SAN DIEGO ---- The Chargers will remain in San Diego for a least another season while they try to build political and financial support for a new downtown stadium, a team spokesman said Tuesday.
In confirming that the team won't exercise its annual off-season right to terminate its Qualcomm Stadium lease this year, Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani said the team will spend the next year examining the feasibility of building a stadium just east of Petco Park. The downtown San Diego site became a viable option when San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders publicly made it one last year.
Fabiani would not commit to declining the team's opt-out clause next off-season. Exercising the clause would almost certainly be a precursor to the Chargers' departure from San Diego County.
"I think we made it pretty clear that we intended to stay and keep working on the downtown site in 2010," said Fabiani, who has been the public face of the team's stadium search. When team President Dean Spanos and Sanders met last fall, he said, "and the downtown site became a serious option, staying in San Diego for 2010 was a foregone conclusion."
While the team has dismissed potential stadium sites in Chula Vista and Escondido over the past year, the prospects of moving downtown are increasingly attractive. Infrastructure costs would be minimal, given all the parking and mass transit options available in downtown San Diego.
While the Chargers had long asserted that a new stadium would be privately financed, they recently announced that public funding would be necessary to build a downtown stadium that could cost up to $800 million.
"We know that's a hot-button issue," Fabiani said. "That's why we put it out there. We want people to understand that this is not the same kind of project that they heard about at the Qualcomm Stadium site or in Chula Vista. If this downtown project is to move forward, it will need support from the taxpayers.
"We need to show people that taxpayers will come out ahead by selling the Qualcomm site and getting rid of the ongoing costs of keeping that stadium functional. You have to win that argument, and clearly we have a long way to go to convince people of that."
That topic is on the table for Wednesday's meeting of the Centre City Development Corp., San Diego's downtown redevelopment team. The meeting will focus on various ways to finance a stadium with the partial use of public funds.
Such discussions are encouraging to the Chargers, who have been searching for a new stadium since 2002. Sanders and the CCDC have shown interest in the prospect of a downtown stadium, an ideal location from the Chargers' perspective.
It's intriguing enough to keep the Chargers from exercising an opt-out clause that opens annually between Feb. 1 and May 1 until the team's lease expires in 2020. The price the Chargers would have to pay to exercise the clause decreases over time, with a major drop-off in 2011.
The Chargers would owe $53 million if they broke the lease this off-season, but less than half that ($26 million) in 2011, so a departure this year was highly unlikely.
The team has maintained throughout its stadium search that it is committed to finding a site in San Diego County.
"We're encouraged because there are some major players who are clearly interested in the idea," Fabiani said of the downtown site. "Having said that, it's still a very difficult thing to pull off."
