While it seems unlikely an arena soon will be built to replace the city of San Diego’s old one, here’s a valid reason to think it could happen somewhere, someday, whether voters in November decide the Midway District site is a fit or not:
John Moores is involved.
Consider his track record.
Moores played a big role in getting Petco Park built and long championed San Diego State’s expansion into Mission Valley, a project since approved by voters and finalized by City Hall.
This week, it was announced that a longtime Moores lieutenant whose specialty is sports venues has ed one of two groups bidding to develop the arena site. In other words, Moores is back in the local land-use game, if he ever left it.
“He is involved,” CEO Erik Judson of JMI Sports said Wednesday of Moores, a Rancho Santa Fe resident who owned the Padres between 1994 and 2012. “I give him regular updates on this project and others. He’s a huge er of San Diego, always has been.”
The original proposal by the group Judson has ed called for a $125-million renovation of the 54-year-old arena as part of a mixed development that also envisions a 12,000-seat stadium for the SD Loyal men’s soccer club, residences, businesses, a 12-acre park and a concert venue.
Judson said in response to some of the public lobbying for a new arena, he was hired to explore how to do it.
“The key is to determine who really wants to play in a new arena,” he said.
Let’s begin with a cold, hard truth that isn’t happily typed. Realistically, the NBA and NHL aren’t candidates to plant a team in San Diego either via expansion or relocation.
That’s not only my opinion, it’s the opinion NBA club owner Joseph Tsai, a billionaire businessman with a residence in La Jolla, conveyed to the Union-Tribune in January 2019 after he and staff studied various arena models for local sites and crunched financial numbers. Tsai owns the Brooklyn Nets, whose arena is operated by the same firm, AEG, that runs San Diego’s arena.
Judson, for his part, said informed “people are appropriately pessimistic” about the NBA or NHL partnering with San Diego in the next several years.
Current tenants of the old arena — the Gulls, Sockers, Strike Force and the Tsai-owned Seals — would be on Judson’s list of candidates as would the WNBA among others.
“The important thing is we will talk to everybody,” he said.
Large obstacles
Judson said even if Mayor Kevin Faulconer and staff choose his project team, the bid will hinge on voters deciding in November to lift San Diego’s coastal height limit for development.
Even if those hurdles are cleared, financing must be arranged.
Judson said an arena on the “lower end” of the spectrum would cost about $300 million and have 8,000-10,000 seats. For more capacity, the price would go up many millions of dollars.
An NBA arena? How’s this for sticker shock: “They’re costing a billion dollars right now,” said Judson.
Forget about the 30-club NBA expanding for many, many years. That’s because the league’s lucrative media rights fees argue against adding a team that would dilute those dollars, even after an expansion fee is plugged into the projections. As for an NBA team moving to San Diego, see the price tag of an NBA arena and the region’s thin corporate base.
(The NHL has no plans for expansion, its commissioner has said. The NHL’s most recent expansion was to wealthy Seattle, where the corporate money is far greater than in San Diego. The Seattle group, whose team will begin play in 2021-22, came up with a $650-million expansion fee and a City Council-approved plan for a $700-million arena.)
Judson said tenants would play a big part in paying for a San Diego arena.
“We would absolutely look for contributions either to the construction cost or long-term leases that could help us fund the building,” he said.
Also, city assistance of some sort would be needed, said both Judson and Seals executive Steve Govett, but neither man said public money would be sought.
Power brokers at City Hall will include a new mayor after Faulconer is termed out later this year.
Moores or his proxies worked with politicians and former politicians to advance land-use projects for the Padres and SDSU.
Longtime Moores associate Steve Peace is a er of mayoral candidate and City Council member Barbara Bry (although Bry is publicly opposed to lifting the height restriction).
Moores partnered with Cory Briggs, now running for city attorney, on the 2016 Measure D land-use initiative that served as a general template for SDSU West. Bry ed the measure as well as the SDSU plan.
While Moores has had political setbacks, such as the resignation of councilwoman and ballpark advocate Valerie Stallings in 2001 after pleading guilty in state court to failing to report gifts from Moores and failing to disqualify herself from votes related to the Padres, he has shown a knack for the long game.
Before buying the Padres in late 1994, he hired former Orioles CEO Larry Lucchino, who led efforts that got a ballpark built in downtown Baltimore. After San Diego voters in 1998 approved what became $300 million in public financing for the downtown ballpark, Moores weathered years of delays in construction caused by lawsuits.
Collaborators with Moores on SDSU’s expansion said he stumped for the project more than a decade ago. The pursuit took several twists and turns including the defeat of Measure D. To an extent, Moores seeded the push for “SDSU West” that overcame Faulconer’s endorsement of a rival measure, scoring a 22-point victory in the November 2018 election.
“When we first started the campaign,” said SDSU West political consultant Tom Shepard, “this is after the SoccerCity folks announced their initiative (in 2017) and had begun circulating it for placement on the ballot, I had a meeting with John and a few others about whether there’d be enough money out there to fund a signature collection drive for our competing measure, and he was one of the first people who stepped forward to make a major contribution on that and did follow up with a major contribution.”
The new Padres ballpark opened in 2004. SDSU officials say their football stadium will open in 2022. Judson, who worked on both those projects and teamed up with Moores to create JMI Sports in 2006, gave no forecast regarding the arena quest, whose potential locales may not be limited to the Midway District.
“But,” he added, “it’s the third leg of the stool.”
