Architects look to renovate Qualcomm

Interesting news from the Union-Tribune today. A group of architects wants to renovate Qualcomm Stadium, regardless of whether the Chargers play there in the future or not.

According to one of the group's members, Jack Carpenter - a fitting name, I must add - the stadium isn't as bad as it has been made out to be, and with some fixing up the stadium will be great for San Diego State football and soccer matches.

Their wish is put a presentation in front of Qualcomm Stadium Advisory Board. A member of that group said that they would listen to what the architects had to say.

Impact Players: Mark Fabiani

This is the first in a series showcasing the main figures in the negotiations.

Mark Fabiani is Special Counsel to the President for the San Diego Chargers.

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An attorney is like a reused envelope.

The sides are bent and scuffed from the abuse it has taken over the days. The paper doesn’t shine as bright from the clutter that’s been placed on top of it. The opening needs a sticker to keep the fold down since the mint stripe has worn away. Whiteout hangs and cracks on top of the countless addresses, and labels that never wear off blanket the outside.

But inside the envelope, through the bends and nicks, fresh paper resides – still bright, sharp and unbroken, available for the next person to open it up and learn from the contents. And if the reader isn’t careful, they’ll feel the sting of a long paper cut down their hand. It is the pain of underestimating what is in front of them.

Mark Fabiani’s envelope is still sharp – at least the San Diego Chargers hope it is.

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Fabiani’s official title is Special Counsel to the President. A better title would be The Voice.

“One of things that we started to do,” Fabiani said, “and still do now, is go out in the community. We go to as many events as we can, whether it's rotary clubs, lunches or ... inviting a group of people who frequent message boards and follow the team really closely on the Internet. “

He is the master of the Chargers’ message to the community about putting a stadium in San Diego County. He represents the thoughts of the Spanos family that own and run the team, and is the point man for any public meeting that wants to talk stadium issues. While men like LaDainian Tomlinson and Shawne Merriman garner the most headlines, it is Fabiani’s words that are crucial to the future of the team.

The story of Mark Fabiani isn’t static to San Diego. Fabiani is well-traveled, well-known, and in several cases, infamous. His past hires range from politics to sports to entertainment, so much so that his personal history reads like a textbook. If the life of this 50-year-old is like that of a quarterback, Fabiani is not a training camp rookie. He’s an established veteran, a kickoff weekend starter.

This profile doesn’t dwell in policy and numbers. Walk into any of the speeches Mark Fabiani’s been giving over the last six years and the numbers will be sitting there. This is about the Mark Fabiani you don’t know. The Fabiani that picked up the pieces of Clinton’s broken home. The Fabiani that united with Dean Spanos by proximity before publicity. The Fabiani that gives more reasons why a stadium in Chula Vista doesn’t work than why it can.

This is why Mark Fabiani is an impact player.

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If Mark Fabiani hadn’t settled in La Jolla, this article may not exist.

The Spanos family did not find Mark Fabiani by looking in the phone booth. The two sides had kept contact in bits and pieces starting in the late ‘90s. They may have never met, however, if the NFL hadn’t found Fabiani convenient.

“After I left the White House the NFL called me,” Fabiani said. “They said 'You handled all the problems for Clinton, would you like to give a Crisis Management presentation?’ They were holding the conference in San Diego, so it was an inexpensive choice for them.

“I guess they liked it and they mentioned me to the Chargers. I went over and met Dean and did some projects, nothing too significant. I did some smaller projects for them.”

But one day in April of 2002, Fabiani went from outside help to inside man.

“I got a call from Dean,” Fabiani recollected. “He said 'I need to see you right away.'

“Actually, I had just gone to the gym and I was in my workout clothes. I said, 'Dean, let me go take a shower and I'll see you later.'

“But he said, 'No, come on over. Let’s meet over here and I can talk to you.’

“We met at the lobby at the LaValencia Hotel and he told me, 'You’ve got to consider helping us on an issue.’ I said, 'What is that?’

He said, ‘We had a big meeting with our family and we decided we really want to try and keep the team in San Diego, but eventually we’re going to need a new stadium to do that. We don't need a new stadium tomorrow, or next week, or next year, but eventually we need a new stadium and it takes a while to get these things done and we want you to get started.’

“At the time, there were all these rumors about Los Angeles and a stadium being built in downtown. The team had moved its training camp to Carson.

“I said to Dean at the time, ‘You know, in my opinion, if you want to move the team, you should just move the team. You have a lease that allows you to do that. You're in a situation where it allows you to do that. If you just want to move the team, you should just move it.’

“And he said, 'I understand that, but that's not what I want to do. We want to try to keep the team here.’

“I said, "Your timing is not good. You've got a ticket guarantee that's making everybody mad. Your training camp is in Carson, and that’s making everybody mad. You've got a renovation that happened at Qualcomm in the ‘90s that the city is still paying for. People are not going to be anxious to be talking to us about a new stadium.’

“He said, ‘I understand that. We have a lot of things to do, and that's why we need to get started.’"

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The real story of Mark Fabiani doesn’t start with meetings at fancy hotels. The story of Mark Fabiani starts with long stretches of brick buildings, open greens, nature trails and the hum of steel mills and limestone. His journey starts in Ellwood City, Pa.

“It's the cradle of the quarterback,” Fabiani said. “I lived in Beaver Falls, Joe Namath's hometown. We moved to California with my parents when I was a teenager, and we lived in Ontario.”

Even though Fabiani spent his teenage years in Southern California and graduated from the University of the Redlands, he still looked back to the East. His future was not set with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Something else needed to be done.

The answer? Harvard Law School.

“I went to college and a lot of my friends were going to law school, and at the time it seemed like the right thing to do,” Fabiani said. “I don't know if it was at the time, but it seemed like it was.

“At the time Harvard had the best law school. It was cold back there though. It was cold in Pennsylvania too, but I had live on the West Coast for a while. It was a shock. It was a good place to go to college. I wouldn't want to live there, but it was a great place to go.”

Like most graduated of law school, Fabiani dove into a firm and began his life as an attorney. But in the midst of a stable career, inklings of doubt began to crawl in his mind. The private sector was not holding his interest. A life of law firm service didn’t seem like the right direction.”

“I came back to the West Coast and clerked for a federal judge on the ninth circuit,” Fabiani said. “A great man named Stephen Reinhardt.”

Judge Reinhardt has only been appointed to the Ninth Circuit for a short time, having previously worked with the Los Angeles Police Commission. Before that, however, he worked with Tom Bradley, who at the time was the mayor of Los Angeles. And when Fabiani needed to regain focus, the judge knew exactly what direction to turn Fabiani.

“I ended up staying in LA and starting working in a law firm,” Fabiani said. “I didn't really like practicing law. I was kind of bored with it. So I went back to see my old friend and told him my situation. He said 'Well, I've got an old friend, Mayor Bradley, and he's looking for some help, and if you want to do something different, go talk to him. Fortunately he liked me, and I went to go work with him.”

Fabiani went to work, and his role of mixing private and public sector problems put him on the map. He became deputy mayor and chief of staff during the last four years of Bradley’s stay in office.

Fabiani wouldn’t stay out of work long. He would jump from local politics to the big stage – working with President Clinton through the 1996 election. He was in front of the national media constantly discussing the Whitewater scandal. Along with that role, he helped shape strategies for the Clintons. He didn’t return to the public spotlight until the turn of the century when worked for Al Gore’s campaign as a strategist and spokesperson.

For Fabiani, working with the media is what has stayed the same throughout all his jobs.

“The principles are all the same - whether it's a sports job or a government job or a campaign,” Fabiani said. “You've got to understand that the media is delayed as the public gets information. You have to respect that people that work in the media. And by media, I now include the blog world and the message boards. You have to be willing to work with them, or else your information is not going to be able to get out. Whether it's any kind of issue, you've got to work with the people who generate the information.”

When asked whether he preferred the established position with Clinton or the unsettling and exciting campaign with Gore, Fabiani actually points to the Bradley days are most satisfying.

“When you're working in Washington, it's sometimes difficult to see if your job is producing any results,” Fabiani said. “You're far away from where things really happen at the local level. There's a lot of bureaucracy. My job with the mayor was a great job because everyday you could see if you were having ... a good effect of a bad effect on people. Washington was pretty far removed.

“A presidential campaign is totally different. You can measure on a day-to-day basis how you're doing. Whether you've got good press coverage, bad press coverage, you can look at how the crowds are. Immediate results are known to you.

“However, it's grueling. It's 20 hours a day, seven days a week for months and months and months. It's not something you can do forever.”

It was here that he met his future firm partner Chris Lehane. The two met in the White House, and their relationship carried over into a long-term – and infamous – partnership.

“I met him at the White House when I worked with Clinton,” Fabiani said. “I left for California, and he stayed and became Al Gore's secretary. I left and he stayed, but we obviously stayed in touch. I started on my own firm in 1997 in San Diego. I took a leave of absence to work on the Gore campaign. I worked for Gore until the bitter end in December, and then I joined up with Chris the following spring.”

Fabiani and Lehane have worked with a variety of people, including the NHL and filmmaker Michael Moore.

“[Chris is] a good guy, he's great to work with, and I feel fortunate to be able to work with him,” Fabiani said. “We've been fortunate to have a lot of interesting clients, interesting business, and I have no complaints.”

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“For the first two years, our efforts were on cleaning up the mess.”

Fabiani’s start with the team wasn’t a time to relax. Work was to be done immediately, and he had to play catch-up for a situation already under duress.

“[There was] getting rid of the ticket guarantee,” Fabiani said, “getting rid of the trigger, getting rid of the litigation, getting rid of the bad relationship between the city and team and getting rid of the bad feelings between the team and the community about the ticket guarantee. I learned that quickly when I started giving speeches. It was a very difficult time.

The team worked with the city to solve the problems, giving each side the chance to finally listen to one another without anything in the way.

“We did clean them up finally,” Fabiani said, “and by the summer of 2004 we had renegotiated our lease with the city, we had eliminated the ticket guarantee and we had moved the training camp back. We had done everything they had asked us to do. We got our new lease signed, and the members of the City Council said ‘Now we can talk about a new stadium.’

“And then everything went to hell in a hand basket with the city.”

The rest of the story doesn’t need to be retold here. The government collapsed, the stadium went on the backburner, and eventually the hope surrounding the project lowered faster than the sun setting over La Jolla Shores. Even now, with all eyes supposedly stuck on Chula Vista’s bayfront, the questions over Qualcomm have never quelled.

“The number one question I get is ‘Why not Qualcomm?’” Fabiani said. “It's like we worked on Qualcomm so long that people forget we worked on it.”

“The answer is pretty simple - when we proposed this … that proposal involved funding a project for a stadium that costs $400 million and infrastructure that costs about $175 million. But now, you're talking about a project that's going to cost double that. And how in the world, even if Mike Aguirre weren't around, even if Mayor Sanders suddenly became interested in our project, even if those issues went away - how in the world do you generate enough revenue off of the Qualcomm site to pay for that kind of huge project? You can't build 30,000 condos on the Qualcomm site. You can only do so much.”

“We would love to stay in Qualcomm. But the truth of the matter is that it doesn't work. If there was another source of funding, would it work? Yes, but there isn't.”

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Six years after Fabiani signed on, more than a decade after meeting Dean Spanos, he’s still working on the same project he gave listening tours for, the same project he wrote statements on, the same project he has seen rise and fall. The stadium negotiations has come and gone from city to city, taking its imaginary pencil and crossing off each place it travels.

Now it sits at the bayfront’s shores and on the Eastside’s expanse. But is this southland ready to sign on the line instead of scratch off its name?

“We've got a lot of land,” Fabiani said. “You're talking about 130 acres on the waterfront. You're talking about 500 acres on the east side. It is very different from the Qualcomm site where you're trying to fit everything on 166 acres of land, only 60 acres of which are developable.”

Land is only one factor out of many other important topics. Land may be the only one Fabiani can cheerfully answer with full confidence.

“There are a lot of reasons why it might not work,” Fabiani said. “It might not work because there might not be a firm base for the shutdown of the power plant. It might not work because even if the plant is shut down, there might be environmental issues that might keep us from using the bayfront site. It might not work because you may never get through the gauntlet of government agencies that you've got to deal with, from the Coastal Commission to the Port Commission to various state agencies and the city of Chula Vista. That's something we have a difficult time explaining.”

And on top of that, someone has to foot the bill – and in California, don’t look at the taxpayers to fill the void.

“It might not work because no one's ever done this before, building a privately financed stadium,” Fabiani said. “It might not be possible to generate the efficient revenue to build [this]. The cost has clearly gone in the opposite direction of where we need it to be. You've got soaring construction costs. You've got a project that costs double what it costs six years ago.”

But Fabiani does have hope on his side. Even thought the stadium project may not be the most famous thing he’s ever done, and even though it probably isn’t the most exciting thing he’s ever faced, it does has something for him to hang onto. For Fabiani, this project is a replica of how he likes to live his life.

Fabiani has never stuck to tradition. From going across the country once and back again, to not following in his Harvard footsteps, to working his way up the ladder in a way uncommon to most of his peers, why shouldn’t a stadium depending heavily on his voice take the most controversial route for its birth?

“Most people get out of law school and go into a law firm,” Fabiani said, “and I went into the government and it was the best choice I could have made. I don't really have any advice for anyone except ‘Don't always follow the traditional path. Sometimes you might do something that's out of the ordinary and it might turn out very well.’”

If an attorney is an envelope, Mark Fabiani can’t wait to deliver.

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