The City Council last night surprised a lot of people in voting to approve the Environmental Impact Report on the Oakland A’s new stadium at Howard Terminal. I was certainly surprised, since I suspected the EIR would go down in flames, sending the A’s to follow the Raiders to Las Vegas. As I write this, early Friday morning, there are conflicting news reports on what the final vote actually was. The Athletic, an online sports hub, writes that it was 7-1 in favor. Meanwhile, NBC Bay Area says the vote was 6-2.
Whatever it actually was, we know the name of one City Council person who voted “No”: Carroll Fife. When I read, in the NBC report, that “Fife asked the A's to have a conversation with the people who live and have lived in areas such as West Oakland, which will be impacted by the project, because many people have concerns,” I had to roll my eyes. As everyone knows who’s been following this saga for years, the A’s have spent countless hours meeting with anyone and everyone who wished to express an opinion, including “people who live” in West Oakland. I switched on my T.V. to the morning news on KTVU and, by one of those funny coincidences, the news anchor was having an interview with A’s President Dave Kaval. She asked him about Fife’s complaint (mentioning her by name), and you could see Kaval—a carefully controlled man—do a mental eye-roll before he said (I paraphrase), “Look. We’ve spent the last five years talking with the community, listening to their concerns.” He went on to talk about how seriously the A’s take community impacts into their decision-making process.
I also want to point out a favorite tactic of Fife: she often says to the media that “many people have concerns” about this, that or the other. What this is, is a rhetorical device she uses to justify her opposition to things like Howard Terminal and greater funding for OPD. If you ask her who these “many people” are, no doubt she can turn up a few of her friends, but the “many people” meme is just her way of pretending she speaks for popular opinion when she actually doesn’t.
We all know that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, is a wacko, QAnon troublemaker on the far right. So insane is she that she was stripped of all her committee assignments over her “apparent support of violence against Democrats.” Even her fellow Republicans in the House criticized her. The parallels between Greene and Fife are strong. Both represent the extremist fringe of their respective political parties. Both are stubborn ideologues. Both are driven by a narrow partisan vision. Both are angry. And both are divorced from the facts, as Fife’s comments prove. When she says she wants the A’s to have yet more conversations with the community, what she’s really doing is demanding the equivalent of a filibuster: nothing less than blocking, postponing and canceling the Howard Terminal ballpark.
I’m not saying I’m in favor of the project. I haven’t taken a position and neither has the Coalition for a Better Oakland. I like the jobs the new development will create, and the tax dollars it will bring into Oakland, and the community benefits package, as well as all the new housing. At the same time, I hear the concerns of the Port people—concerns we should take seriously—and I also understand the worries people have about the train tracks and the narrow streets along the Embarcadero that will be thronged with cars on game days. I do trust that the A’s—who want to stay in Oakland—have taken community feedback very seriously and have altered their plans many times in order to respond to those concerns. The next, and final, vote for the City Council to approve the project will occur this summer. How do you think Carroll Fife will vote?
Steve Heimoff