Who lost the Coliseum?

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum used to be among the most distinguished public buildings in California. It hosted two Olympic Games (1932 and 1984), two Super Bowls (including the first), and the 1959 World Series (Dodgers and Chicago White Sox). John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president there in 1960. And while the stadium often seemed rundown in recent years, you couldn’t question its toughness: It managed to survive 13 seasons as the home of the National Football League’s Raiders and their notoriously volatile fans.

But its status as a public entity couldn’t survive the dysfunction of Los Angeles—or California. This summer, consumed by scandal and financial shortfalls, the government commission that owns the Coliseum effectively turned over the keys to a private school, the University of Southern California, which has long played its football games there. Technically, the Coliseum remains publicly owned, but, under the terms of a 98-year lease, USC is in total control.

Press and critics at museums near the Coliseum have criticized this deal as a sweetheart transfer of a civic treasure to a private entity, and not without reason. The Coliseum’s prospects were just starting to look up, with a new rail line nearby, the arrival of the Space Shuttle Endeavour next door at the California Science Center, and the revamping of the Natural History Museum. But now, USC, which already has more money than some countries, will keep ticket and concession revenues from Coliseum events. USC also has permission to knock down the Sports Arena next door and build a soccer stadium in its place, all in exchange for its investing at least $70 million in renovating the Coliseum and paying $1 million in annual rent, subject to inflation adjustments.

But as right as the critics are to question whether the USC deal is too generous, they’re wrong to disapprove of taking the Coliseum away from its current managers. What they’re overlooking are all the costs of having an important public space like the Coliseum controlled by multiple governments.

The handover of the Coliseum to USC is being portrayed as the culmination of an unfortunate sequence of events—the death of a teenager in 2010 from an ecstasy overdose at a Coliseum rave, which led to a Los Angeles Times investigation of financial and other irregularities among Coliseum management, which led to indictments of three former Coliseum managers and three other people, which led the Coliseum Commission to hand the whole mess over to USC.

Those recent scandals, however, were just symptoms of the fundamental problem. Like too many other important places in California, the Coliseum is run not by one person or one government—but by many. Its governing commission is a joint project of the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, and the state of California. This arrangement has proved the adage that when a place is governed by multiple governments, it is effectively ungoverned.

In L.A., which is already so big and disconnected, such a lack of governance is even more damaging. The Coliseum has been a decaying pit of a place for a couple of generations. As someone who has attended hundreds of events there, from the ’84 Olympics to football games between Roosevelt and Garfield high schools, I’ve sat on broken seats and lost years of my life to traffic jams in its neighboring streets and parking lots. With a few exceptions, the divided commission has been unable to do much about this.

California is already notorious for having thousands of governments, but we’re also the national headquarters of governments combining forces to create new government entities. The Coliseum is one example of a very common combined entity, known as a Joint Powers Authority, or JPA, which originated in efforts by cities to work together to fight tuberculosis during the ’20s. State law makes it very easy for California governments to combine with one another, with nonprofits, and even with government agencies in other states. Joint entities are used to create insurance pools and purchasing discounts, to do regional planning and regulatory enforcement, and to create bond-pooling joint authorities so that money can be borrowed at better rates and without voter approval.

Many of these joint entities work. But others don’t—and others are too complicated to be well monitored. And when multiple governments oversee the same public space, the results can be messy. San Francisco is already dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns on its $4 billion-plus Transbay Transit Center, a multi-government project touted as “The Grand Central Station of the West.” Access to, and the environmental protection of, Lake Tahoe and our Pacific Coast have both suffered in part because of multi-government governance. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an environmentally crucial estuary and major source of water for Californians, has deteriorated in ways that threaten water supply and harm fish under the overlapping governance of a bewildering array of local governments, state agencies, federal agencies, and various interest groups.

In the case of the Coliseum, the media has made much of leaked e-mails from the commission, which showed the body willfully ignoring public meetings laws. But the e-mails also show how much energy is required to manage a body run by three different (and dysfunctional) governments. It’s clear that Coliseum managers couldn’t contain their desire to make the USC deal and escape the madness. Wrote the Coliseum general manager in one missive: “Oh, what a joy there will be for both of us … when we are not in these meetings.”

Whatever you think of the terms of the deal, USC’s takeover of the Coliseum has one great virtue: a single entity in charge. This sort of arrangement tends to work a lot better. I’m not a big fan of L.A. LIVE or The Grove, but those privately owned places are vital public gathering spots, in no small part because it’s clear who is in charge of each. And Angelenos are fortunate that Griffith Park is clearly a city asset and that the Hollywood Bowl is the county’s business.

Taming California’s proliferation of entities with multiple masters doesn’t mean we have to do a cozy deal with a private entity like USC, as we did with the Coliseum. But having one boss, and one mission, is essential for competent management of public spaces. Especially in L.A.