San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith has had legendary faceoffs with some of the region’s more cantankerous political figures: his predecessor Michael Aguirre, former Mayor Bob Filner, attorney Cory Briggs.

Add Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani to the list.

Fabiani’s aggressive advocacy for a Chargers’ move to Los Angeles and his slashing denunciations of San Diego’s efforts to keep them here certainly has made the stadium derby entertaining. He’s made legitimate points, but his attacks on Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s leadership and competence has ratcheted up the tension.

Fabiani’s more recent broadsides have been aimed at what he calls “the city’s misbegotten legal strategy.” He says San Diego’s recently adopted plan to fast-track an environmental review for a December or January election can’t be done properly and doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.


To Goldsmith, them’s fightin’ words.

The city attorney responded publicly in his methodical fashion, laying out his case for why what Fabiani says isn’t so. Along the way, he took out a verbal blow torch, deriding Fabiani as a “mouthpiece” only interested in undermining San Diego’s efforts. He also questioned whether Fabiani had the chops to even discuss the matter at hand.

“Mark Fabiani wouldn’t known an Environmental Impact Report if he stumbled over it,” Goldsmith told Darren Smith on The Mighty 1090 on Wednesday.

It didn’t use to be this way. In March, when the city and county announced funding to pay for outside hired guns to help them negotiate a stadium deal with the Chargers, Fabiani was conspicuous in his praise of Goldsmith’s involvement — when he had little good to say about anybody else on that side of the table.


Then Goldsmith raised some eyebrows when it was learned that he had private conversations with the Chargers about getting negotiations going before the mayor’s stadium task force was done with its work.

That seems long ago. Goldsmith is a staunch defender of the EIR plan pushed by Faulconer. Not only is it on solid legal ground and paves the way for a stadium vote, Goldsmith said, but it shows the NFL San Diego is making progress in its effort. And he relished the notion that it might upend Fabiani’s strategy to portray San Diego as dysfunctional on the stadium front.

“It’s his worst nightmare that we have our act together,” he told Smith.

Who’s on first?

A growing number of people don’t think the Chargers are going to stick around here much longer.


Among the most adamant for some time has been Scott Lewis, editor-in-chief of the Voice of San Diego, who on Twitter Wednesday said “I was first to say Chargers were done with San Diego.”

I haven’t been keeping score, but I’m glad to credit Scott with I-told-you-so bragging rights — at least in this latest episode of the Chargers-L.A. soap opera.

It seems ancient history but in 2002 then-L.A. Times columnist T.J. Simers made his prediction: “The Chargers will leave San Diego, move into their Carson training camp facility, which they are already contracted to begin using this summer, and will kick off the 2004 season here — in a temporary site such as the Coliseum.”

You ask me, the statute of limitations has run out on that one. Simers went on to predict the Chargers’ exit on and off for much of the next decade. It reminded me of a doom-and-gloom business writer who a colleague once said had predicted seven of the last three recessions.


In any event, Scott might want keep it vague about exactly when the Chargers will leave.

Tweet of the Week

Goes to Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (@LorenaSGonzalez) reacting to a headline in the Huffington Post: “How do you elect a woman? Give her a famous husband.”

Gonzalez: “This article is interesting, correct even. But the headline makes me want to puke.”