CARSON, Calif. — The ball now belongs to the Raiders, the Chargers, the Rams — and the NFL.
A second City Council has approved a second proposed pro football stadium in the Los Angeles area, putting local issues to rest in the NFL’s return to the region and leaving the next move to the teams that would seek to relocate and the league that must give its approval.
The latest step was Tuesday’s 3-0 vote from the Carson City Council, which cleared the path for a $1.7 billion stadium that could become the shared home to the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders.
It was intended to lure the NFL back to the Los Angeles area after two decades without a team in the nation’s second-largest media market. In nearby Inglewood, St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke is part of a group planning to build an 80,000-seat stadium.
Under NFL rules, the next opportunity for a team to file to relocate to either stadium would be in January 2016. The move would have to clear a tangle of league hurdles, including getting support from at least 24 of the 32 teams.
Carson Mayor Albert Robles likened the absence of the NFL in greater Los Angeles to the state’s deep drought.
“There are two things that are needed here in Southern California,” Robles said after the vote. “One of them is rain … the other is football. And today, hopefully, we took care of that, because football is coming to Carson.”
The vote came with a loud cheer from a crowd dotted with Raiders jerseys and Chargers banners, and it faced virtually no opposition from the room.
Mike Haynes, who played for the then-LA Raiders in their 1984 Super Bowl title year and grew up in the area, spoke in favour of the stadium.
“It might not be too long ’til sometime another local kid will have an opportunity to play in a Super Bowl right down the street from here,” Haynes said.
Council members could have opted to put the issue before Carson voters but chose to approve it outright as state law allows. The nearby Inglewood project already has been approved by that city’s council.
The sudden rush to Los Angeles is tempered by a 20-year history of disappointment for fans. A string of stadium proposals have come and gone since the Rams and the Raiders fled Southern California after the 1994 season.
Last month, the Anschutz Entertainment Group spiked plans for a field in downtown Los Angeles, although Mayor Eric Garcetti has suggested that it could be revived.
The Inglewood blueprint envisions a $1.86 billion stadium rising on the site of a former horse track as part of a nearly 300-acre development of homes, parks and office space. The 168-acre Carson site, edged by a freeway, is a former landfill.
The Chargers’ talks with San Diego City Hall to replace the nearly 50-year-old Qualcomm Stadium have grown increasingly strained. The Raiders’ even-older Oakland Coliseum has had sewage and electrical problems and is now the only stadium in the U.S. used for both an NFL team and Major League Baseball team, the Oakland Athletics.
