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Bond Sale Puts Padres’ Ballpark Back in Play
BY MIKE ALLEN
Senior Staff Writer
Thwarted for more than two years by litigation, San Diego officials took no chances in the days leading up to Feb. 15 when the city sold $169 million in bonds for the Padres ballpark Downtown.
“There were only a few people who knew about it, and that was intentionally so,” said Assistant City Attorney Les Girard. “We were not going to give the opponents of this project the chance to go down to the courthouse and file another lawsuit to screw up this deal.”
Just before 9 a.m. on Feb. 15, in a conference call connecting San Diego with four locations in New York and Los Angeles that linked dozens of attorneys and bond specialists, the city closed the long-planned sale to underwriter Merrill Lynch.
“One of the last questions the underwriters and their attorneys asked before the deal closed was, ‘Is there any new litigation?’ and we could answer no,” Girard said.
Following a final round of questions that satisfied all the representatives, the bond sale closed. Paul Webber, the city’s hired bond lawyer from Orrick Herrington
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