He hasn’t paid to see a Chargers game in many years, but local artist Michael Rosenblatt is drawn to the Bolts like few other fans.
How much? In mid-October, he launched an online petition titled “Tell the NFL: Save the San Diego Chargers!” On Thursday, it topped the 5,000-signature mark, helped by a boost Tuesday when more than 1,100 added their names.
“Speak now before it’s too late by signing this petition and sharing it with your family and friends,” Rosenblatt wrote four months before a joint Chargers-Raiders stadium proposal for Carson triggered an explosion of interest and sped up plans to find a site here and ways to pay for it. “Let’s show the [Spanos family] and the NFL that San Diego loves the Chargers!”
Coverage of the issue has focused mainly on owner and elected officials’ efforts to find a solution. But where do fans stand?
For his part, Rosenblatt takes the side of taxpayer subsidies (and would help with his own money). He supports a public vote toward that end, which “should have been done during the last 10 years.”
“People have to pay for a lot of things with taxes,” Rosenblatt told Times of San Diego in a phone interview Thursday. “There are a lot of things people are expected to pay taxes for.”
Rosenblatt, 54, says a new Chargers home here — his 160-word petition doesn’t say where — would be a boon to tourism among “so many economic reasons to have a new stadium.” He says a new arena might help land soccer’s quadrennial World Cup.
But how high a tax?
“I don’t think it should bring economic suffering to anybody,” said Rosenblatt, a Carlsbad resident.
“It’s not like traveling to Mars,” he said of coming up with a financing scheme. “We all have to come together and set an example for ways to pay for it. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Rosenblatt, one of the founders of the Save Our Bolts group on Facebook, suggests that “wealthier companies” might unite to help build a stadium, especially if a vote turned thumbs down on public financing.
He argues that corporate partners could benefit from keeping the Chargers in San Diego. Naming rights could be part of the mix.
And he also can’t see the advantage of moving to a market that, for 20 years, hasn’t missed an NFL team.
The Chargers “can’t expect 13 million people [in the Los Angeles market] to like all three teams” mulling a move — citing the St. Louis Rams along with the Raiders and Chargers, he said. “They can’t squeeze in a third team [to the L.A. market]. The money is in San Diego.”
He insists that other cities “not as rich as San Diego” have built NFL stadiums. “It can be done.”
Although he’s made money from sports art depicting Chargers, he apparently has no other financial interest in the team staying here. He painted a Tony Gwynn mural at San Diego State University but no public art for the Chargers. He says the Chargers haven’t contacted him since launching the petition.
He says he has sold a dozen paintings of Chargers past and present to private buyers but hasn’t had any financial dealings with the NFL team.
“I don’t do T-shirts” for the Chargers or “anything like that,” he says. “If it has NFL licensing involved, it’s a long process.”
Rosenblatt has been a Bolts fan since he went to games with his father in the 1980s and fell in love with Air Coryell teams led by Dan Fouts. He says he’s been to more recent games as an invited guest, but hasn’t paid for a ticket lately.
With an exciting team, however, he sees a path to making the team even more profitable, noting that the Dallas Cowboys [sometimes called “America’s Team”] and the Green Bay Packers have national followings. He thinks the Chargers could as well.
A new Chargers stadium “doesn’t have to be 100,000-plus seats,” Rosenblatt said. “It’s just a matter of planning it out.”
Like the average fan, Rosenblatt says he doesn’t have the time and money to see the games in person, but would hate to see San Diego lose the prestige of being an NFL city.
San Diego benefits from that as a tourist attraction — with Chargers games attracting non-Bolts fans, “even if they’re lifelong Steelers fans.”
Rosenblatt plans to attend Monday’s public-feedback meeting of Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s nine-member Citizens Stadium Advisory Group. He’ll also attend the public rally that day.
Leaders of Save Our Bolts, a nonprofit group, have publicly expressed support for a stadium tied to an expanded bayfront Convention Center.
“I promise you that we as a 20-man board for this group are working very hard and diligently to get you the info as we get it and also the info to help educate you, so that you may educate others on the process of this major multipurpose events center (MPEC),” Donney Cummins said in a Facebook post.
The group’s Dan McLellan also has argued for the multi-use solution, saying that without it San Diego might lose Comic-Con as well.
(Similar Facebook pages have been launched at Keep the Chargers in San Diego and San Diego Chargers Stadium Petition. BoltPride, founded in 1992, also has a Facebook arm.)
In Rosenblatt’s mind, it’s do-or-die time.
Fans “have to decide whether it’s going to be like for eternity without a football team here,” he said. “The time to act is now, not later.”
