Oakland takes hit in bid for Raiders

Disney CEO agrees to lead L.A.-area stadium effort

In a matter of hours on Wednesday, Oakland’s odds for keeping the Raiders went from not-so-good to bad.

Just as Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf met with National Football League brass in New York — with no stadium plans to unfurl — the Raiders and Chargers made an impressive move to bolster their bid to relocate to a $1.7 billion stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson: They got Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Robert Iger to lead the development effort.

As head of the world’s largest media company, Iger oversees Disney theme parks, ABC Television Group and ESPN. He is known to many of

the NFL owners who will decide which team or teams will move to glamorous, celebritystudded Los Angeles — a huge market that hasn’t had a professional football team in two decades.

Former Raiders CEO Amy Trask deemed the Iger appointment “extremely significant” in demonstrating that the Carson proposal is serious, and said it shows “how utterly committed they are to relocating.”

Making case to NFL

The news came hours before officials from San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis attended a league meeting in New York to make their cases for why their cities should keep their professional football teams. The NFL team owners will decide in January which team or teams will get to relocate.

While the Raiders and Chargers are pursuing plans to jointly build a stadium in Carson, St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke is pushing for a $1.9 billion stadium in Inglewood.

Meanwhile, officials from San Diego and St. Louis have put taxpayer money on the table to entice their teams to stay, with San Diego offering $350 million in public funds for a new $1.1 billion Chargers stadium, and St. Louis pledging $390 million in bonds and tax credits for a billion-dollar stadium by the Mississippi River. St. Louis sent a team of power brokers to the NFL meeting Wednesday, including Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and Goldman Sachs banker Greg Carey.

Schaaf, who has adamantly refused to spend a cent of public money constructing a new football stadium, said she would spend her allotted 45 minutes hyping Oakland and illustrating why it’s an ideal market for the Raiders. She brought Oakland City Councilman Larry Reid to serve as a second ambassador on what appeared to be a political mission.

Oakland and Alameda County each pay $11 million a year for Mount Davis, the 1996 Coliseum face-lift that included an 11,000-seat top deck addition that the Raiders are no longer using.

Schaaf left the meeting in New York without talking with news media there. Later she issued a statement reaffirming her commitment to support the Raiders in any effort they make to build in Oakland while protecting taxpayer dollars.

Bid to buy out county

She also revealed that the city is working to buy out Alameda County from Coliseum ownership. Currently, both Oakland and Alameda County own and operate O.co Coliseum.

Some sports economists have praised Schaaf for campaigning to keep the Raiders while not participating in a bidding war.

“I wish every city would say that,” said University of South Florida economics Professor Philip Porter in a recent interview with The Chronicle.

Porter pointed out that if cities didn’t engage in subsidy wars for football teams, the teams would locate wherever they could make the most money — which tend to also be the places that offer the biggest subsidies.

“So the subsidy awards tend to just be gifts to the teams,” Porter said.

“If her objective is to be a good steward of the public money, then what she’s doing is exactly right,” said David Berri, an economics professor at Southern Utah University. He noted that stadiums don’t generate economic growth for cities, and cities that get bilked into funding them often wind up saddled with debt after the teams are long gone.

Stanford University sports economist Roger Noll argued that while the Raiders and Chargers made a splash by snagging Iger, his appointment probably won’t sway the NFL owners to approve the Carson project.

Noll believes that, for all of St. Louis’ efforts to keep its teams, the Rams will probably return to Los Angeles, opening the door for the Raiders to move to St. Louis.

Vanderbilt University economist John Vrooman agreed that Rams’ owner Kroenke already clinched the Inglewood deal by promising to tie his luxury stadium to a larger retail development. The Carson project, in contrast, doesn’t have enough “economic pop” to justify putting two clubs there, Vrooman said, given that the NFL prefers single-team monopoly markets.

Slap in fan’s face

But if Iger’s role as the nonexecutive chairman of Carson Holdings LLC — a company the teams formed to get the land deal — is largely symbolic, it still came as a slap in the face to longtime Raiders fan Jim Zelinski, spokesman for the grassroots group Save Oakland Sports.

“We’ve been supporting the team for 41 years, and we were hoping that loyalty would be returned by the Davis family,” Zelinski said in an interview Wednesday.

Now, he said, “it’s become very clear that the Raiders are going full bore with Carson.”