Early last week the San Francisco 49ers and Santa Clara City Council reached an agreement on a new stadium. Details were a big vague as they were to be released today, prior to a city council vote June 2 on whether to back the deal.
While many folks just want to see a stadium get built, others (like myself) have a bigger interest in the details and the nitty gritty of the proposed deal. As this is going to go before the voters in Santa Clara, the primary interest is in the financing of the stadium. Football stadiums are not cheap and the money has to come from somewhere.
Rather than link to the individual PDFs, I thought I'd link to the 49ers stadium section of the SantaClara.gov website. It includes the agenda for the June 2 meeting, as well as 16 exhibits to go with it and a report of additional correspondences. If you don't feel like reading them, at some point this summer I'll read everything over and provide a relatively clean summary for everybody.
I would like to point out one extremely interesting clause in the term sheet the two parties agreed too. If it's in all stadium deals it's no big deal, but if not, it's quite interesting in regards to our brethren across the bay. Article 16 of the term sheet is titled "Second Team." Section 16.1 says:
49ers Stadium Company will have the right to enter into a sublease with a second NFL team (“Second Team”), on terms and conditions consistent with and subject to the Stadium Lease to allow the Second Team to play its home games in the Stadium, subject to the following conditions...
What follows is repayment issues in the event a second team subleases from the 49ers. However, it's the first part of that sentence that appears rather huge. The second NFL team would be the Oakland Raiders. Again, I don't know if this is standard language, or if it's something team is more seriously considering.
Section 16.2 discusses a temporary second team occupancy (no more than 2 NFL seasons). I suppose that could be if the Raiders were able to work out a new stadium deal, they could use the 49ers stadium while it's being built. This would be most notably if it involved bulldozing the Coliseum and building on the same property.
I don't know about you, but I find that pretty interesting. Of course maybe I'm just a nerd about these kinds of things.