OAKLAND — City officials and the Oakland A’s did some last-minute negotiating Monday to keep the team’s waterfront ballpark plan on track, but neither side appeared ready to budge on the financial blueprint to set it into play.
Although both sides indicated they were willing to resume talks before the City Council meets Tuesday morning to consider the A’s non-binding financial term sheet for the $12 billion ballpark and village project, there was no indication that the sides had come to an agreement on several key details.
For the A’ s, the council vote will signal whether the city is willing to do all it can to keep the team in Oakland, which already has seen the Raiders and then the Golden State Warriors leave. For the city, the stakes are also high as it tries to balance the team’s interest with those of taxpayers while making sure it gets affordable housing and community benefits out of the deal.
“The city and the A’s are continuing their dialogue today with the shared goal to make a world-class ballpark a reality,” Justin Berton, a spokesman for Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, said in a text on Monday.
“The city will continue to advocate for a proposal that supports and serves Oakland and our entire region, provides affordable housing, public parks, great jobs and other direct benefits for the community — all without risk to our Port, our taxpayers, or the City or County’s general fund,” he added.
A’s President Dave Kaval confirmed he and city officials met via Zoom, but just as he did on Friday, he cast the discussions in a darker light than the mayor’s office, saying the two sides remain “far apart” on key points.
“We are growing increasingly concerned that the council is going to vote on something that doesn’t match what we’ve proposed,” Kaval told this news organization in a phone interview.
For the city to counter with its own terms for financing the project’s infrastructure and dictating other conditions without the team’s buy-in “is not an effective path forward,” Kaval said. Nevertheless, he added, “my phone is open.”
Even if the council approves the team’s term sheet, many more steps lie ahead — including the completion of an environmental impact report — before construction equipment can start rolling in to clear the way for a 35,000-seat ballpark and a mixed-used development of 3,000 homes, 1.5 million square feet of office space, 270,000 square feet of mixed retail, a 3,500-seat performance theater, 400 hotel rooms and about 18 acres of parks and open space at Howard Terminal, which is part of the Port of Oakland near Jack London Square.
But the A’s want the city to at least bless its term sheet for financing the streets, sidewalks, pedestrian overpasses and other improvements needed to support the Howard Terminal project and access to the 55-acre site.
Lacking such a clear signal, Kaval has said the team intends to ratchet up its efforts to find their ideal ballpark in another city, with Las Vegas currently the lead contender. Kaval and other A’s officials are scheduled to make another visit to Las Vegas the day after Tuesday’s council meeting.
The key issues that have separated the two sides remain affordable housing, community benefits and how to finance the infrastructure such as streets, sidewalks and pedestrian bridges surrounding the site.
In its own term sheet released Friday, the city wants the A’s to build as many as 15% of the homes — 450 if the 3,000 units are built — on the Howard Terminal site and pay a development fee to finance construction of another 450 affordable homes elsewhere. Kaval has asked the city to waive that condition, even though the city typically requires developers to designate certain percentages of their projects for affordable housing.
The city also wants the A’s to contribute millions of dollars in community benefits ranging from local construction work hiring to providing relocation assistance to residents and businesses who could be forced out by rising property values triggered by the planned development.
The city also has indicated it’s only willing to form one of the two tax-assessment districts the A’s are demanding to reimburse them for paying the upfront costs of street improvements, environmental cleanup, seismic upgrades and other work for the ballpark.
Kaval wants the city to also form a separate assessment district encompassing the Jack London Square area to pay an estimated $350 million for such improvements as pedestrian and vehicle crossings to get A’s fans across train tracks to the ballpark.
Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan has proposed that the city and the A’s cooperate to secure state and federal funding to pay for the work.
“We also must recognize that the State, Federal, Regional and other levels of government invested heavily in projects that involved the destruction of communities in Oakland, and which perpetuated air quality disparities,” Kaplan noted in a letter to council colleagues. “This is also a project of major regional significance, in a region that also fully relies on use of this Port, so it is vital that resources and strategies at all levels be part of the solution.”
In messages to this newspaper Monday, Kaplan said she believes agencies such as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Alameda County Transportation Commission might be swayed to contribute enough to pay for the $350 million the A’s want.
Kaval said in an interview Monday if the city wants to pursue other sources of funding, that’s fine, but if it cannot guarantee that money by Tuesday, there likely would be no deal. “We need the certainty now,” he said.
Meanwhile, community and special interest groups have been pressuring the council with their own concerns.
Community advocates fear a large luxury development at Howard Terminal could trigger gentrification and insist the city get ahead of that by calling on the A’s to not only provide affordable housing but also money to support renters, hire locals and provide job training.
At a rally last week, Tommy Wong, co-founder of a Good Good Eatz and member of the Oakland Chinatown Coalition, said Chinatown “is a vital economic and cultural hub. The A’s could plug into that if they had a community benefits plan,” Wong said. “Here is where words have to meet the ground.”
Others are more firmly opposed to the project, even if it had a community benefits agreement.
The East Oakland Stadium Alliance, a coalition of businesses operating at the port and the longshoremen unions who work for them, fears the project would harm their operations.
“We stand firmly by our position that a stadium and real estate development that would insert tens of thousands of people on to a 24/7 working port is inherently incompatible land use and would be irreversibly detrimental to the economy — and downright dangerous,” said Aaron Wright, a Business Agent for ILWU Local 10.
