Inglewood Mayor Says City Ready for the NFL

The city of Inglewood is celebrating the NFL decision to allow Rams owner Stan Kroenke to move his team from St. Louis, Missouri, to Los Angeles starting this fall.

That will put the Rams in the Coliseum, or perhaps another stadium in greater L.A. for a few years while a new home for the team is built in Inglewood.

Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts tells KCRW that residents are “overwhelmingly 100 percent ecstatic.”

Asked how people can be sure the roughly $2 billion behemoth stadium planned for Inglewood is in the best interests of the city, and not just developers, Butts called that “an insane question.” He said only a few residents oppose the development, and that the traffic impact would be minimal compared with what his city saw in its Hollywood Park Race Track heyday.

“When the Lakers left to go to Staples (Center) and the racetrack crowds dwindled from 40,000 to 1,000, we lost our mojo, lost our identity,” Butts said. “But we came back with the Forum,” which he calls the No. 1 concert venue in California. And to attract the Rams, he says, “We put together a project that was pretty compelling obviously for the ownership.”

Butts says that if El Niño storms delay construction as expected, the stadium might not be ready until the 2019 football season.

Listen to the full interview with KCRW’s Steve Chiotakis below: