ST. LOUIS -- The St. Louis stadium task force's efforts to keep the Rams took another step toward having an "actionable" plan to send to the NFL by the Dec. 30 deadline.
The St. Louis Board of Aldermen's Ways and Means Committee on Thursday approved the proposal, which asks the city of St. Louis to provide $150 million toward a proposed $1 billion-plus NFL stadium on the city's north riverfront. The vote was 7-2 in favor, though there is still work to be done to finalize the city financing.
"We are committed to keeping the Rams and the NFL in St. Louis, and it is particularly rewarding that this important committee recognized the vast upside of the project, including many benefits that are lasting and transcend football," the task force said in a statement.
Now that the bill has passed through the committee, it will be discussed, evaluated and voted on by the entire board of aldermen. That discussion is expected to begin Friday, but the board is scheduled to take its normal holiday break at the end of the week. It's expected that the board will call a special session next week to have a full vote to approve the plan before the NFL's Dec. 30 deadline to have full proposals from the home markets in San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's task force has been working on finalizing a financing package for more than a year with the city money the final piece of the public financing remaining.
Even if the full board passes the city financing, the St. Louis proposal still requires a significant commitment from Rams owner Stan Kroenke for the stadium to be built.
In a Wednesday interview on The Bernie Miklasz Show on 101 ESPN in St. Louis, NFL executive Eric Grubman indicated that the proposal would not be attractive to Kroenke even if the board of aldermen finalizes the city piece of the money.
"St. Louis will sure fall short of having a compelling proposal that will attract the Rams," Grubman told Miklasz. "To that end, and I don't mean to oversimplify and I'm certainly not going to attempt to negotiate the individual points, the stadium is going to cost more than is on the drawing board at the moment. The funding has declined, and new taxes are being proposed for the Rams. So if you already had an owner who was showing a great reluctance to come off his position that he won in arbitration, you sort of moved away from Stan Kroenke. I don't speak for him, but those are just the facts and the numbers."
The NFL hopes to have a vote on which teams out of the Rams, Raiders and Chargers will get to relocate to Los Angeles at another round of owners meetings scheduled for Jan. 12-13 in Houston.