The Chargers announced yesterday the team officially filed for relocation to Carson. The Dean Spanos video announcement is here.
No surprise, Twitter lit up as a result.
Leading the reaction was a series of tweets from SDUT Opinion Editor Matthew Hall, which Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Lee Jenkins touted as “the best use of Twitter” he’d ever seen.
Hall tweeted:
Dean Spanos: “We’ve had nine different proposals that we’ve made, all of them were basically rejected by the city.” OK, let’s list the nine.
1. A 2003 proposal to redevelop the Qualcomm site had drawings and a conceptual $400M financing outline: Chargers to pay half for free land.
2. An offer from National City for the team to develop 52 acres controlled by the Port and railroad that collapsed with no formal team plan.
3. A study of land in Chula Vista paid for by the Chargers that found two possible stadium sites but involved no formal team financing plan.
4. Discussion of building a stadium and office space in Oceanside, an idea that doesn’t pencil out and thus never includes a financing plan.
5. A suggestion from a national developer to build an Oceanside stadium and shopping center, all together now, with no team financing plan.
6. The possibility of buying a bunch of land in Escondido in 2009 to cobble together a stadium site, which quickly falls apart with no plan.
7. A plan hatched in 2009 to transform several East Village sites, including an operating busyard, into a stadium built with team/NFL $400M.
8. The 10th Avenue Marine Terminal site plan pushed most publicly by then-U-T ownership in 2012 without support from city or team officials.
9. Public officials’ new Mission Valley idea, which the team met with opposition, refusing to negotiate let alone consider a financing plan.
If those are Mr. Spanos’ nine proposals, I hope he explains his logic or redoes his math. First, they clearly weren’t rejected by one city.
Second, any definition of “proposals that we’ve made” ends with the 2003 Q proposal and maybe the 2009 East Village site, which had no plan.
Hall wasn’t the only one fact checking Spanos. Tony Manolatos, the guy who should be credited as the leading rebutter of Mark Fabiani’s ongoing scorched-earth, anti-San Diego PR effort to get the Chargers out of town, tweeted:
Spanos: “This current process proposed by the Mayor runs past the timeframes where you need to have an answer.”
Manolatos provided a reminder:
But when the Mayor proposed a January vote, which would have met the timeframes, the Chargers walked away from the negotiating table.
Manolatos also shared with Twitter followers a comment from a former County Chief Administrative Officer:
“The notion that they studied and did detailed analysis on nine sites over 14 years is nonsense and has always been nonsense.” –Walt Ekard
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