PT: We discussed stadium financing issues today and had a lengthy discussion about the Internet. Tomorrow we will come back to the LA situation and obviously we will pick the Super Bowl for January 2003. We will start with an instant replay demonstration and then we have a couple of Competition Committee matters and then we will come back to the stadium issues with Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Denver.

PT: I had a moment of silence in recognition of Leon Hess’s death. Steve Gutman said a couple of words along the lines of what he said at the service at the synagogue in New York. We did not discuss where the Jets are in the sale process.

PT: The main thing we want to accomplish is to make clear to the ownership at large that there is a strong consensus within the Expansion Committee that the price should be set on a negotiable basis and not through an auction process. We reported that when we were out in LA on April 20^th. We want to make clear to the entire membership and have discussion on that if there is a need for discussion on that.

Secondly, I want to be very clear how we are going to use the next thirty days between now and the 30^th of June. It is a critical thirty-day period. I think that we have accomplished a lot already. The exclusivity issue is gone. It was a sticking point when we were in LA on the 20^th of April and I said it would evaporate and that is what happened this week. I think we got a real consensus on basically the size of the stadium, the configuration of the stadium, in terms of what it is we would be selling, in terms of suites, club seats, and season tickets.

The third piece is the site development plan. I think the plan presented by Michael Ovitz presents exactly the kind of vision that we feel is necessary to transform the venue in the best interest of the fans and the city of Los Angeles, which also would be in the best interest of the team and the National Football League because what we don’t want to do is go back in there with a track record of unsuccessful operations and live with the perception at the beginning that it will be more of the same. I think some form of Michael Ovitz’s plan sets a vision in terms of transforming the venue and also access by the fans with their automobiles, obviously by car, which is so critical in that part of the world. We need to get on with that, the cost analysis of that, and how it can be financed.

The Eli Broad plan is supportive on one of the critical points in terms of the feasibility of parking structures on the Exposition Park site, which they recognized and emphasized and had three different alternatives for parking structures on the Exposition Park site. I think there has been a coming together between the two groups and we want to continue to make this a consensus process, a unifying process because that will eventually give the platform to get it off the ground.

PT: It presents a vision and a transformation of the venue, which is critical. We used to have a stadium in Jacksonville. The stadium that Wayne Weaver and those people put up has transformed that whole area. In any number of cities around the country, that is what we have to accomplish. I think it is particularly important in Los Angeles because of the fact we are going downtown against the backdrop of other sections of downtown having been transformed, including the Staples Center, for sports that are competitive with us. If your competition in the sports entertainment business is in a transformed complex, you have to strive for the same type of thing. Now we have to work on the precise form of it: cost analysis, engineering analysis, and financing.

PT: They had three different parking structures that they talked about. One was seventy-five hundred, one was thirty-five hundred and one was twenty-five hundred and they would have been contiguous along Martin Luther King Boulevard. They were up over the ten thousand number with parking structures and then they had the additional discussion about other spaces elsewhere in Exposition Park, grass areas and then spaces in the USC area. Both are talking about parking structures.

PT: We never told anyone twenty-five thousand, this way or that way. We talked to both groups about coming together and unifying their efforts. Whether it is a merger, whether it is a consolidation, whether it is working together in the next phase that is what has to be worked out.

When we eliminated Carson and selected the Coliseum, we got a sharper focus and it enabled us to move ahead. Now, on the site development plan, everyone can work together and come up with the plan and we will be better off than going on two different tracks which involve two different things.

PT: That would be an important element of it, yes. A total assessment of the sources of funding will be a very important part of what we try to get done in the next thirty days and the uses of the funds, which gets you to the other side of the equation, which is project cost.

PT: No I don’t. We were asked similar questions when we had the referendum in Pittsburgh. The Arizona project was much more than a football stadium. It was not presented to the voters as a football stadium project. It wasn’t a football stadium project. It was a major economic development project. It included not only a convention center but residential housing, retail and it fell in that context and you can’t read much more into it anymore than I can read a national scope into the fact that the Denver referendum passed. A lot of these things become heavily dependent on the type of project. In Pittsburgh, that was a factor. It was a 12 county capital improvement plan and in the wake of that election, they got it done anyway. These things become heavily dependent on what is being voted on.

On the other side of the coin, we recognize and the stadium resolution we adopted in March recognizes as our revenue grows, and as we get what we did in television, which is a significant increase from one source of revenue, we should be doing what any sensible business would do, which is take that short-term increase in revenue and transform it into a long-term improvement in facilities to give you the base for the growing revenue over the thirty-year life of a stadium. That is a reality that we recognize and to an extent that is recognized elsewhere and it becomes a factor in the discussions that we have in all these states.

PT: No, I do not feel mystified. I am disappointed but I had a discussion with him about his feelings. I told him that I thought they were misguided and terribly wrong but he went ahead and sued anyway. It was two or three weeks ago and it was about a week before the Finance Committee meeting where we gave the endorsement to Snyder.

I said the understanding we had was that there was going to be peace here and no litigation. He said he felt John Cooke had acted inappropriately and I told him I thought that was very misguided and very wrong. That was the extent of the exchange of views.

PT: It’s important so that we have a better informed membership on how the committee feels we should be setting the price and selecting the owner on a negotiated basis, and hopefully we can move to an even broader consensus than we have now. Just a better sense of what it is we are trying to accomplish in the next thirty days. If we spent fifteen, thirty minutes on LA tomorrow, I think that would be about it so to set a price, I think it would take us fifteen to thirty days of discussion, not fifteen to thirty minutes. It is one of the things we need to discuss. At the end of the thirty days, I hope we will be at that point.

PT: We have gone back and forth on that. Certainly the concepts we have adopted could be used there. One of the driving forces on the stadium financing program was the recognition that we needed to get a stadium built in Los Angeles. We needed to get stadiums built in the top six markets. We could certainly use the concepts.

I think that we would expect to be part of that process, too. The compatibility with the landmark status of the Coliseum would be something we would want to be very sensitive to and it would be something we would expect to be involved in and not just leave it up to others. Certainly we would work with others but we don’t expect to leave that to others because we know how important that is to the project and to the community.

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