there a month or so,” he said. “No way you have done proper environmental studies on this thing.”

Butts pointed out that the original Hollywood Park plan — for 3,000 houses and office and retail buildings on the former racetrack site — had an environmental review before the council approved it in 2009. And experience with the racetrack and the Forum across the street suggest that the area should be able to handle game-day traffic, he said.

The developers have plans to clear federal regulatory hurdles too. The Federal Aviation Administration requires in-depth reviews of tall buildings near airports; Los Angeles International Airport is three miles west of the stadium site. The developers plan to sink the stadium 100 feet into the ground, making it low enough to avoid the FAA study.

The goal, project spokesman Gerard McCallum said, is to work quickly so that when an NFL team officially declares its desire to move to Los Angeles — which could happen as early as January 2016 — it’ll have a new home already under construction in Inglewood.

“We want to be playing football there,” he said, “in September of 2018.”

I once got into a discussion about similar stuff with a St. Louis fan who wanted to change the team name and logo so they would be more St. Louis. I disagreed, and said their longterm identity meant more to me than any St. Louis identification. He said that was superficial, since it meant I was just loyal to laundry. I said that the name, logo, and uniform are more than just merely external things–they’re the signs and symbols of a history and tradition, and that history and tradition is part of what the team means to people. I knew he was a baseball Cards fan, so I said, what if the Cards changed their colors and their name and became (say) The Aces. Would that be an absolutely meaningless change in merely superficial, external things? I think he saw the point when it struck home–no, the Aces wearing black and red would not be the same as the Cards wearing red.

wv wrote:

I have doubts about whether he knew
how to best utilize Tavon.

I don’t have any doubts at all. His whole career as a Rams OC Schott proved one thing–he knew how to take advantage of what guys could do. That’s why we saw Amendola do more with him than anyone has before or since. Or why all of a sudden we realize Kendricks is a superior wham blocker.

If Tavon wasn’t doing things it’s because he didn’t know how. He did not yet master the NFL-level subtleties of running certain kinds of routes. If he HAD, we would would have seen it. And it has nothing to do with injuries. Tavon is just a slow learner when it comes to those things. (Like Quick.)

Think of this. Toward the end in 2014 we saw Bailey used on a variety of routes, every single one of which ought to, in theory, fit Tavon…IF Tavon could run them effectively. So any coordinator in his right mind would have had Tavon running them, not Bailey. So either Schott was so stupid he shouldn’t be allowed to drive, OR, Tavon still has to develop as a route runner at receiver. Since we already know he’s a slow learner, to me the whole thing is just obvious.

InvaderRam wrote:

who knows. cignetti could surprise us. and i still like the fact that the coordinator and players will have real familiarity with each other. that can’t be discounted working with these guys every day. knowing their strengths and weaknesses. and maybe he even brings a fresh perspective that schotty was missing.

who knows. but i’m actually happy about this announcement.

nittany ram wrote:

Well there is nothing about this hire that will ‘wow’ anybody. But I agree that the continuity in offensive systems is important.

Well we know the offensive philosophy and most likely, it ain’t gonna change. Power running mixed with play action plus big plays of other kinds (besides long throws) designed to take advantage of this or that defense.

Schott was good at it. That’s controversial, I know, but still, that’s my verdict. The only thing holding him back was personnel.

Cigz could be as good as Schott or better. If he’s better that’s gravy. The main thing, though, is personnel. The Rams may have enough at receiver, they have a couple of backs, they ought to be able to field a healthy line with depth. If that all works out Cigz ought to do just fine, I would think.

It will be interesting to see if he adds anything we haven’t seen yet.

I agree that the main thing is, keeping the same playbook (more or less) and the same system and terminology. Means you don’t lost 2-3 years of development on guys like Tavon and Quick and Cunningham etc.