“We had a lot of positive feedback from a number of owners as well as league staff,” he said. “I think they were impressed by the … speed with which we were able to overcome a lot of hurdles.”

As for why he waited until November of 2014 to announce his task force, Nixon just said he needed to do it in time for the Legislature’s 2015 session, and before the Rams declared that they would go year-to-year at the Edward Jones Dome, that January.

“What I wanted to do was to make sure we had a preliminary plan so I could get that in front of the public and the Legislature at the beginning of the legislative session,” he said. “I knew folks would want to look at it, and have discussions about it.”

Votes by the public in St. Louis or the Legislature in Jefferson City weren’t legally necessary, he maintained. And he wasn’t about to add them onto a project “already as complicated and challenging as this one was,” he said.

Moreover, he called the NFL’s worries about a hostile state Legislature “irrelevant.”

“If the best excuse they can come up with is some subsequent legislator might vote yes or no on a bill — they can do that on anything,” he said.