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Mayor Jerry Sanders still has seven months in office, but he’s only running out the clock on the issue. He talked a good game for two and a half years, but now he’s doing what the last mayor did: making it the next mayor’s problem.

Don’t just take my word for it. I didn’t.

I asked the four major candidates angling for his job in the June 5 election. I approached them all after a recent debate and pressed them on an issue that no one’s really pressed them on so far.

None of the candidates — not even District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, whom Sanders has endorsed — think he will broker a deal with the team before a new mayor takes over.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying San Diego taxpayers should reach deep in their pockets to build the Spanos family a billion-dollar stadium. (That’s a topic for the entire San Diego region to tackle later.) I am saying that Sanders has squandered an opportunity to let the public settle this seemingly endless issue once and for all.

For reasons in his control (a succession of consultants) and out (the economy, the death of redevelopment funds), his open field has closed.

Sanders took office in 2005, five years after Chargers owner Alex Spanos first said the team needed a new venue. A few months after his election, Sanders was letting the team pursue stadium options countywide, saying the city was too cash-strapped to build a facility.

Then in 2009, the mayor and the team were talking again, publicly exploring a site in East Village. More than a year ago, Sanders was calling Chargers president Dean Spanos the “most frustrated person on the planet” and promising “to throw the weight of my office” into putting a stadium plan before voters in November 2012.

A few months later, Sanders went on a three-city U.S. tour to drum up ideas and interest in a new stadium. But a stadium consulting firm he retained in October didn’t sign a contract until March and won’t release a financing plan until at least September.

Now, Sanders is saying nothing. He's refused my interview requests for months.

Hard to believe the City Council would hurriedly vote to put a complex financing plan on a ballot before Sanders leaves office in December. Harder still to believe that plan would be embraced by the next mayor.

I base my disbelief on all the stock answers to the stadium question.

Councilman Carl DeMaio says he already has experts advising him on a potential public-private partnership. Dumanis wants to build a stadium without taxpayer money. Rep. Bob Filner, D-San Diego, has vowed to say no to extortion from the team and the National Football League. And Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, a former Marine, says he’s ready for stadium negotiations because he has interrogated members of al-Qaeda.

The good news is that three of the four candidates are committed to having the public vote on the stadium plan, eventually, and Dumanis said she’s leaning that way. (To speed the project along, she said she might not hold a vote if it’s unnecessary.)

The bad news? Only DeMaio routinely mentions a public vote when he’s discussing the stadium issue during debates. I figured out the others’ views only by asking them after the debate I attended.

With so much money at stake, forging ahead on a vote is likely subject to some pollster somewhere predicting residents would easily support it.

So let me predict that this whole issue is something San Diego’s mayoral candidates may still be discussing ... in 2016.