IRVING, Texas – The NFL will hold a special meeting on the Los Angeles relocation situation in January with members of the league’s influential Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities pushing for a vote at that time on which team or teams could move into the nation’s second largest market.

On the eve of league meetings in suburban Dallas on Wednesday, allies of Rams owner Stan Kroenke have begun lobbying for a deal in which the Chargers would join the Rams in playing at a $1.86 billion stadium in Inglewood.

League owners expect Kroenke and his allies to begin pitching at the Four Seasons resort a proposal in which a second team relocating to Inglewood would be an equal partner with the Rams.

The latest moves come on the same day Kroenke met with Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon at Rams Park. Kroenke, who has avoided meeting with supporters of a $1 billion downtown St. Louis stadium, has been encouraged in recent weeks by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to begin communicating with Nixon and Dave Peacock, the former Anheuser-Busch executive who is co-chairman of a stadium task force set up by Nixon.

While Los Angeles committee members are determined to hold a January vote on which team or teams relocate, other owners are pushing for a vote to be pushed back to late February or March.

Chargers owner Dean Spanos and Mark Davis of the Raiders are committed to building a $1.75 billion stadium in Carson. Both Kroenke and the Spanos-Davis partnership are believed to have the nine votes needed to block a team from relocating. Under NFL rules, teams seeking to relocate need the approval of three-quarters of the league’s 32 owners.

Houston and Dallas have been mentioned as possible sites for the January meeting.

While there have been hints in recent weeks that the NFL’s more-than-20-year journey back to the Los Angeles-Orange County market could extend into the spring – if not beyond – Tuesday’s developments created a renewed optimism a relocation decision is within reach.

“Dallas is the start of the fourth quarter,” said Marc Ganis, a sports business consultant who was involved in the Raiders and Rams relocation after the 1994 season. “Dallas is the start of the beginning of the end of the game.”

NFL officials said a vote on relocation will not be scheduled during meetings Wednesday. Neither will a relocation fee be set for franchises moving into the Los Angeles-Orange County market.

There will, however, be plenty of lobbying and arm-twisting. Efforts on behalf of a stadium in Carson backed by the Chargers and Raiders have been joined behind the scenes in recent weeks by Disney chief Robert Iger. Iger agreed last month to be the chairman of Carson Holdings, the group behind the Carson project, if the league approves the Chargers’ and/or Raiders’ relocation.

But the key to the relocation remains whether the St. Louis task force can convince Kroenke or at least enough NFL owners that the downtown stadium is a viable option.

Several league owners have said it would be extremely difficult for Kroenke to win relocation approval with a viable option in his current market.

“There’s going to be a series of inflection points from here on,” Ganis said. “Those will indicate which way this is headed. And we’re getting to the more important inflection points. Does St. Louis show up or not? That’s a major inflection point. If it does, the final resolution becomes self-evident. It becomes self-evident that the answer (to who is relocating to Los Angeles) is not the Rams.”

The St. Louis project, however, is far from a slam dunk. The task force has presented a term sheet to the league for a proposed outdoor stadium on the city’s waterfront just north of downtown. The St. Louis term sheet, however, continues to evolve with questions emerging about whether some funding sources are still available and about potential increases in the project’s budget.

Tuesday’s developments are a further indication of the amount of votes Spanos and Davis and their allies have secured for the Carson project, league employees said. While the Carson project does not have the 24 votes needed for relocation, Spanos and Davis are believed to be significantly closer to the figure than Kroenke.

The latest pitch from Kroenke’s allies is a significant departure from how he earlier viewed a second team in Inglewood.

During an August NFL meeting on the Los Angeles situation in suburban Chicago, Kroenke was asked during his presentation on the Inglewood project by Chicago Bears chairman George McCaskey if the stadium could host two franchises. Yes, Kroenke replied, a lease agreement with a second team could be drawn up very quickly.

Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com