During the final minutes of a June council meeting, Mayor James T. Butts Jr. The budget was more robust. But there was one major obstacle. Though few details about the battle over the proposed arena have been made public, The Times obtained more than 1, pages of emails and other documents that shed light on the discreet effort to launch the project.
One appears to contradict what Butts characterized during a deposition last year as a less-than-encouraging early meeting he had with Clippers officials. Others show that discussions between Inglewood and the Clippers started much earlier than previously acknowledged, and that Clippers representatives worried MSG would learn about the arena plan before the company had agreed to surrender its parking lease. MSG sued Butts and Inglewood last year , claiming the mayor tricked the company into terminating its lease so the city could make way for a technology park.
The mayor repeatedly has denied the allegation. Wong recounted the meeting in brief notes typed two days afterward that were included in the filings. During a deposition taken last August in connection with the lawsuit and excerpted in the court filings, Butts gave a much different account of the Ritz-Carlton meeting. In response to questions from The Times about the meeting, Skip Miller, the attorney for Inglewood and Butts, declined to discuss specifics of the case because of a protective order.
He issued a general statement instead:. Competition in the concert business, as the new arena proposes to bring to Inglewood, is a good thing; and MSG should have to compete like everybody else.
We look forward to opening this facility for our wonderful fans in The three blocks highlighted in a map attached to the email include a church, apartment buildings and private residences, though the exclusive negotiating agreement was later revised to exclude those structures. Two months later, on Aug. Staples would be better. On Sept. On Feb. Mayor 5 minutes ago. He just received a call [from someone connected to MSG] if it was true that the clippers are going into Inglewood.
