Rose Bowl renovation approved, stadium dominoes fall

It only took 10 years to get it done, but the Pasadena City Council on Monday approved a $152 million bond package to renovate the 88-year-old Rose Bowl stadium. From the LA Times:

The renovations include widened tunnels and added aisles for smoother entering and exiting. A modern version of a 1940s-style scoreboard will replace the existing one on the south end, and a video board will be installed on the north side. Premium seating will be bumped from 600 to 2,500 following the expansion of the press box building.

 The financing plan will have repercussions far beyond "smoother entering and exiting" through the vomitoria. For one, this all but locks out any future deal to bring the NFL to Pasadena, leaving Industry and the Coliseum as the two remaining bidders for a professional football team in L.A. Everyone knows the NFL does not like the Coliseum as its currently configured - too big, too old - and so the Rose Bowl renovations would seem to give the Industry bid a boost.

But the Rose Bowl deal also extends UCLA's lease there until 2043, robbing Industry of a potential tenant and much-needed source of revenue. This could make it harder for Industry's backers to finance a new stadium, unless they can convince the USC Trojans to break ties with the Coliseum. The Industry stadium's design has already been altered for soccer play as a way to attract off-season tenants, but here again they'll have to compete with the renovated Rose Bowl, which has a storied history of World Cup play.

All of which puts added pressure on the Coliseum to pay for upgrades and possible redesign. Public financing for such a project will be hard to come by in this economy and the NFL has no appetite to get behind an expensive deal when they dictate to Industry just what kind of comfy accommodations the league would prefer. Big downtown developers have shown no interest in a public-private partnership to improve the Coliseum, choosing instead to explore building a brand new stadium near Staples.

Schwarzenegger vetoes 710 tunnel bill

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today vetoed a bill that would have required any extension of the 710 Freeway to be built below ground.

The decades-long campaign to close the 4.5-mile gap between Alhambra and Pasadena has faced stiff opposition, none more resolute than the city of South Pasadena, through which the road would have to travel. Senate Bill 545 from Sen. Gil Cedillo was sold as a compromise that would let the freeway be built so long as it tunneled underneath the city's historic homes and tree-lined streets.

Some - including some of the bill's supporters - think the bill would have killed the project given the prohibitive price tag - $3.6 billion for a tunnel versus $850 million for a surface road.

In his veto message, Schwarzenegger called the bill "unnecessary":

There is absolutely no need to enact statutory restrictions that would mandate certain project design options or remove others from potential consideration. In addition, several properties belonging to the state would be subject to sale for less than fair market value as a result of this bill, resulting in the loss to the state of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The properties Schwarzenegger refers to are homes, many abandoned and in disrepair, that sit in the freeway's path. Had the bill become law, Caltrans could have sold many of these properties, something South Pasadena and Pasadena would like to see happen. Would the governor have signed the bill if the housing market was in better shape?

Social government

Rick Cole, former Pasadena city manager mayor and now Ventura city manager, offers his view of how social media networks will change local government in this month's Public Management magazine. One consequence is more direct democracy, he argues, and less reliance on elected officials to decide things - and less reliance on newspapers to report those decisions:

A crowd-sourcing approach to local government resembles a barn raising more than a vending machine as a model for serving the community. Instead of elected leaders exclusively deciding the services to be offered and setting the (tax) price of the government vending machine, a barn raising tackles shared challenges through what former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith calls "government by network."

Citizen groups, individual volunteers, activists, nonprofits, other public agencies, businesses, and ad hoc coalitions contribute to the designing, delivering, and funding of public services. The media compatible with this model are not the newspapers—the local newspaper reporting yesterday's council meeting, for example. The new media are the instant Facebook postings, tweets, and YouTube clips that keep our shifting body politic in touch.