Yesterday’s City Council vote on the “term sheet,” or conditions, for the proposed Oakland A’s Howard Terminal Stadium was disappointing. I admit to being a little surprised it got 6 “yes” votes (Kalb, Kaplan, Reid, Taylor, Thao, Bas), but then, as Bas noted, this was not the final vote on the project, just a definition of conditions the Council wants in order to conduct further negotiations with the A’s.
What I wasn’t surprised by, though, was the begrudging nature of the “yes” votes. Kalb was typical: “I will hold my nose and vote for this motion.” That was hardly motivational for the A’s, whose management did not fail to take note of the Council’s disdain. “The current term sheet as it’s constructed and its current language is not a business partnership that works for us,” A’s president Dave Kaval was quoted as saying in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. The sticking point seems to be the Council’s demand for low-cost housing, which it insists the A’s finance, and which the A’s counter that they’re unwilling to do.
We should all expect that the A’s will no longer be playing baseball in Oakland, starting perhaps as early as the 2022-2023 season. It’s clear that the City Council is not interested in keeping the team, despite the treasures the Howard Terminal Stadium project offers Oakland: 3,000 residential living units in a city desperate for additional housing, 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, 270,000 square feet of retail, an indoor, 3,500-seat performance center, 400 hotel rooms, and 18 acres of open space on the Bay where today there is none. That’s in addition to the thousands of good-paying jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes that would pour into the City’s coffers.
I wrote yesterday that the social justice mania that obsesses the City Council blinds them to the opportunities that Howard Terminal promises Oakland. Jobs, parks, new housing, an influx of tax dollars for our schools, kids, libraries and parks, a vast new infrastructure that will improve West Oakland, a new tourist attraction at Jack London Square, an entire new neighborhood along the estuary—these are glittering prizes that any rational City Council would embrace with enthusiasm. Sadly, our current City Council is driving the A’s away, as it drove away the Warriors and the Raiders, because those teams’ ownership wasn’t “woke” enough, in their purblind view. Oakland has been the loser, poorer and more degraded than ever. Is that what the City Council actually wants?
Steve Heimoff