49ers may open stadium without a name

Even with the 49ers being one of sports' hottest franchises right now, they just might open their $1.2 billion Santa Clara stadium in 2014 without a naming-rights deal that would pay a big chunk of the construction bill.

"We don't have anything in the pipeline," team spokesman Bob Lange told us just before the team jetted off to Atlanta for Sunday's NFC championship game. But he quickly added, "It's not a necessity. ... A number of other stadiums have opened without a naming-rights partner."

True, says former 49ers executive Andy Dolich. But given all the excitement that the team has created on the field and the buzz it has generated over the stadium, "There should be many interested corporate entities in the pipeline."

According to Forbes Magazine, 22 of 32 NFL teams have stadiums with a corporate name attached - the most lucrative deal being the $400 million that MetLife paid to put its name on the home of the New York Giants and Jets.

On the other hand, there's Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who opened Cowboys Stadium in 2009 but is still holding out for bigger moniker money than he's been offered so far.

The 49ers are hoping to get something like $330 million for their stadium's naming rights.

Terry Burton, a naming-rights expert from Detroit, says the country is awash with pro and college tagging deals - worth an estimated $25 billion annually - and that the Niners should take their time to get the right one.

After all, nobody wants to end up with the wrong partner - like the Houston Astros, whose ballpark opened in 2000 as Enron Field.

Friendly fire: A major split has developed between San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and his longtime mentor and ally, Rose Pak.

Their once-warm friendship has grown chilly in recent months - the latest temperature drop being the fight over who should take Supervisor Carmen Chu's seat if, as expected, the mayor names her to replace Phil Ting as city assessor.

In this drama, ethnic politics are playing a key role. For years, the supervisor's seat in the heavily Asian American District Four has been held by a Chinese American - and Pak wants it to stay that way.

Lee, however, is hearing from advisers that there are plenty of Chinese Americans in city positions already - and that it's time to put a white woman (of whom there are none on the board) into the mix.

The white woman Lee's people have in mind is Police Commissioner Susan Loftus. She's backed both by state Attorney General Kamala Harris, the former DA here, and major mayoral moneyman Ron Conway - whom Pak can't stand.

Her opposition doesn't bother Lee's advisers, many of them holdovers from former Mayor Gavin Newsom's time, who have been out to curb Pak's influence since Day One.

Pak's candidate for the seat had been a longtime friend, Malcolm Yeung of the Chinatown Community Development Center, who strongly backed Lee's mayoral run in 2011.

However, Yeung recently pulled his hat out of the ring - leaving the Pak crew without a candidate.

"But then," Pak said acidly, "who wants to have the seat, if it means having to carry the mayor's water all the time?"

Gangland: The two groups of thugs tagged by Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan as being responsible for most of the city's violent crime aren't mainly interested in being tops in the drug trade or even in controlling large chunks of turf.

"They are all about who is the toughest guy on the block," said John Keene, Alameda County's deputy chief probation officer.

The groups Jordan blamed for "about 90 percent" of Oakland's violence in recent months - a figure the Police Department later conceded was overstated - are called Money Team and the Case Gang. They stage robberies and engineer credit-card fraud schemes, but most of what they do is "just crazy machismo crap," Keene said.

"And that is what people are having trouble wrapping their heads around."

They're so pointlessly violent, Keene said, that more-established gangs are laying low while they shoot it out.

One problem the cops are having, said Keene, is that there's no real leadership in either group.

"It used to be you could sit down with one or two guys and work out a deal for all the way down to the shorties," Keene said. "Not anymore.

"They just randomly shoot up an area in the middle of the day," Keene said. "It's down to fighting over ex-girlfriends."

On the waterfront: A fourth-floor faucet left open overnight may have totaled Oakland Unified School District headquarters.

When an absent-minded janitor forgot to turn off the spigot in a utility room Jan. 7, water ran unchecked for eight hours - leading to a flood that buckled floors and caused some ceilings to collapse.

The 150 administrators and other staffers, from the superintendent on down, have been forced from the four-story building on Second Avenue near Lake Merritt. They've been scattered to makeshift offices at school sites throughout the district while a full damage assessment is conducted.

District spokesman Troy Flint said the bill was likely to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

With a $250,000 insurance deductible, some in the district doubt whether the 94-year-old building is worth saving.