Lakers to pay $2 million tab for victory celebration parade in Los Angeles

LA Lakers to pay for NBA victory celebration

LOS ANGELES — The Lakers plan to mark their championship victory with a more modest celebration than in the past, avoiding the city’s downtown business district on its parade route Monday and leaving out the huge rallies that have drawn tens of thousands of fans in previous years.

The scaled-down celebration was likely to cost some $2 million, including police overtime and other city services, which the Lakers planned to pay, team spokesman John Black said Friday.

Between 500,000 and 2 million people are expected to line the 2-mile-long parade route extending from the Staples Center to the edge of the University of Southern California campus, the Lakers said in a statement.

Lakers players were to address fans from a float plying the parade route, along with double-decker, open-air buses filled with the team’s coaches, staff members, owners and cheerleaders.

The scale of the event appeared significantly downsized from past years when championships were celebrated by kickoff rallies at City Hall or the Department of Water and Power building, parades through the downtown business district and huge rallies at Staples Center.

Black said cutting out the rally would make the celebration easier and less expensive, while skipping downtown for the parade was designed to keep the event more manageable for police, fire and other city agencies.

“You want it long enough to make it enjoyable,” he said. “But it can’t go on forever.”

A message left with the mayor’s office seeking details about the city agencies’ roles in the event was not returned.

Last year’s parade skipped the downtown core, beginning at Staples and ending at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with a rally that drew some 95,000 fans.

The Lakers and others eventually paid for most of that event, which was heavily criticized for its $2 million cost to the financially strapped city. Criticism intensified after the city found itself with another $3.2 million price tag for security at the Michael Jackson memorial at the Staples Center about a month later.

The Jackson memorial costs were themselves defrayed by a $1.3 million contribution announced Friday by Staples Center-owner AEG and the estate of Michael Jackson.

Los Angeles police Officer Cleon Joseph had no immediate details about the department’s deployment plans for Monday.

At least 1,700 officers kept watch over the crowd of 95,000 that piled into Memorial Colosseum after last year’s Lakers parade.

That celebration included brief bursts of violence. Dozens of people shut out of the packed stadium rally tried to climb over a ticket booth and tear down a temporary fence.

People threw rocks, bottles and other objects at officers, who fired beanbags into the crowd. In all, 15 were arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer, narcotics possession, disturbing the peace and other violations.