City Council Gives AEG 6 More Months to Convince an NFL Team to Come to L.A.

A Los Angeles City Council committee today backed AEG’s request for six more months to secure an NFL team to play in Los Angeles.

AEG signed an agreement with the city in 2012 to build a football stadium and expand the Los Angeles Convention Center. But with that deal expiring next week on Oct. 18, the company has yet to get a National Football League franchise to agree to move to the city.

The full council is expected to consider the extension request Tuesday.

“We’re obviously disappointed that we have been unable to secure an NFL commitment today and we nonetheless remain committed to the vision” of the 2012 agreement,” AEG executive Ted Fikre told committee members.

He said he could not guarantee the city a team, but said there were “a lot of variables at play,” involving the league and “one or more teams.”

“What we can say is, we’ve made progress in recent months, with the renewed dialogue with the NFL, that it was encouraging enough to us that we felt it was worth taking some more time to continue the effort,” Fikre said.

Fikre said the NFL appears to be more interested in relocating a team than creating a new one to play in Los Angeles.

As part of its extension request, AEG also agreed to foot the $750,000 bill for “plan b,” in case they fail to secure a football team. The money would fund a design competition that would result in six concepts for expanding the Los Angeles Convention Center and to pay the costs of conducting environmental studies of the designs.

Fikre said that while they are working with the city on the back-up plan, their “first choice” was to build the football stadium.

City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana also said “the preferred choice” is still to continue with the original 2012 agreement to create a home for a Los Angeles football team, and using the revenue generated from the stadium to pay for two-thirds of the cost of improving the Convention Center.

The “plan a” agreement includes AEG “taxing themselves of L.A. Live to generate some of the revenue necessary” to build the stadium, he said.

“There’s no public subsidy whatsoever of the stadium itself,” Santana said. “And people find that hard to believe, but actually not a single penny of public money will be going to build a stadium if we move forward.”

--City News Service

PHOTO Image via Shutterstock

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