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49ers rehuddle in stadium hunt
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Related Topics: SAN FRANCISCO
SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News) - The 49ers’ plan to build a stadium in the South Bay has a new twist: Officials for the NFL team are now looking at a new Santa Clara site since the first plan to build the stadium on land currently leased by Great America as a parking lot received opposition from the amusement park’s owners.
It was approximately one year ago when the 49ers informed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that a proposed stadium project at Candlestick Point was unworkable due to parking and transportation infrastructure concerns. The team has since been in talks with Santa Clara city officials about building an $854 million stadium adjacent to the theme park.
Last month, the corporate owner of Great America, Ohio-based Cedar Fair Entertainment, formally announced opposition to the plan.
Cedar Fair spokesperson Stacy Frole told The Examiner on Thursday that although the company conceptually thought the two entertainment entities “could be a good fit,” further study of the plan lead them to believe that the amusement park business would be negatively affected by the stadium’s proposed location.
To get around the hurdle, the 49ers initially said they might try to resolve the issue by buying Great America, something Frole said Cedar Fair would be willing to do, for “fair market value.”
Now, the 49ers are looking at an alternative site, within walking distance of the first, on an overflow parking lot across the street from the team’s headquarters.
Team spokeswoman Lisa Lang said the second site is not the 49ers’ “first choice” because the stadium would now be about a five-minute walk from the light-rail stop and be less centralized to nearby parking options. The overflow lot is space Great America patrons “never use,” Lang said. She said that fewer restrictions are written into Cedar Fair’s lease with Santa Clara for the overflow parking lot.
Since Cedar Fair’s opposition is the “big hurdle” to the stadium plan, Lang said building on the alternate site might be the answer to Cedar Fair’s concerns.
Frole said she was surprised the 49ers were just now proposing the alternative site, because when Cedar Fair began to express concerns over the original plan, they had asked the 49ers if they had any alternative sites to propose and were given no other options.
“We would have been happy to look at that information earlier,” she said.
San Francisco has since proposed building the stadium at the site of the former Hunters Point Shipyard. Lang said the team is still interested in the proposal — as a potential backup plan — but expressed concern about San Francisco’s ability to guarantee transportation improvements and complete the environmental cleanup on the polluted Superfund site in time to make the team’s goal of getting into a new stadium by 2012.
