If A’s leave the Bay Area, it will be because of greed
It’s now up to the Oakland A’s to decide whether they want to keep the team in the Bay Area. If they leave, they will have only themselves to blame.
City negotiators, in preparation for Tuesday’s critical City Council meeting, have already offered the A’s the framework of a very fair deal for the team’s proposed $12 billion development and waterfront ballpark plan next to Jack London Square. Oakland officials have made clear that they’re not going to put the city at financial risk. They have learned from their costly effort to woo the Raiders back from Los Angeles in 1995, for which city taxpayers remain about $65 million in debt even though the team left town again. The city is not going to make the same mistake twice.
The A’s for their part, however, seem to want to do everything they can to alienate the community and undermine their “Rooted in Oakland” claim. They continue to
seek a massive taxpayer subsidy and to make the city absorb the financial risk if they later leave.
They keep threatening to take their ball and go home — wherever that might be to them — if the city doesn’t capitulate to their unreasonable demands.
It’s important to remember that the A’s aren’t just asking to build a ballpark. That’s only a tiny portion of the proposal for the Howard Terminal site that’s mostly owned by the Port of Oakland. This is a development plan that happens to include a ballpark — not the other way around.
The A’s also want to erect as many as 3,000 residential units, 1.5 million square feet of office space, 270,000 square feet of mixed retail, a 3,500-seat performance theater and 400 hotel rooms.
The city is offering to help the team form a taxincrement district that would last for 45 years and fund most of the cost of infrastructure improvements on the site by issuing bonds.
That’s a great deal for the A’s.
The city has wisely balked at team President Dave Kaval’s wild demand for a second tax district that would affect properties stretching over a nearby 1½-mile-long swath of land.
That would be irresponsible.
Unfortunately, what seems to be driving Kaval and billionaire team owner John Fisher is not just a quest for a good business deal, but greed.
They already suckered Alameda County supervisors to sell them the county’s half of the Coliseum where they current play at a deeply discounted price — with no requirement that the team stay in town. Apparently, they think city officials are fools, too.
If the team keeps insisting it wants to move out of the Coliseum, it should give up its ownership there to free that site for a single developer. That would be a sign that the team genuinely cares about the welfare of the community.
And if the team insists it needs a waterfront ballpark, it should stop threatening to move to Las Vegas, which, last we checked, has no waterfront site to offer.
The team’s — specifically Kaval’s — childish posturing should end.
Fortunately, so far, the City Council, city negotiators and Mayor Libby Schaaf haven’t caved to it. It’s Kaval who keeps insisting that a waterfront ballpark is the only alternative, yet sending signals through Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred that Oakland should also sell the team the city’s half of the Coliseum.
For the Howard Terminal deal, the city is now asking that the team commit to staying in Oakland for only 25 years, although exactly when that clock would start running is still open to negotiation. That’s way too short a time frame, especially considering the bond debt could last for 45 years. Fortunately, the city is at least insisting that if the team leaves it will still be on the hook for paying its share of the bond debt until it’s retired.
At issue on Tuesday is whether City Council members will approve the staff’s proposed nonbinding framework for entering the next phase of negotiations with the team. If they do, it will be up to the A’s to decide whether they want to move forward or leave.
The city has been more than reasonable. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the A’s.