With Warriors in Finals, council keeps luxury box
Just days before the NBA Finals tipped off, the Oakland City Council quietly turned its back on a deal to sell the city’s luxury box at Oracle Arena to the Warriors for $200,000 a year — money that could be used for cashstrapped city services and programs.
The Warriors had even agreed to start the deal immediately instead of waiting until next season — a move that would have been worth as much as $5,000 per game to the city. No sale.
“Nobody wanted to give up the tickets for the playoffs,” said council President Larry Reid.
The idea of selling the city’s 20-seat box was put in motion after Reid and colleagues found themselves the targets of a scathing Oakland
Public Ethics Commission report in March on the lack of oversight in the handing out of free sports, concert and other tickets for the mayor and council members.
All council members and the mayor are entitled to two tickets apiece for events at the arena and can dispense them as they see fit. Each is also entitled to a pair of tickets for events at the neighboring Coliseum.
Alameda County also has a suite at both the arena and stadium, as does the city-county agency that runs the Coliseum complex.
The March report by the ethics commission was the latest in a long line of studies and stories that have questioned how tickets to Coliseum and Oracle Arena events are doled out to public officials.
The Public Ethics Commission found that of the 11,000 tickets made available to the City Council and Mayor Libby Schaaf in the past two years, officials had failed to disclose how nearly a third of them were used — meaning there was no way for the public to find out who got those tickets. Council members and other officials can use the tickets themselves or give them to others.
After the report came out, Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan proposed doing away with the freebies and suggested that the city sell its tickets instead.
Reid subsequently approached the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum Authority brass about simply selling the city’s box to the Warriors. In short order, team President Rick Welts came back with the $200,000-a-year offer.
However, Reid said that when he checked with his council colleagues about the sale, he found zero interest. So he called Coliseum Authority executive Scott McKibben and told him the deal wouldn’t happen.
A number of council members told us they were only vaguely aware of the proposed sale or knew nothing about it.
Kaplan said that while she’s ready to give up her seats at both the arena and stadium, she needs lots of cooperation to go through with a sale of the luxury box. “It has to be the whole suite, and that would require a vote of the City Council,” she said.
Councilman Dan Kalb said he and his colleagues are “open to all options” — but that given the urgency of coming up with a budget for next year, the future of the luxury box “is just not high on the list of things to figure out right now.”
In the meantime, he said, if he can give away his tickets to groups to be auctioned off for good causes, “I’m thrilled to do that.”
In fact, Schaaf and some of Kalb’s council colleagues have given Warriors playoff tickets to charitable causes. Schaaf, for example, gave two tickets to Thursday night’s Game 1 of the Finals to Friends of the Oakland Animal Shelter, which raised about $10,000 by raffling them off.
Whatever the case, Reid said, as council president, “I do what my colleagues say, and they don’t want to give it up.”
Million-dollar question: Just how Oakland and lawyers for the sexually exploited teenager at the center of a scandal involving several Bay Area police agencies came up with the figure of $989,000 to settle her legal claim against the city is a bit of a mystery.
“It’s a funny number, but I’m sure there is a rationale for it — I’m just not sure what it is,” said East Bay attorney Dan Siegel, who has handled many civil cases against the Oakland Police Department but was not a party in this matter. “It may just have been that the city’s position was, ‘We won’t pay $1 million,’ so someone suggested this.”
In any event, the final figure was far short of the $66 million that her original lawyer was seeking from Oakland.
The 19-year-old woman, who formerly used the pseudonym Celeste Guap, was a sex-trafficking victim as a juvenile and had been in relationships with police from a number of Bay Area jurisdictions.
Oakland lawyer John Burris, who took over the case after the paperwork was filed by another attorney, said the $66 million demand was never realistic. In fact, he said, he wasn’t happy it had been suggested.
“It only created outrage, and it took attention away from the police and placed it on the money,” Burris said.
He declined to say how the settlement total was negotiated, or just how much of it he will get. The final sum, he agreed, is “weird.”
Oakland City Council President Larry Reid said the council spent all of three minutes being briefed on the settlement before approving it last week 7-1. The lone holdout was Councilwoman Desley Brooks — who argued that the woman deserved more.