John Moores wants NFL football team in Anaheim

San Diego — Papers in Los Angeles and Orange County are full of news that Padres owner John Moores is scouting about for a new stadium in Anaheim. Not for the Padres, but for a National Football League expansion team that Moores hopes to bring to the Mickey Mouse city. According to reports in both the L.A. Times and the Orange County Register, Moores has approached the NFL about a new team for Anaheim and has even offered to put up most of the money for a new stadium. "I think Moores is serious about being an NFL owner, and I think Moores is serious about looking at Anaheim," Anaheim mayor Tom Daly told the Times a week ago Tuesday. "Are we recruiting any existing teams? The answer is no," Daly said. "That could change." According to the reports, Moores is going over a list of prospective stadium sites, including one close to the Disney-owned Arrowhead Pond, where the company's hockey team plays. "If we have a person who is truly serious about owning an NFL team and wants to finance a stadium in Anaheim and bring a team here, then I think there are many possibilities available," Daly is quoted as saying. The Times concludes: "While it is unlikely Moores could complete plans for stadium design and construction in less than a month, he is an ideal owner for the NFL, which forbids corporate ownership but embraces business mavericks." An NFL spokesman confirmed that Moores had been talking to the league but would offer no details. Despite all the talk in L.A., the Union-Tribune has remained silent on the matter, apparently hoping not to stir up new controversy about Moores and his taxpayer-financed sweetheart deal to build a baseball stadium in downtown San Diego ... A sportswriter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal wants the Padres to sell off its Vegas farm team, the Stars. "As far as I'm concerned, the Stars can't change their affiliation fast enough," writes Joe Hawk. "To use the parlance of our Jerry Springer-ized culture, they need to kick the San Diego Padres to the curb. Without so much as a goodbye handshake." Hawk's beef: not enough seasoned players. "In the case of the undermanned Stars, what additions grudgingly allowed this season by the Padres came too little, too late."

Anchors Away

Two more TV anchor types are said to be heading to San Diego. Michael Tuck, once the bane of San Diego's then-police chief, now sheriff, Bill Kolender, has been fired from his longtime gig at KCBS in L.A. He told the L.A. Times he's coming back down the coast to his old stomping grounds. Back in 1991, a report by the state attorney general alleged that a rogue narcotics unit working out of SDPD had sex with informants, handed out drugs, mixed up evidence, and launched a drug investigation into Tuck, who was a frequent critic of the department's policies and practices under Kolender. The anchorman was never charged with wrongdoing, though the Union-Tribune reported that "vice detectives had investigated allegations that Tuck dated an underage girl and brought her into a bar"... Pittsburgh's Estha Trouw is said to be leaving her weekend anchor beat at WPXI and heading here too.

Lobbyists at Peace

San Diego's own Democratic state senator Steve Peace is making waves once again. A close friend of the electric utility lobby, Peace has now gone to bat for the giant 3M Company, maker of reflectorized license plates. So reports Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters. Peace has introduced SB 698 to "require that every license plate on every vehicle in California -- that's upwards of 50 million plates in all -- be replaced by newly designed reflectorized plates by 2005. A motorist could keep his old plates only if he paid a hefty extra registration fee." Walters says the action would cost state motorists $98 million, "a considerable chunk of which would go to 3M." Concludes Walters: "Not surprisingly, the Legislature is so far sanctioning this money grab in response to lobbying pressure."... Other San Diego legislators were featured in a San Francisco Examiner story last week about $1000-a-plate political fundraisers. "Notice how everybody makes the rounds of all the fundraisers," Senator Dede Alpert (D-Coronado) told the paper. "Naturally, we try to keep them close to the state capitol."

Contributor: Matt Potter