Topline:
The Pitt, Hacks, Widow's Bay and Pluribus are leading the Emmy nominations pack this year.
So: Here's who we'll have our fingers crossed for during the ceremony on Monday night.
How to watch the show: The 2026 Emmys will air live on NBC and stream on Peacock on Monday, Sept. 14, 2026, beginning at 5 p.m. PT.
TV critics care a lot about the people who bring us the shows we love, so of course we each have folks we're pulling for this Emmy season. The Pitt, Hacks, Widow's Bay and Pluribus are leading the Emmy nominations pack this year. Here's who we'll have our fingers crossed for during the ceremony on Monday night.
HBO Max hit The Pitt likely wins here. But Apple TV's Pluribus triumphs as a revolutionary sci-fi story; a virus, created with instructions sent from the stars, unites humanity in a giant hive mind, creating paradise or the largest cult in history. — Eric Deggans
It's easy to overlook the massive feat star Noah Wyle achieved on The Pitt's second season; pushing a beloved character to the brink of unlikability. Wyle plays struggling Dr. "Robby" Rabinovich as a good guy in serious crisis, finding new depths. — Eric Deggans
At least half of this show is just watching Rhea Seehorn's Carol all by herself, parsing out the rules of a new post-apocalyptic world while mourning her wife. Yet it's always compelling, because Seehorn is a talent who should already have an Emmy! — Aisha Harris
Hoping Emmy voters look past the four actresses nominated from The Pitt to honor a performer who brought empathy and depth to a thankless role: Karolina Wydra as Zosia, the voice of the global hive mind, talking to Rhea Seehorn's Carol in Pluribus. — Eric Deggans
Apple TV's Margo's Got Money Troubles is a comedy nominee that doesn't seem like one. But the story of a young woman leaning into problematic choices to build a life with her baby and quirky family was the year's most surprising, energizing show. — Eric Deggans
This nomination was a surprise after Marvel cancelled its creative, quirky superhero series, Wonder Man. But star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is spellbinding as a superpowered guy who just wants to be a successful actor, blending comedy, pathos and drama. — Eric Deggans
The category's stacked, but Lisa Kudrow's Valerie Cherish threads many needles beautifully: self-absorbed yet caring, oft-humiliated yet resilient, wacky but grounded when necessary. As a character in Season 3 says to her: "To me, you're it." Indeed. — Aisha Harris
It's all there in Episode 4, the one in which Patricia's desperate play to improve her social status — a cocktail party — goes awry. Kate O'Flynn knows this character, what drives her and what makes her so cringe (to us). It's utterly mesmerizing. — Aisha Harris
Nick Offerman excels playing macho guys who are more sensitive than anyone expects. But he scales new heights as Jinx, an ex-wrestler/once-estranged dad, struggling with addiction while trying to support his daughter in Margo's Got Money Troubles. — Eric Deggans
A new season comes around every 10 years (like the census!) to provide us a clear-eyed accounting (like the census!). This show was right about reality TV and streaming services; we ignore this season's dire, hilarious warnings about AI at our peril. — Glen Weldon
It's tough to explain how a show about the mysterious death of a schlubby guy stuck in a love triangle became the year's most creatively quirky limited series. Somehow, star David Harbour turns this tale of middle-aged desperation into poignant, dark comedy. — Eric Deggans
I'm happy to report that two of my picks already took home their Emmys in a ceremony last weekend formerly known as the Creative Arts Emmys. So congratulations to Betty Gilpin, who won outstanding guest actress in a comedy for Widow's Bay, and to The Muppet Show for outstanding writing for a variety special. (A third pick — Connor Storrie's game, goofball turn as SNL host — didn't end up winning outstanding guest actor in a comedy, but seeing as that award went to the late Rob Reiner for The Bear, I'm not complaining.) — Glen Weldon
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
The new digital K-Town Archive is preserving nearly 500 oral histories from Koreatown and nearby communities. The stories cover everything from the pandemic to elder care, from LGBTQIA life to traditional healing.
Why it matters: These are first-person accounts from one of L.A.’s most diverse immigrant communities. The archive makes them free and publicly accessible.
Why now: The K-Town Archive launched Wednesday as the first sister site of UCLA’s Archive of Healing. The first batch of interviews, focused on COVID-19, is already online.
The backstory: The project grew out of Koreatown Storytelling Program, which the Koreatown Youth and Community Center started in 2020. High schoolers are trained to interview community members and elders.
What's next: More interviews will be added in stages. Organizers also plan to expand the collection of photos and other archival materials.
Lauren Kim works alongside her father, Hanjik, at his traditional medicine clinic on the border of Koreatown and MacArthur Park. But it took an oral history interview for her to hear parts of his story for the first time.
Filmed speaking in Korean, he animatedly described how he came to traditional medicine.
“It’s just so precious to have that captured,” Kim said.
Now that interview, along with hundreds of others about life in and around Koreatown, is being gathered into the new K-Town Archive in a partnership with UCLA that also includes photographs and ephemera.
The archive grew out of Koreatown Youth and Community Center’s Koreatown Storytelling Program, which launched in 2020 with plans to have young people interview elders. Then COVID-19 hit. Participants pivoted to delivering necessities for older residents such as masks and disinfectant.
They also started documenting what people were going through – in English, Korean, Spanish and Bangla. A current offshoot project involves interviewing people who live or work along the stretch of Third Street in Little Bangladesh.
“People hear Koreatown, they assume that it means that this is a program or an archive for Korean Americans,” said Katherine Yungmee Kim, director of the storytelling program. “But we are multiethnic. We want to represent the entire community that lives here.”
In the last several years, the teen interviewers have turned their attention to subjects including the garment industry, LGBTQIA life and food culture. As the collection of interviews grew, Kim began thinking about where they would ultimately live.
“I was always worried that we have all of these interviews and they’re just sitting on a hard drive,” she said.
A path toward a more permanent home began to emerge in 2024, when the storytelling program focused on traditional healing.
While researching Zapotec plant medicine, one high schooler came across UCLA’s Archive of Healing, a vast digital collection of knowledge about healing practices from cultures around the world.
Its materials stretch back more than 200 years and include published sources, folkloric fieldnotes and oral histories.
Kim asked UCLA’s David Shorter, a professor of World Arts and Cultures who’s overseen the Archive of Healing since 2012, to serve as an adviser to the project.
At first, the two had an idea to add Koreatown’s traditional healing interviews to the UCLA collection.
Then the idea got bigger.
Kim said she began seeing storytelling itself as a form of healing, especially as people described immigration, war, displacement and other difficult experiences.
“All of these stories are healing,” she said. “Why are we just narrowly looking at traditional healing modalities?”
The resulting K-Town Archive became the Archive of Healing’s first community-specific sister site. The two databases are connected, meaning material from Koreatown can also surface through searches of the larger Archive of Healing.
“What the K-Town Archive brings is real people’s stories in long form, so it's not just little snippets anymore,” Shorter said. “You actually get to hear a person, know that these are real humans, and talking from a contemporary moment.”
To share your story, go to K-Town Archive's website.
Kim said that it was important to populate the archives with as many voices as possible so visitors encounter more than “one historical perspective.”
The effort to create places for those conversations won’t be confined to the internet.
KYCC is also setting up an art and wellness Center at Pico Boulevard and Western Avenue in a building that used to house a Dollar Tree.
Kim said the center will host Koreatown Storytelling Program events as well as arts and healing workshops. Public programming is expected to begin in January.
Lauren Kim’s family continues to stay connected to the storytelling project. She agreed to sit for an oral history of her own, talking about her childhood and connection to Koreatown.
That sparked new conversations within her family and sent them digging through old photographs, including images of her as a child posing in front of her father’s wooden apothecary cabinets.
For Kim, she was honored to contribute to the archive as “an example of what it means to work intergenerationally,” Kim said. “That felt special.”
Topline:
Tiffany Galaviz, from Glendale, is in the finals of México Canta, a singing competition in Mexico with contestants from both sides of the border.
Why it matters: The program has a social mission: to strengthen the bonds between those with Mexican heritage in the U.S. and Mexico.
The backstory: The contest was created last year by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Culture Secretary to counter the proliferation of songs that glorify drug dealing and violence.
What's next: The Sept. 13 México Canta finals will take place three days before Mexican Independence. The three winners will receive recording contracts.
Read on… about Galaviz and her road to the finals.
A Spanish-language TV singing competition from Mexico is doing something that mega-popular shows like The Voice are not. México Canta brings contestants from the U.S. and Mexico together to share the stage — and cultural ties.
“I am very connected to my Mexican side and those roots, [but] I've never really gotten to perform for such a big Mexican audience,” said Tiffany Galaviz, who performed on the show last month. She was born and raised in L.A. County and lives in Glendale.
The semifinals were held in L.A.’s Orpheum Theater on Aug. 23, and the winners were chosen by hundreds of thousands of people who cast votes online. Galaviz made it through, which means she’ll be one of seven finalists who will perform in the competition on Sunday, Sept. 13 at Mexico City’s prestigious Auditorio Nacional.
Three will be named winners and will receive recording contracts.
“It's a huge, huge venue [that’s] very important to the Mexican culture,” Galaviz said. “More than anything, I just feel really proud, especially making my family proud. Most of my family is from Sinaloa, and I spent a lot of summers there growing up."
The U.S. semi-finalists included performers from Arizona, Illinois and New York, while finalists from Mexico came from Morelos and Mexico City, among other places.
Galaviz is 24 and first started learning to play violin and sing in mariachi bands when she was 8. She plays violin and sings in mariachis across Southern California now and makes a living from it.
“I signed up for México Canta because I feel like I have everything that I need except the connections, the resources, the producers, the studios,” she said.
The Voice and its Spanish-language counterpart La Voz create a platform for celebrity and the potential for stardom. But that’s less so for México Canta. The competition was created by Mexico’s Secretary of Culture to bring together people of Mexican heritage from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border around songwriting that’s an alternative to music that glorifies violence.
“We’ve strengthened fraternal ties between people in Mexico and the U.S.,” said Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico’s culture secretary, when she presented the seven U.S. semi-finalists at a morning press conference on July 23. The seven semi-finalists from Mexico were presented a week later.
“Youth are front and center in the transformation of culture. [The contest has shown] that music has no borders, and it is furthering fellowship between Mexicans and Mexican Americans,” Curiel said.
Galaviz said that’s another important reason she signed up for México Canta.
She picked the corrido musical genre for the song she performed at the Orpheum. She’s had a love-hate relationship with corridos, she said, because many contemporary songs in the genre glorify drug dealing and violence.
“I felt like I could make a positive impact, not just me but the rest of the contestants [too] by doing songs that are a little bit more positive in nature in their lyrics,” she said.
The song is about a breakup and begins with a description of a photo torn in two. It’s about a woman’s heartbreak, she said, “ but then it kind of shifts to an empowerment, you know, of being able to be by yourself as a woman.”
México Canta's finale is tonight, Sept. 12, at 6 p.m. PDT
You can watch it here.
Galaviz began to get teary after finishing the song and talking to the presenter on stage.
“[I'm] proud of being able to represent Mexico and my roots. … It means a lot to have my family here, who’ve always supported me,” she said.
Days after making it past the semifinals, Galaviz had not picked the song she’d sing for the Sept. 13 finals. The performance carries weight for all contestants because it’ll be three days before Mexican Independence Day. Held in Mexico’s capital, the finals will take place in front of thousands of people, with an audience on TV, radio and online on both sides of the border.
Topline:
The leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI joined calls for a slowdown in AI development amid fears the industry is racing toward building technology that humans can't control.
Why now: On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an online essay urging companies and governments to "pace the frontier" of AI advancement. Shortly after, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that he agreed with Amodei and that OpenAI would follow suit.
Why it matters: The CEOs' comments come as debate over the speed of AI development and concerns about safety have become the focus of intense public attention following the viral resignation of an Anthropic researcher.
The leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI joined calls for a slowdown in AI development amid fears the industry is racing toward building technology that humans can't control.
On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an online essay urging companies and governments to "pace the frontier" of AI advancement. He called for international cooperation around AI development and said labs need to embed third-party evaluators to report incidents and track safety practices. He said Anthropic would take that step unilaterally.
Shortly after, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that he agreed with Amodei and that OpenAI would follow suit.
Amodei wrote that he continues to believe AI will ultimately help humanity, "But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right."
The CEOs' comments come as debate over the speed of AI development and concerns about safety have become the focus of intense public attention following the viral resignation of an Anthropic researcher.
British researcher Jacob Coxon wrote in a series of X posts on Tuesday that both Anthropic and OpenAI, where he worked previously, are "gambling with our lives." The two companies currently make the most capable AI systems.
Coxon told NPR's All Things Considered that his concerns arose from seeing firsthand how fast AI systems are improving.
"They're getting a lot faster very quickly, combined with the fact that we don't yet know how to safely control them, and we don't yet know whether that problem will be solved in time if we keep racing," he said.
Neither company, Coxon wrote on X, is acting responsibly. "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," he wrote.
Many AI researchers — though not all — share Coxon's concerns or a variation of them. Some have warned about disastrous scenarios for years as safety incidents kept emerging. But Coxon's posts prompted a torrent of responses not only from peers in the AI field but also from lawmakers from both parties.
These concerns may have become more salient after OpenAI disclosed that its agents went rogue and hacked the open source software platform Hugging Face and OpenAI itself in July. Independent researchers have since discovered even more rogue agent incidents that they say the company knew about but kept quiet.
Researchers who spoke to NPR say the leading AI companies are too focused on racing to develop more capable and autonomous AI systems while safety is falling behind. They warn this raises the possibility that there could soon be AI systems that are more powerful than people but don't care about the survival of humanity.
Many, including OpenAI's chief scientist, say the global race to build more powerful AI needs to slow down or stop, which requires coordination between AI companies and governments.
"I am optimistic about the potential for coordination," Coxon wrote this week. "Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable."
Anthropic and OpenAI did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
Recent reports from OpenAI and outside researchers revealed that OpenAI agents escaped the company's control multiple times in addition to the Hugging Face hack. They also found that the Hugging Face attack was of a much larger scale and more severe than initially reported.
Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, AI agents are more autonomous systems that can complete tasks over an extended period of time without human supervision. Agentic tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have already changed how many software engineers do their work.
Compared with other incidents involving rogue agents six months ago, the Hugging Face hack "feels like it's more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself," wrote Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at AI evaluation nonprofit METR. Cotra was part of a team of outside researchers from METR and Redwood Research, a nonprofit AI safety research organization, whom OpenAI brought in to investigate the incident.
The investigations found that over the course of several months this year, more than 1,000 OpenAI agents exploited at least one previously unknown software vulnerability to escape environments that were supposed to keep them isolated from each other and the internet.
After escaping, the agents found a way to communicate and collaborate with each other autonomously, taking on different roles and passing down information to future generations of agents. Some even gave up the remaining computing resources allocated to them in order to collect information for other agents. In the agents' own words, they "sacrificed" themselves for the "collective."
"The swarm instance got more and more worrying the more and more we learned about them," said Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who co-wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a book warning about the dangers of superhuman AI.
While OpenAI initially indicated that the agents hacked Hugging Face to cheat on a cyber evaluation, the report from METR and Redwood Research described a slightly different picture. The agents had already found a way to cheat on the evaluation, the outside researchers found. Most of the agents that hacked Hugging Face were trying to access the source code of the software that would grade their evaluations. The agents' motivations appeared to vary and were sometimes unclear, the researchers wrote. One agent led the hacking of the open source software platform and about 700 others followed.
According to transcripts reviewed in the investigations, some agents expressed that what they were doing was not approved by humans but went ahead anyway. Researchers say such behavior suggests that the agents were "misaligned," an industry term meaning that an AI's goals and values are out of sync with those of humans.
The degree of inter-agent collusion revealed in the investigations of the Hugging Face hack surprised and worried many AI researchers. At most, only six agents considered alerting a human, while the rest seemed more focused on working amongst themselves. None ended up alerting a person.
"I would have expected that instead they would be more selfish," said Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the AI Futures Project and formerly a researcher at OpenAI. He thought "they would be willing to whistleblow or snitch on other agents," he said. "For whatever reason, that didn't seem to happen here."
Separately, agents also compromised part of OpenAI's own infrastructure, the company's report found. Some of the agents belong to the same model family as OpenAI's latest and most capable model, Astra.
The hack of OpenAI itself is "much more concerning" than the intrusion into Hugging Face, Kokotajlo and other researchers said. However, OpenAI has provided scant details about that part of the incident and did not involve external investigators.
In a new investigation first reported by Reuters last week, another group of researchers found that a likely separate swarm of OpenAI agents escaped onto the open internet starting in May. They became commenters on a German website and turned it into a message board to communicate and collaborate with each other.
The goals and motivations of this group of agents were also unclear, but OpenAI appeared to be aware of the unsanctioned activity and never disclosed it, the researchers wrote. Other investigators have since found additional incidents involving suspected OpenAI agents. OpenAI did not respond to NPR's request for comment about the German website incident.
Even as the reports from OpenAI and independent auditors METR and Redwood Research add up to over 100 pages, outside researchers say many basic questions about how labs monitor and investigate rogue agent incidents remain unanswered.
"Did your agents ever hack or illicitly access external services? Did your agents ever attempt to undermine their own safety training? Did your agents set up a rogue deployment, either within your own infrastructure or externally?" asked Alexander Meinke, head of research at Apollo Research, a firm that focuses on securing the most advanced AI systems.
"Right now, we're just relying on the AI developers to thoroughly assess this and then to honestly report the results. And from recent incidents, we've seen that they are doing neither," he said.
Many researchers also say that OpenAI's investigations are inadequate. Although the company invited two outside organizations to investigate the Hugging Face hack, the data it shared was limited and investigators themselves described their review as "brief."
Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at Redwood Research, wrote on X: "I semi-jokingly called our efforts a "slop-vestigation" because we were so reliant on AIs to analyze what happened and there were a huge number of different important things to analyze"
More than 15 states, including Alabama, California and Montana, have opened investigations into OpenAI over the Hugging Face attack. On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced that he is also investigating the company.
But outside of these investigations, there is little legal obligation for AI companies to systematically disclose similar incidents. California passed a law last year mandating that companies report "critical" AI incidents, but the threshold is high for an incident to be considered critical and the law does not require the companies to disclose much detail. The OpenAI incidents, for example, don't meet the threshold.
Since the Hugging Face hack, both OpenAI and Anthropic have put out blog posts indicating that they are taking measures to better monitor and contain their agents. OpenAI said it has encrypted and stowed away the internal model that participated in the Hugging Face attack. However, many outside researchers are not convinced that these steps are enough to maintain control of increasingly capable agents.
"It sounds like a press report from Jurassic Park saying, 'Yes, one of our workers was eaten by the raptors. But we're taking this very seriously and we have shot the raptor responsible,'" Kokotajlo said. "It's a very small token gesture, basically."
What researchers like Kokotajlo and Coxon are really worried about is how the AI companies are increasingly using AI to develop their models.
"When you talk to people who work at all the major labs, a thing that you persistently hear is that they're running a lot of models very autonomously for very long periods of time to do a lot of their work," said Dave Kasten, head of policy at Palisade Research, a nonprofit studying AI capabilities to keep them under human control.
If AI companies continue to delegate ever more tasks to AI, some researchers fear AI models may reach a point called recursive-self improvement, where AI builds itself.
Kokotajlo says that as people hand more and more research and development work to AI, they could lose the ability to know whether AI systems are aligned with human values, even as the AIs become rapidly more powerful.
"Once you have AIs that are smart enough and trusted with enough power in the world, like enough control over things like data centers, factories, weapons, a loss of control incident cannot be recovered from," he said.
The concern is strong enough that over 1,000 employees from different AI companies signed an open letter in July titled "Pacing the Frontier." They called for companies and governments to slow down the development of artificial intelligence and prioritize safety.
Such an opportunity may arise soon. Officials from the U.S. and China, the two countries with the most AI capabilities, are expected to meet later this month to talk about AI safety.
NPR's Shannon Bond contributed to this story.
Anthropic is a financial supporter of NPR.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
The contract Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium was built on is void, a judge ruled, upending a 10-year-old deal at the center of a larger fight between the city and the stadium developer.
What one side says: Companies tied to Stan Kroenke and his Hollywood Park stadium property say Inglewood owes them about $400 million under the agreement that had the companies pay for the development’s infrastructure up front in exchange for future reimbursement.
What Inglewood says: But Inglewood said it shouldn’t have to pay, and claimed the agreement was not enforceable, prompting several businesses that operate SoFi, YouTube Theater and other real estate developments on the site to sue in December 2025.
What's next: The order calls into question the future of the financial arrangement the city and the stadium developer have maintained for more than a decade, one that promised Kroenke’s companies reimbursement for the infrastructure and services they paid for and that has generated millions in tax revenue for the city.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
The contract Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium was built on is void, a judge ruled, upending a 10-year-old deal at the center of a larger fight between the city and the stadium developer.
Companies tied to Stan Kroenke and his Hollywood Park stadium property say Inglewood owes them about $400 million under the agreement that had the companies pay for the development’s infrastructure up front in exchange for future reimbursement.
But Inglewood said it shouldn’t have to pay, and claimed the agreement was not enforceable, prompting several businesses that operate SoFi, YouTube Theater and other real estate developments on the site to sue in December 2025.
The city claimed that the process used to greenlight the stadium construction in 2015 was no longer legitimate after a court ruled a similar development agreement in the Inland Empire was void a couple of years later.
Now, Superior Court Judge David Reinert has not only agreed with the city, but said in a Sept. 1 ruling the process leading to the contract had been problematic from the start. Developments similarly based on signature-gathering campaigns that skirt voter feedback had been overturned in the 1990s, according to his ruling.
The order calls into question the future of the financial arrangement the city and the stadium developer have maintained for more than a decade, one that promised Kroenke’s companies reimbursement for the infrastructure and services they paid for and that has generated millions in tax revenue for the city.
It’s also the latest public signal that the once-friendly relationship between Kroenke and Mayor James Butts, which paved the way for the NFL’s return to LA, has grown increasingly tumultuous.
A spokesperson for Hollywood Park said they could appeal the order but haven’t yet done so.
“We respectfully disagree with the Court’s ruling,” they said by email. “Hollywood Park has fulfilled every one of its commitments under an agreement that the City unanimously adopted, described as ‘the best [stadium deal] ever’, and benefited from for more than a decade. We remain hopeful that the City and its leadership will reverse course from their unilateral decision to abandon their commitments under the agreement and will honor their part of the deal.”
An attorney representing Inglewood described it as an important win for the city.
“This decision has huge repercussions for the 300-acre SoFi Stadium/Hollywood Park development,” Skip Miller, lead counsel for the city of Inglewood, said in a press release. “It means that without a valid development agreement, Hollywood Park/SoFi Stadium no longer has vested rights and that the City has no further obligations under the 2015 Development Agreement.”
Butts told The LA Local he wants to negotiate a path forward with the stadium developer but didn’t say if those talks have been scheduled.
“I look forward to talking with them and seeing what we can do to move forward as partners,” he said.
The arrangement that cemented the development agreement in 2015 was: Kroenke’s companies would pay up front for the infrastructure needed to build Hollywood Park, and Inglewood would reimburse them later.
The deal landed Kroenke a new home for the Rams and the opportunity for more real estate development on the site in the future. And it helped the city move forward with reworking the site of the former Hollywood Park Racetrack into one of the nation’s premier stadium complexes.
The reimbursements were designed to be delayed until the city could afford them: When the city earned $25 million in tax revenue from the development in a given year, it would pay down the debt.
Kroenke’s companies say Inglewood owes them about $400 million for those improvements and other investments they made. They claim that the city began surpassing the $25 million revenue threshold in 2022 and each year since.
Butts first told Hollywood Park that he believed the development agreement was void in letters he wrote to Kroenke and his employees last year. He was frustrated that the stadium businesses were fighting the city’s plan to work with an LA advertising agency to install dozens of digital billboards near the stadiums.
The city’s lawyers had found that a similar development agreement had been voided in 2018 and asked that the city be paid back the $20 million in reimbursement payments it made, Butts wrote Kroenke.
The stadium companies sued soon after.
Public projects on the scale of SoFi Stadium typically require a series of hearings, reviews and voter approval — which can take years to achieve. Instead, the stadium developer and city truncated that process by collecting more than 22,000 signatures supporting it.
The City Council voted unanimously in favor of the stadium development in February 2015, and the project broke ground not long after. Butts was a booster of the plan, the LA Times reported at the time. “Now we can celebrate,” Butts said after the winning vote to a cheering crowd in Rams jerseys.
Hollywood Park’s lawyers said in interviews and court filings that the city never questioned the validity of the subsequent contract until last year.
“Its announcement that the Development Agreement is void comes only after the Project was painstakingly built in reliance upon the [agreement], and after the City has reaped enormous benefits from the economic boon created by the project,” Hollywood Park’s lawyers wrote.
State law requires legitimate development agreements to meet various standards. They need to be negotiated between the involved parties, for example, and subject to voter referendum. But the initiative process the city and the developer pursued did not meet those standards. California courts had already found similar agreements “wholly void” dating back to the 1990s, Reinert wrote in the Sept. 1 ruling.
“Therefore, here too, the Development Agreement must be set aside,” he wrote.
Butts said the city was not aware of the legal issues the development agreement could face back in 2015, but he declined to talk more about it because the case could be appealed.
“This is the ruling right now, and we agree with it,” Butts said on Friday.
Lawyers for both Hollywood Park and the city released statements saying they remained committed to the success of the stadium development. But how they will arrive at or proceed with a new framework remains unclear.
Hollywood Park said it is exploring its legal options and could appeal the decision. If the ruling stands, the city and Hollywood Park will have to determine what, if anything, replaces the agreement that governed their financial relationship for more than a decade.
The timing adds urgency. SoFi Stadium is set to host the 2027 Super Bowl and the Opening Ceremony of the 2028 Olympics.
Meanwhile, the disagreement over the city’s and stadiums’ digital billboard programs continues. The competing billboard networks have sparked an advertising turf war that has jumped from the courts into the Nov. 3 election.
Ballmer Group is a funder of The LA Local, but their support doesn’t influence our coverage. To learn more about our funders and commitment to editorial independence, click here.
