49ers Finding That Adoring Fans Aren’t Necessarily Pliant Voters

SAN FRANCISCO — Every speaker enjoys preaching to the converted, and Willie Brown is no exception. So when this city’s convention and visitors bureau recently invited the mayor to speak in favor of a proposed $325-million football stadium to be voted on Tuesday, he jumped at the chance.

“Why, the Phoenix folks spent $300 million” to build a stadium, he said with amused contempt. Phoenix? “We charge more at a Motel 6 than they do at their Grand Hyatt!”

The audience of local hotel and tourism executives roared. There was scarcely a naysayer in the room, no one to challenge Brown’s assertion that the new stadium, along with a $200-million shopping mall, is “the best of all projects.”

Try telling that to the rest of the city.

Tuesday’s city referendum over replacing 37-year-old Candlestick Park (renamed 3Com Park not long ago) with a modern stadium nearby remains a decided underdog in opinion polls despite open threats by the 49ers to leave the town they have called home for 50 years and the promise of 10,000 jobs and millions of dollars in community redevelopment if the project is approved. Recent polls show the measure trailing by anywhere from 9 to 23 percentage points.

The ballot issue specifically calls for voters to approve a $100-million city bond issue to help cover stadium construction. The financing, according to the team, would be covered by new sales tax revenues generated by the new mall. A second measure on the ballot circumvents many of the normal planning procedures in order to get construction moving ahead quickly.

All but a handful of top elected officials, including the popular Brown, support the plan, along with the city’s two major newspapers.

But almost from the campaign’s inception the stadium issue has been entangled in the peculiarities of local politics and questions over why the team’s well-heeled owners need public funds.

Moreover, many people doubt that the city-owned 3Com Park, built in 1960, is in as dire physical shape as 49ers management contends. Although the team maintains that repairs costing as much as $117 million are needed to render the stadium safe, there are no signs that it is a danger to fans or even much of an inconvenience: Every football game is a sellout and the waiting list for 49ers season ticket numbers in the tens of thousands.

Instead, critics say, team owner Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., a shopping center magnate whose personal fortune is estimated by Forbes magazine to be more than $650 million, wants to get his hands on the roughly $30 million a year that could be generated by thousands of club seats and hundreds of luxury boxes installed in a new stadium. That money is especially alluring because by National Football League rules it need not be shared with the visiting team, unlike conventional ticket revenues.

“This is basically a shakedown,” said Joel Ventresca, head of the Committee to Stop the Giveaway, the lead stadium-opposition group. “The whole notion of subsidizing private for-profit companies is a very offensive form of public welfare. Many pressing needs in San Francisco are not being addressed because we’re so distracted with how we can enrich a multimillionaire owner.”

That argument has a particular resonance in San Francisco.

“San Francisco has a much more old-Left organized political opposition,” said Roger Noll, a Stanford University economist who has done economic studies for the Major League Baseball Players Assn. “Their distaste for subsidized capitalism is very strong.”

That distaste has coalesced around the Youngstown, Ohio-based DeBartolo. Stadium campaign managers have tried to keep the team owner largely under wraps in advance of the vote. That’s wise, because almost every public statement he has made has roiled the waters.

The campaign got off on the wrong foot several months ago when he made an explicit threat to move the 49ers if the stadium plan was rejected. That generated so much ill will that the team started over, mailing voters a promotional brochure confessing, “We dropped the ball,” and apologizing for being so much more maladroit at politics than football.

Team President Carmen Policy has since spent much of his time backpedaling from DeBartolo’s threat, arguing that the owner was simply expressing concern about the condition of the existing park.

“We didn’t threaten to leave,” he told The Times. “We were just trying to say what we were facing.”

But Policy also warned that if the measures fail there will be no new proposal and no new vote. “We can’t put a better deal on the table,” he said.

It didn’t help much last month when Jack Davis, who is managing the campaign for the bond issue, threw a wild bash that featured live sex acts. Davis later apologized for the party, which was attended by many of the city’s leading figures and became the talk of the town.

Early polling places set up in four public housing projects quickly raised another controversy.

“It smells to high heaven,” said state Sen. Quentin Kopp, who added that he would confer with the secretary of state’s office to see whether it is legal to set up “selective” early voting places.

The voting spots--where residents were allowed to cast absentee ballots Saturday--were set up in the four housing projects, and 89 people voted.

Registrar of Voters Germaine Wong said the spots were chosen because they are places where residents tend not to vote and that stadium backers had nothing to do with requesting the sites.

But critics noted that two of the polling places were set up in Bayview-Hunters Point, the low-income neighborhood adjoining Candlestick Point.

The stadium project’s very genesis has fueled public skepticism. The shopping mall, which would be built not by DeBartolo’s company but by Mills Co., the developer of Ontario Mills and other large malls around the country, was added to the project essentially as a political afterthought.

DeBartolo and Policy initially approached the mayor with a plan for the city to provide $100 million in financing for a $325-million stand- alone stadium, team officials say.

Brown concluded that such a baldfaced subsidy would have no prayer of passing a vote. Since DeBartolo built shopping malls for a living, he suggested, why not throw in a mall with the stadium?

That would allow him to sell the $100-million financing as a job-development and urban renewal scheme aimed at Bayview-Hunters Point.

As the plan emerged, the idea was for sales tax revenues from the mall to cover debt service on the bond issue, thus ensuring that there would be no cost to the city’s general fund.

But the maneuver seems to have backfired. Instead of offering protective cover for a team subsidy, the mall proposal has simply provided another flank for stadium opponents to attack.

No one has produced any marketing survey showing that the mall could succeed without drawing business from existing retail merchants in the city. That means that applying sales taxes from the mall to the bonds could mean a net charge to the city budget.

Critics say the promoters’ claims that the project would produce 6,500 permanent new jobs are inflated. They also question whether any significant share of those would go to neighborhood residents as the promoters promise.

Nevertheless, the city, team and even the NFL have strived hard to emphasize its putative economic benefits.

“This is not a stadium project,” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said during a recent pilgrimage to San Francisco. “It’s economic development in the truest sense of the word.” Just in case, he also carried a league pledge that a new stadium would host a Super Bowl within a year or two of its completion.

Brown also came up with a plan to protect the city from losses it might suffer if the mall fails to generate enough tax revenue to cover the bonds. In that event, he said, the bonds would be repaid through an insurance policy brokered by the investment firm Morgan Stanley & Co.

But critics respond that the exact terms of the policy have not been set--and cannot be until the bonds are issued. At any rate, they say, the deal would still mean diverting sales taxes toward a private construction project.

Meanwhile, stadium supporters are once more relying on the 49ers’ terrific local popularity and the threat of their departure to carry the Tuesday vote. Although the team is bound to 3Com Park by a lease that runs to 2008, with three five-year extensions after that, they contend that the stadium’s poor condition allows them to break the lease as early as next year.

Pro-stadium forces are relying on the high percentage of undecided voters showing up in all recent opinion polls. Brown last week assured a gathering of supporters that large numbers of the undecideds will swing in favor by the time they reach the polling booth.

“And the people who will vote no,” he said, “we’re telling them that the election is the next week.”