The Clippers want a new home. For Inglewood, it's not so simple.

Inglewood's revival as a sports hub for Los Angeles County is happening quickly. When the NFL finally agreed to allow not one but two teams to move to Los Angeles, Inglewood was able to secure the bid for the stadium over a competing site in Carson. The aging Hollywood Park racetrack was transformed into the monolithic Los Angeles Sports Entertainment District project. In spite of setbacks from rainfall, the stadium is set to open by 2020, hosting both the Chargers and the Rams. It will host the Super Bowl in 2022 and will play an integral part in the upcoming 2028 Olympics.

Inglewood's football stadium sailed through California environmental regulations and city council deliberations, fast-tracked for development and already under construction. But if the Los Angeles Clippers hoped that the process to add a basketball arena just across the street would be as smooth and painless, they have been mistaken. In the 11 months since Inglewood signed an agreement with the team to build an arena on the corner of Prairie Street and Century Boulevard, the city's proposals have been met with concerns over eminent domain, protests and environmental roadblocks.

Through the setbacks, the mayor of Inglewood, James Thurman Butts, has remained defiant to critics and believes the arena project will be a catalyst for economic growth. In face of new lawsuits, Butts has continued to claim the arena will bolster a city that seeks to overcome recent civic controversies. Now Butts and Inglewood faces at least two lawsuits stemming from attempts to make the Clippers arena a reality.

"No entity is going to tell us how much prosperity is too much for the residents of Inglewood," Butts said, in response to one of the recent lawsuits.

Eminent Domain, Environmental Concerns

The Clippers' lease at Staples Center will expire in 2024. Since acquiring the team from the Sterling family, owner Steve Ballmer has sought a new home for the Clippers, who have long played in the shadow of the other LA basketball team, the Lakers. Despite ties to Washington state, Ballmer committed to keeping the team in Los Angeles County. If the arena is built in Inglewood, the team would play 20 minutes down the road from their current location.

But more importantly, Ballmer said he would buck the civic trend in new sports arenas and stadiums and not ask for public funding in building this new venue.

"This new arena would be 100 percent privately funded," Ballmer wrote in 2017. "No public dollars would be used for this project."

The commitment to no public funding has set Ballmer's project apart from a trend in civic and sports ownership developments, with owners regularly demanding public money invested in their new venues. The new professional football teams in Los Angeles both came from cities (San Diego and St. Louis) that did not give team owners the funding they were seeking. A similar story is unfolding in Columbus, Ohio, where a Major League Soccer franchise is threatening to move to Austin, Texas, unless the city aids in construction of a new stadium.

But where Ballmer's plan has set him apart from his peers, new problems have risen that could see Inglewood footing their own bills in legal battles.

In 2017 the city signed an exclusive negotiation agreement with Murphy's Bowl, a corporate entity that lists Steve Ballmer as its sole proprietor, to construct the arena. The agreement gave the city $1.5 million in a non-negotiable deposit for administration expenses.

The first wrinkle appeared in the language of that agreement which empowered the city to use eminent domain to secure the land necessary to build the arena. With the football stadium being built on the north side of the same street as the proposed arena, available land for both construction and parking has become short in supply.

When citizens confronted the city over the issue in August, Inglewood agreed to reduce the size of the zone where the area could be built. However, the city has also held fast to maintaining the language in the agreement that clears them to use eminent domain.

At a City Council meeting Butts responded to criticisms over the eminent domain clause with credulity, at one point claiming he had entered "the twilight zone" when hearing about the concerns. He questioned whether the head of the opposition group Inglewood Residents Against Taking and Evictions (IRATE) even existed.

Plans from the proposal released in an environmental report notice call for 17 acres of land to use for constructing the basketball arena and accompanying facilities and parking space.

Even in the reduced zone, some local businesses and residents remain at risk.

"They've already committed themselves to not looking at any alternative uses for the site or the location," said Doug Carsten, a lawyer representing IRATE in a lawsuit filed against Inglewood. "They did that before even embarking on the environmental review, which violates California law."

The lawsuit alleges that Inglewood committed to the negotiating agreement and to the construction project before beginning an environmental review, required by state law.

California's Environmental Quality Act has played a pivotal role in shaping the future of Inglewood sports. Under the act, new construction must follow environmental guidelines that could potentially limit how often the new venue could be used.

For example, environmental measures could require traffic limitations due to projected congestion. It would require the city to take measures for public transit and reduce the carbon footprint of cars, or it could restrict the number of days the arena could be in operation.

Of course, it would be in the interest of whoever operated the arena to make the most of its use and keep the arena hosting events as much as possible. In the current proposals, Inglewood believes the arena would be host to at least 41 basketball games and 100 to 150 non-Clippers events each year.

"The environmental laws are often used to help neighborhoods guard themselves," Carsten said. "And in Inglewood the NFL stadium got approved by doing an end-run around the law. It had this particular way of passing the initiative without review."

The basketball arena hasn't been so lucky. State legislation was proposed that would have exempted the arena's construction from environmental laws, on the basis that the arena would provide economic stimulus and with regard to existing development nearby with the NFL stadium.

Mayor Butts was deeply involved in attempting to pass the legislation. He urged support from the Inglewood Chamber of Commerce as well as from LA Metro. Butts is a member of the Board of Directors for the Metro.

The legislation was heard by California legislature at the end of the 2017-18 regular session and was voted down.

A Neighbor Displeased

In recent months, a new wrinkle emerged in another lawsuit, this time from Madison Square Gardens, which owns and operates the Forum. The Forum sits on the north side of the NFL stadium and less than two miles north of the proposed arena site.

The Forum is suing Inglewood over what it sees as an effort to release land for parking leased to the venue. Overflow parking had been an issue for years with the Forum, but in the suit claims that in 2017 the city and mayor Butts pressured the Forum into giving up the lease under the guise that the city was preparing to construct a technology park. The Forum agreed to terminate the lease on April 4.

Weeks later, Inglewood and the Clippers began drafting the negotiation agreement to build a new arena.

The Forum sees the claimed timeline of events as being in breach of contract, good faith and fraud, per their lawsuit. They also claim that mayor Butts used personal email and phone numbers to conduct his arrangement with the Clippers to pressure the Forum into selling their land. Counsel for Inglewood and mayor Butts responded in an April news conference, claiming that no one misled MSG; and that the city had, in fact, helped save the Forum money.

"It started with the Forum contacting me," said Butts, "asking that I mediate a dispute between them and the Kroenke group because they were locked out of parking across the street." Butts claims he arranged for parking from the city for the Forum while the dispute played out.

"The agreement that was brokered saves [MSG] $25,000 a night for parking," Butts aid. "They get to park for free, they now get to keep the revenue derived from parking on the Kroenke land. It was then and only then...that the parking lease was terminated."

The former area owned by the Forum makes up nearly all of the parking area described in initial maps of the arena project, as well as half of the main arena site.

"I would challenge [MSG] to show me an email, a note, something scribbled on the back of the napkin that I made such a commitment," said Butts in response to the idea that he had told the Forum he would build a technology park.

In a response to the Forum lawsuit, Butts and his lawyers also claimed that MSG had hired private investigators to damage his reputation and sabotage his office.

Butts has brought first the NFL to Inglewood and now seeks to bring the NBA to his city as well, mostly through the rhetoric that sports venues built in Inglewood will be pro-jobs and foster economic stimulus for his city.

But faced with criticism and pushback on various aspects of the project, Butts has responded by painting his opponents as standing in the way of progress.

"We have people who believe that they can tell a black and brown city the constraints of your dreams, that we need their permission to do greater and greater things, and we don't agree with that," Butts said in an interview with the Los Angeles Sentinel.

Facing these challenges, Inglewood recently sought to employ the services of a local marketing firm, Daley Technology Systems. In a proposal, the city would employ the services of the firm for $100,000, which would include special advertising spreads in seven papers in the Southern California Newspaper Group, including The Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News and the Pasadena Star News, along with all online versions of those publications. The money to fund this advertising campaign would be drawn from the city's general fund.

The plan also calls for a design of a "Stadium & Special Project War Room," with plans to make additions to the mayor's conference room to keep guests immersed in proposed plans and proposals for business and current projects, such as the basketball arena.

"Over the past 7 months since the announcement of the negotiations with the Clippers to build an arena, a number of false representations have been made regarding the objectives and directions of the City," reads a memo sent from the city manager's office.

DTS had worked previously with the city of Inglewood to provide advertising material for the new NFL stadium.

"No one is being forced to sell his or her property," Butts also said in that interview, dismissing claims that the dual stadium and arena development would cause gentrification and push out some Inglewood residents.

The thread running through Butts' rebuttals to criticism on the project is that his plan is, at its core, about economic prosperity. Butts' line has been that the arena will bring jobs and other economic benefits to Inglewood, a city that has faced a number of issues, including recent controversies with its education, police department and trash hauling services.

That the proposed NBA arena is privately funded does remove a bugbear from the scenario, but the question of whether all the accompanying legislative and legal issues - the wraith of eminent domain and environmental concerns and lawsuits from competing venues - is in service of economic stimulus is a question that has plagued civics and sports venues for years.

The Brookings Institute found back in 1997 that economic impact of sports venues was grossly overstated, writing that "Sports facilities attract neither tourists nor new industry."

In 2015, Stanford professor of economics Roger Noll wrote that sports venues do not generate the economic growth that they advertise. While Noll found that basketball and hockey arenas were better deals for cities, that addendum hinges on the notion that arenas see more frequent use.

Nevertheless, the mayor sees the opportunity for growth with sports in Inglewood.

"The reality is after we get pass this nonsense everyone is going to cooperate," said Butts, of the MSG lawsuit. In the meantime, it could become an expensive fight.