• Farmer's Field's Fanciful Green Promise — LA Weekly
• Football, traffic jams and a Blade Runner cityscape made for blood sport this week among readers -- LA Weekly
• NFL Football is Bad for You and Your Neighborhood — KCET
• Industry NFL stadium plan endorsed by Orange County supervisors -- SGVT
• California special exemption for NFL stadium plan not so special — LA Times
AEG Wants to Build an NFL Stadium in Downtown LA (What Traffic?), OC Supervisors Want City of Industry
Chasen Marshall, OC Weekly
Sep. 15 2011
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2011/09/aeg_nfl_stadium_downtown_la_orange_county_board_supervisors_city_of_industry.php
A stadium will be built ... somewhere in LA County.
An NFL stadium is coming to the greater Los Angeles area, at some point. The sponsorship deal with Farmers Insurance has been sealed, the promotional propaganda has been spread, the LA city council has voted unanimously in favor of a tentative agreement. It seems to be all systems go in the Anschutz Entertainment Group's attempt to bring an NFL stadium to Downtown Los Angeles.
The Orange County Board of Supervisors, however, would like invested parties to reconsider the site and build the billion-dollar entertainment mecca in the City of Industry, where the county of Orange could enjoy a piece of the pie.
The City of Industry project has been promoted by Majestic Reality, which wants to build Los Angeles Stadium using private funds in an area "centrally-located" and within one hour of 15.5 million potential fans--and away from the headache of commuting to and finding parking in the already-clogged downtown area.
The OC Board of Supervisors, which issued its support on Sept. 13, follows in the footsteps of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors (May) and the San Berardino Board of Supervisors (June), which have also lent support to the Industry location. The OC board embraced the opportunity to bring an NFL franchise and 18,000 regional jobs to the area.
The AEG project has come under scrutiny recently. Last week our sister paper, LA Weekly, produced a cover story about all the parts of the Farmers' Field deal that know one is talking about: "a sea of ultrabright LED billboards" and special environmental impact concessions, in part to prevent what AEG's ultra-rich owner, Philip Anschutz, calls "frivolous lawsuits."
Not to mention the traffic that the stadium builders somehow maintain won't exist. Have they been to LA? There's traffic at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, let alone on a Sunday afternoon when the Los Angeles Chargers of San Diego and the Los Angeles Lakers (at Staples Center, just across from where the new stadium is supposed to be built) are both playing. The necessary road and freeway on-ramp and off-ramp construction could end up costing the city millions of dollars.
AEG isn't the only one to blame, even a city council member who voted in favor of the tentative stadium agreement admitted to LA Weekly that "The transportation issue is the one issue no one's addressed."
WHAT?!
How do you propose building a stadium for 72,000 fans near two of the most frequently clogged freeways (10 and 110) without considering the traffic implications? Whatever the answer, this is the type of backward negotiation and research that has transpired.
City of Industry Chargers has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
Farmer's Field's Fanciful Green Promise
David Futch, LA Weekly
September 15, 2011
http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/1496226/
AEG has promised to build a "carbon-neutral" Farmers Field football stadium that will add no extra emissions to the current load in polluted downtown Los Angeles. But there's no way to accomplish that, according to environmental lawyers, climate researchers and traffic engineers who've seen it all before.
Konstantin Vinnikov, a University of Maryland climatologist and atmospheric scientist, says the buzz phrase carbon-neutral is pure public relations.
"You can attach labels, as many as you want," he says. But in his extensive research into greenhouse global warming, the internationally recognized scientist has found little meaning behind green claims like the ones made by L.A. politicians and AEG president Tim Leiweke.
Vinnikov, who has been researching climate change since 1961, says, "Most labels are nonsense, dreamed up by marketing departments."
That's what marketers did at MetLife Stadium, the $1.6 billion arena built for the New York Jets and Giants.
Long before it opened in 2010, the Jets/Giants investment partnership New Meadowlands Stadium Corp. and New York politicians promised New Yorkers a lot of environmental advances at the new stadium.
They swore that MetLife Stadium — built several miles outside New York City, in New Jersey — would be the greenest football arena in America. Then the owners, John Mara, Steve Tisch and Robert Wood "Woody" Johnson IV — saw the price tag associated with going fully green and cut back on such details as installing insulated windows in private suites, while sticking by other promises such as waterless urinals.
"Promises are cheap," says Santa Monica environmental attorney Doug Carstens, but California developers consistently promise "mitigation" to reduce the negative effects of huge projects, all the while quietly working on a Plan B with far fewer environmental fixes.
"When developers [like AEG] start shedding mitigation like crazy," Carstens warns, "then instead of revoking approval, public agencies tend to forgive and forget" — and city halls go along.
Nidia Bautista, Coalition for Clean Air policy director, says green is always good, but developers who claim to be carbon-neutral simply aren't being real.
"We'd like to see corporations take steps to green up their businesses," she says, "but that's a far step from calling yourself carbon-neutral."
Three bills are sitting on Gov. Jerry Brown's desk that could throw the California Environmental Quality Act into turmoil.
SB 292 would streamline the complaint process, give AEG a break on lawsuits associated with its stadium and make it extremely difficult for communities to sue to force AEG to protect the livability and environment near the stadium. AB 900 emerged in the eleventh hour of the 2011 legislative session last week, when other corporations cried to legislators, "What about my project? I want an exemption from environmental law." A last-minute third bill, SB 226, lets cities use decades-old environmental studies — from a time when far less density and environmental damage existed — to let developers ignore local zoning.
If Brown signs SB 292, a struggle will begin as city boosters strive to prove that Farmers Field will be all that they promise and doubters raise red flags.
Carbon-neutral refers to the amount of carbon dioxide generated by operating the stadium and the proposed new Pico Hall at the L.A. Convention Center. AEG insists the net amount of carbon dioxide generated will be the same as now.
But traffic engineer Bob Shanteau says that promise is extremely hard to fulfill, so AEG will resort to buying carbon credits — essentially, paying to help reduce emissions in another part of California, or even outside California, as penance for adding a big emissions load to downtown.
Shanteau asks: "Do they include the carbon dioxide emitted by all of the additional motor vehicles, buses and trains serving fans going to and from the games? ... Do they count the carbon dioxide emitted by the power plants supplying the electricity for the billboards, etc.?"
AEG has claimed it will one day persuade 50 percent of NFL ticket holders to take public transit to a Super Bowl. But under SB 292, the traffic-reduction requirement is vague and features a loophole that critics say makes it ineffective at best.
Under it, AEG must produce "trip ratio" data — essentially, the number of attendees divided by the number of cars that arrive — and then try to improve the trip ratio, with the eventual goal that Farmers Field attract 10 percent fewer cars than any other NFL stadium's trip ratio.
Who would measure this?
AEG would, by and large, collecting car-trip data for four years. After the fourth football season, L.A. City Hall — not state environmental officials — would decide if the data was accurate. Then, after the fifth season, if it became clear that AEG was failing to discourage enough cars as compared to other stadiums, the city would try to make AEG implement vaguely defined "feasible measures" to cut traffic. The year, by this time: Circa 2022.
Andrea Sarzynski, a University of Delaware policy expert who has studied car culture extensively, says stadium event-goers will take mass transit only if it's beneficial to do so.
To create that tipping point, L.A. may allow punishingly high parking rates for Farmers Field — already, AEG charges $40 to park at its $1 billion Ritz Carlton-Marriott skyscraper near Staples Center — coupled with low Metro transit fares.
But Sarzynski says it will take several years to shift significant numbers of NFL ticket holders to mass transit. "AEG may be fighting an uphill battle until the time when the L.A. region is better served by convenient transit," she says. "AEG would need to be working closely with transit providers and planners when they design the site and to ensure proper service to the site, once constructed."
Yet Metro, which has poured billions of dollars into mass transit, is losing market share to private cars in the region — and is known for its years of construction delays and cost overruns.
James Moore, USC professor and director of the school's Transportation Engineering Program, says no neutral outcome is possible when it comes to traffic.
"On the strictly technical question, 'Can one build a 72,000-seat event generator and then mitigate traffic impacts sufficiently that the transportation level of service experienced prior to construction of the facility would be attained after the event generator is completed?' the answer is no," Moore says. "The technology does not exist. It is not available at any cost."
Jennifer Regan, AEG's global sustainability director, says the firm will offer mass-transit users incentives such as reduced prices at stadium stores and food courts, and perhaps even free transit. She says that effort will be helped by Metro's Blue Line station a few blocks from Farmers Field, the Gold Line station from downtown to the San Gabriel Valley, and park-and-rides that might be created in outlying areas. She also cites the much-delayed Expo Line from Santa Monica — but whether it will be open by 2016 is unknown.
For all these reasons, AEG probably will buy carbon credits — essentially paying for environmental fixes in a far-off locale that don't benefit L.A. (AEG will be hard-pressed to clean up any polluters near downtown, where its own carbon load will affect the atmosphere and community, because, as Regan notes, "The 'market' is very small right now.")
SB 292 is a grab-bag of unproven ideas: reducing car trips, instituting on-site energy production using natural gas, installing parking-garage solar panels and, says AEG land-use attorney Dale Goldsmith, "something as simple as planting trees."
Vinnikov, the climate-change expert, says the promises boil down to political theater and platitudes offered amidst a jobs recession, bearing no relation to science. What's going on, he says, is that "If someone is going to build a stadium and employ people, that is what's important."
Football, traffic jams and a Blade Runner cityscape made for blood sport this week among readers
Letters to the Editor
Thursday, Sep 15 2011
http://www.laweekly.com/2011-09-15/news/blade-runner-stadium/
They were responding to our story ("Blade Runner Stadium," by David Futch, Sept. 9) detailing how the city had failed to consider the full costs of megadeveloper Philip Anschutz's planned NFL stadium. We also revealed that the proposal allows Anschutz's AEG to create a Blade Runner-like vista of electronic billboards.
"Once again a wealthy developer plans to fatten his wallet at everyone else's expense," a reader identified as Watchdog writes. "Building the Farmers Field football stadium may not cost Angelenos a dime, as AEG claims, but taxpayers sure are going to be on the hook for resurfacing downtown streets and revamping intersections to accommodate AEG and the 75,000 people who show up for a game."
Watchdog also takes aim at provisions approved by the state Legislature that prevent citizens from challenging the proposal in Superior Court. Instead, legal challenges under state environmental laws would have to bypass the lower court and go directly to the state Court of Appeals — where bringing lawsuits is far more expensive.
"Californians fought hard to guarantee there would be an environment left over once the developers were finished raping the land," Watchdog writes. "AEG wants the state to exempt it from 'frivolous' lawsuits challenging the stadium's impact on the environment. There used to be honor among thieves, but not these thieves that include not just AEG but the entire L.A. City Council for failing to do their job — due diligence as per the cost of road upgrades before the council swooned and signed off on the memorandum of understanding giving AEG carte blanche to do and build whatever it wants."
AEG President Tim Leiweke has tried to calm fears about traffic congestion by arguing that the 10 and 110 freeways, which intersect near the stadium site, are mostly empty on Sundays, when most NFL football games are played. AEG also says many fans will take mass transit to the game.
A reader named Robert says, "Vehicle traffic downtown is terrible all the time, and sporting events have little to do with it. But the article approaches the traffic issue from the antiquated perspective of cars are the alpha/omega of mobility. This is a fallacy.
"If you insist on driving downtown rather than taking transit, then you deserve to be stuck in the mess you help create. The stadium is an opportunity, of sorts, to retrain Angelenos on methods of getting around.
"Big cities like L.A. host big cultural events of all varieties; hosting these events means there are impacts to the way we experience the city. It is so much more logical to put your largest event venues in central locations where the transit services are most densely located and where virgin land does not need to be sacrificed."
Reader Rick Abrams has a different view. "As far back as 1915, Los Angeles recognized that subways and other fixed-rail mass transit do not function in large circular cities. People will not walk more than 1/2 mile to subways. Thus, subway stations have to be about one mile apart. If you can do the geometry, you will see why subways will never solve L.A.'s transportation problems and subways will not bring fans to Anschutz's stadium.
"The alternative is the bus system. That is not workable. Anyone who thinks that Angelenos will give up driving to a football game and use slow, dirty, crowded buses has not used due diligence in assessing transportation in L.A. The income level that can afford to attend will not use buses, unless they charter them."
Reader Steve Sann loves the idea of a Blade Runner scape. "Look at Tokyo," he writes. "Who doesn't love Tokyo? I've seen only positive effects from the development of L.A. Live. It brings a lot of people back to the city, and people who come to the city spend money on businesses."
Reader Morty Shallman says our cover headline "stumbled upon the perfect name" for the new stadium. Blade Runner Stadium would give "a nod to L.A.'s film heritage, while at the same time acknowledging our precarious present and dystopian future."
Finally, sniff sniff, a couple of readers made it personal. "Leave it to L.A. Weekly to stand in the way of progress," says a reader identified as Truly. "Come on, people. This town needs football. We've needed it for 20 years. If AEG is going to be the one who finally gives this city what it deserves, then I'm on their team."
And Font b writes: "When they build that new stadium, let's see how fast L.A. Weekly gets to Farmers Field with a DeWalt impact drill bolting in multiple news racks all around that place attempting to benefit from all that 'traffic.' "
NFL Football is Bad for You and Your Neighborhood
D. J. Waldie, KCET
September 15, 2011
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/1st_and_spring/commentary/nfl-football-is-bad-for-you-and-your-neighborhood.html
What They Think of You
It's not the game of football that's bad for you (unless you're prone to concussions). And it's not a downtown sports stadium or one in Irwindale (although tickets will cost you more than $100 each). Nor is it specifically AEG's brazen acquisition of the Los Angeles City Council (council members sold their souls to developers long ago).
Farmers Field and Ed Roski's competing stadium proposal are bad for you because they have been used to accelerate a game-changing shift in land use authority. And in the name of football and jobs, the state Legislature further weakened environmental protections and diminished your ability -- with your neighbors -- to question the suitability of big development projects. Almost as bad, concessions to AEG and Roski have inserted the state Legislature and the governor's office into the local development approval process -- and introduced them to new millions in campaign contributions from big developers.
Pro football was the screen behind which SB 226, SB 292, and AB 900 were introduced in the last days of the legislative session. They won approval in the final hours before the legislature adjourned. The three bills now await Governor Brown's signature. (They may already have been signed into law when you read this.)
SB 226 frees "urban" development projects defined as "green" from detailed environmental review, but without clearly defining what is "urban" or "green." AB 900 limits how communities can influence the environmental review of development projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). And SB 292 gives AEG a special CEQA exemption - like the one already given Ed Roski's Irwindale stadium - that similarly limits the ability of neighborhoods to challenge either project on environmental grounds.
SB 375 - signed into law in 2008 - already contains triggers for exempting multi-family residential projects from CEQA review if their greater density is assumed to reduce driving and expand public transit use. Under SB 375, some projects designed to increase neighborhood density could be built even when opposed by city council members. Regional and state planning agencies will determine what gets built and where.
Whatever their affect on job creation -- always difficult to measure -- these bills have one obvious goal: They allow state legislators to waive key protections in California's environmental controls for developments that are sponsored by campaign contributors. Developers with connections and political juice will be permitted to build fast, big, and profitable . . . and leave neighborhood residents to live with the results.
Dangerous precedents have been set for eroding the quality of life for all Californians who don't live in gated communities, rural enclaves, or posh neighborhoods.
Sadly and unaccountably, David Pettit, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, was among those who welcomed the muting of California's environmental protections.
The NRDC, which fought long and hard for the state's environmental laws forty years ago, isn't a big fan of NFL football. And it's probably not in the pocket of big developers.
But CEQA lawsuits have been used by neighborhood organizations to restrain the size and impact of dense, mixed-use, in-fill developments backed by big developers. And for the NRDC, maximizing urban density and dependence on public transit, pricing drivers out of their cars, and other forms of social engineering though land-use regulation are now more important than protecting the victories for California's quality of life that had been won by CEQA.
Football is a rough game, played for big money by very big guys. They just sacked the principle of local land use authority and ended responsible environmental review in California.
And I hear the NRDC cheering.
Industry NFL stadium plan endorsed by Orange County supervisors
Thomas Himes, SGVT
September 14, 2011
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18886191
INDUSTRY - The Orange County Board of Supervisors endorsed Tuesday a proposed NFL Stadium in Industry, citing its location as easily accessible to the area and Anaheim, according to a statement from the stadium's developer, Majestic Realty.
Supervisors passed the resolution in a 3-0 vote, according to the statement. Supervisors Shawn Nelson, Bill Campbell and Janet Nguyen voted in favor of it, while Supervisor John Moorlach abstained and Supervisor Pat Bates was absent, according to the statement.
"Majestic Realty's Los Angeles Stadium will create tremendous economic benefit for Orange County. With a location just 15 minutes from the central Anaheim tourism center, the stadium offers a needed boost to Orange County's hotel and restaurant community," Nelson said in the statement.
The Riverside County Board of Supervisors endorsed the project in May, and the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors endorsed the project in June.
"We've always known that our stadium is the best for Los Angeles County," stadium developer John Semcken said. "But as you can tell from today's endorsement, it's clear we've created an entertainment destination for the NFL that will benefit the entire Southern California region."
California special exemption for NFL stadium plan not so special
Michael Hiltzik, LA Times
September 14, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20110914,0,3766592,full.column
Back in 2009, the California Legislature enacted a special exemption from state environmental laws for billionaire developer Ed Roski's proposed NFL stadium in the City of Industry.
Just this once, we were assured. Special case. "Rarest of the rare," Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) called the occasion. No way the waiver would be a precedent for other big projects, he said.
Did you believe that? Me neither.
So no one has a right to be surprised that just last week the Legislature granted another environmental exemption, this time for Anschutz Entertainment Group's proposed NFL stadium downtown.
And on the reasoning that what's good for the AEG goose is good for the entire development business gaggle, the Legislature promptly passed yet another environmental exemption, this time a gift so open-ended that no one has any idea how many big construction projects will be shaded beneath its capacious boughs. Both bills are currently on Gov. Jerry Brown's desk.
"You didn't have to wait very long to see the domino effect" of the AEG bill, Bruce Reznik, executive director of the Sacramento-based Planning and Conservation League, told me. "It happened in 24 hours."
The supporters of the two bills passed last week — hastily, in the final hours of the legislative session — have tried to downplay their impact. They say the bills don't grant outright exemptions to the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, like Roski got.
They just require that environmental lawsuits against the projects brought under CEQA start in the state Court of Appeal, rather than in Superior Court. Oh, and they limit the time the court can consider those lawsuits before rendering judgment to 175 days.
The AEG stadium and any projects designated under the second bill would still have to meet CEQA requirements for environmental impact reports. And it's not like there's no judicial review at all — in fact, most lawsuits under CEQA end up before the Court of Appeal sooner or later anyway. So it's not like CEQA has been undermined.
I have one word of response to that: Baloney.
AEG and its chief executive, Tim Leiweke, contend that AEG needed a break to move the downtown stadium project forward. Specifically, it required "protection from frivolous lawsuits from those who are trying to get a competitive advantage or those who are just trying to destroy the process," as Leiweke told The Times last month.
For those of you unfamiliar with the land developer's dictionary, a "frivolous lawsuit" is defined as pretty much any lawsuit.
The palmed card in this deck is that court review of a big project's environmental impact statement doesn't "destroy the process," as Leiweke would have it; it's an essential part of the process. And eliminating the lowest rung of court review isn't an innocuous change.
It increases the expense and complexity of legal challenges to big projects. That might not dissuade well-funded and high-profile environmental groups from going to court, but it may lock out the community groups and local organizations that operate on a shoestring and whose members feel the negative effects of big projects earliest and most severely.
"Smaller groups already have a very hard time getting to the courthouse doors, let alone getting through them," says Doug Carstens, a leading environmental attorney in Santa Monica.
Carstens observes that even though the downtown stadium's builders still have to prepare an environmental impact report, such reports are hardly the last word. And when the project under review is a mega-development such as the stadium with its vast potential for snarling traffic and filling the night sky with blazing billboards, community oversight is more, not less, important.
"Let's say the EIR for the stadium is defective," Carstens says. "Say it leaves out traffic impacts, is obviously in error and incomplete. If you are a person in the community who needs to bring one of these cases — we're talking about people who see their children growing up with asthma — you won't be able to do that with AEG, because the bar has been raised."
Supporters and critics of the bills agree that they may have some virtuous aspects. For example, the AEG bill commits the company to an environmental standard of construction, including "best in the nation" traffic mitigation, more firmly than earlier versions of the measure.
That's a real gain, argues David Pettit of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which negotiated the final version. "It was our assumption that some form of this would pass whether we liked it or not," Pettit says. "So we made the decision to be at the table rather than just say no. At the end of the day, we got what we wanted."
There's also some agreement that CEQA procedures could benefit from streamlining. Though if the latter is the case, why achieve the streamlining by steamrollering an unread bill through the Legislature minutes before adjournment?
The broader of the two bills approved, AB 900, allows the governor to designate certain projects for expedited court review, but doesn't limit how many he can wave through before the measure sunsets at the end of 2014.
The most insidious aspect of these measures is that together they represent another step toward two-tier government: One tier for the wealthy and well-connected, one for the rest of us.
"In a country and state governed by the rule of law, a multibillion-dollar influential corporation shouldn't be able to go to the Legislature and get a special law," says Reznik of the Planning and Conservation League.
What about the all-purpose rationale advanced for these bills, that today's economic climate demands special consideration for job-producing projects? "It's wrong to pass a bill just for AEG," the refrain goes, "but this project is just too good to pass up."
Yet even the most cynical legislator or editorialist knows that big shots can always come up with a rationale to cut corners or silence inconvenient opponents.
Moreover, the development lobby has had the knives out for CEQA almost since its enactment in 1970. The blades are always honed especially sharp during recessions.
In 1983, for instance, developers goaded Gov. George Deukmejian into pushing through a number of "reforms," including a rollback of judicial review.
When growth took off again later in the decade, California experienced buyer's remorse about these changes, and the Legislature again strengthened CEQA's enforcement and public review provisions. The cycle repeated itself the following decade, and here we are again today.
As for the effort by AEG or its fellow big developers to carve out special legal advantages, it's what comes naturally, like dogs licking themselves.
But that doesn't excuse our supposed tribunes of the people for capitulating so cravenly to threats and payoffs from big businesses like AEG, which has donated millions of dollars to state and local candidates, parties and political committees.
Nor should anyone take lightly the death by a thousand cuts of CEQA, which Reznik describes as "a vital law for 40 years giving the public a voice in decisions that impact them, their communities, and their air and water quality. There has been a gradual chipping away, and when we're looking back for those protections we may find that we don't have them anymore."