By Jose Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report
A judge ruled earlier this month that Inglewood’s development agreement with Stan Kroenke’s Hollywood Park is void. The city of Inglewood now faces one of the most significant legal and fiscal uncertainties of any municipality in Los Angeles County — and the full cost to residents remains unresolved in open court.
The background is worth laying out precisely. In 2015, the Inglewood City Council unanimously voted to adopt an initiative bringing a $5 billion NFL stadium to the city. Mayor James Butts publicly assured residents that no public money would go toward the project. Kroenke’s companies agreed to front hundreds of millions of dollars in public infrastructure improvements, with repayment structured to begin once the city generated $25 million in annual tax revenue from the development — a threshold the city reportedly crossed in 2022 and has exceeded every year since.
What was owed back became the dispute. Kroenke’s companies claim Inglewood owes approximately $400 million for infrastructure costs, some of which stretched outside city limits. Mayor Butts wrote to Kroenke in July 2025, claiming the contract was not legal. In September 2026, a judge agreed — ruling the development agreement void. What that ruling actually changes remains, by the mayor’s own admission, unclear.
A financial controller reads that last sentence as the headline. A city signed a deal. The deal was described at the time as the best stadium agreement ever negotiated. The city benefited from it for more than a decade. The city then attempted to disclaim obligations under it. A court agreed the agreement is void. And the city does not yet know what that means for its finances.
What is known is that Inglewood’s fiscal position was already strained before the legal fight began. The city’s own FY2025-26 budget showed a nearly $24 million deficit across multiple fund types. New revenue streams created after SoFi Stadium opened — including fees charged to residents — were being used to service financial obligations tied to the development. A former city accountant alleged in a lawsuit that she was pressured to wire funds without proper documentation. Former city treasurer Wanda Brown corroborated those claims publicly.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Public Integrity Unit agreed in March 2026 to review a separate complaint: a $20 million payment the city made to Hollywood Park Management Company that did not appear in the adopted budget and was never put to a public vote. That review is ongoing.
Taken together, these are not overlapping coincidences. They are the documented pattern of a city that committed to a major public-private infrastructure deal, extracted benefits from that deal for years, and is now attempting to escape the financial obligations that came with it — while simultaneously facing questions about how public funds were being moved internally without the transparency city governance requires.
What residents of Inglewood deserve is a clear accounting of what the city actually owes, what it has already paid, and how those payments were authorized. A court voiding a development agreement does not erase the infrastructure that was built or the tax revenues the city collected as a direct result of it. What it does is create a legal vacuum in which the city’s obligations become subject to renegotiation — a renegotiation that will happen in courtrooms, not at public meetings, unless the city chooses otherwise.
The $400 million figure may change. The litigation will take time. But the question Inglewood residents are owed an answer to is simpler: who authorized the payments that were made, and who approved the commitments that were not?
Jose E. Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and founder of The Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego, California.
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