The penalties threatened by the city could include opposition to the Radisson ownership’s goal of converting the 266-room building into affordable housing as part of a continued state program that has been sheltering people experiencing homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a letter sent last week, city attorney Barbara Parker warned that the city would review the hotel’s “record of non-compliance” when deciding on contracts. land-use approvals and permitting “until the violations are remedied, to the maximum extent permitted by law.”

It is the latest development in an increasingly messy wage-theft case; the expected $400,000 payout would be the largest in Oakland’s history.

City officials declined to comment Monday on whether the threats against Radisson could interrupt its conversion to housing under the California Homekey program.

California Supportive Housing, a nonprofit based in the South Bay, is set to acquire the hotel and lead its redevelopment.

The organization plans to do the same for the 104-unit Quality Inn Hotel in Oakland, which in February fell into loan delinquency, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

To help complete the Quality Inn’s rehabilitation, the Homekey program in January awarded the city $20 million in grants.

At the Radisson, meanwhile, the city’s Department of Workforce and Employment Standards determined in the fall that the hotel owed back pay to 128 ex-employees — including housekeepers, front desk staff and others — who were mostly all laid off after the pandemic began.

Radisson did not comply with a wage-increase measure that entitled workers to $20 an hour instead of a $15-per-hour rate if they declined their employers’ health benefits, the city found.

The city’s ultimatum letter is addressed to the hotel’s general manager, Tony Ng, as well as Nupen Patel of the Texas-based ownership firm K&K Hotel Group, which does business locally as Oakland Alameda Hotels LLC.

The owners missed a deadline in December to appeal the city’s wage-theft finding. Ng did not respond Monday to an interview request.

Former workers at the hotel, represented by a chapter of UNITE HERE Local 2, put pressure on the city last month to take further action against Radisson.

“Until now, we have not received anything,” Ana Bermudez, a former laundry worker of three years at the Radisson, said in Spanish at the news conference. “We want the Radisson to pay attention to us and pay us what they owe us.”

In a letter to the owners, Parker said the city never received a response from the Radisson’s ownership to its initial wage-theft finding last fall, nor to a follow-up.

The hotel’s new deadline is June 18 to “issue restitution checks to the affected employees,” the letter states.

“This is your final opportunity to avoid significant legal liability,” it adds.

The closure brings to an end yet another piece of the Bay Area’s racing tradition. Another historic track, Bay Meadows in the Peninsula, closed in 2008 after 74 years.

Longtime enthusiasts who filled the 140-acre grounds were treated to a lunch buffet, a commemorative last race and the chance to say goodbye to the East Bay’s only official equine-racing venue, where thousands of horses had competed since its opening in 1941.

Outside, near the north entrance, Rocky Chau, an anti-racing activist, clutched a Golden Gate Fields mug he’d saved from a visit to the track with his father in the 1990s. Then he chucked it to the ground, watching it shatter.

The piercing sound, audible over the noisy nearby highway, briefly startled Chau’s fellow participants in an otherwise carefully orchestrated public funeral for an estimated 2,000 horses that have died during the track’s 83-year history.

“Animals feel pain, just like us; they feel love, just like us!” chanted the protesters, carrying plastic-white carnations, a fake coffin and signs that read “Shut Down Golden Gate Fields.”

At large, it was a day of celebration for the regional chapter of Direct Action Everywhere, an animal-welfare group known for its disruptive shows of disobedience that often draw criminal prosecution.

Horse racing may never return to Berkeley if voters this November approve a measure banning factory farms. Facilities can earn that designation from federal regulators if they house especially large populations of livestock — in this case, the threshold is 500 horses.

Twenty horse deaths were reported at Golden Gate Fields last year, and another seven so far in 2024, including a pair of thoroughbreds this past month named Lilly’s Journey and Sam Spade.

Most were either put down by workers after suffering racing-related bodily injuries, or died for other, undisclosed reasons, per data from the California Horse Racing Board. Of 82 horse deaths last year across seven California race tracks, just under a quarter occurred at Golden Gate Fields.

The persistent death toll has blemished the track’s proud history as a hub of U.S. horse racing, having featured Triple Crown winner Citation, fabled come-from-behind champion Silky Sullivan and legendary thoroughbred John Henry.

A major Canadian conglomerate, the Stronach Group, acquired the property in 2011 and announced its closure last year with plans to refocus its racing investments in Southern California.

Separately, the group’s founder, Austrian-Canadian auto parts magnate Frank Stronach, was arrested Friday in Toronto on charges of sexual assault, including rape, that spanned decades.

Golden Gate Fields’ closure might be welcomed by animal-welfare activists, but it will eliminate jobs for somewhere around 200 workers, many of them immigrants, who now must wait for a proposed fall horse-racing operation in Pleasanton to take clearer shape.

Some of the displaced workers — who groomed and cared after the race track’s horses — have been connected with social services to bridge a path to future work, Berkeleyside reported.

“If you look at the conditions they were forced to work in at Golden Gate Fields — these were not great jobs,” said Almira Tanner, an organizer of Sunday’s protest.

“I hope, as part of our society’s evolution away from using animals for entertainment, for food, for profit, that we support workers in that transition, too,” she added. “I would love to see the workers be helped to get a job that doesn’t harm them or harm (animals).”

Chau, the protester who destroyed his souvenir mug from Golden Gate Fields, said the race track was a regular family trip — a core childhood memory that he recognized only later had played a role in his late father’s gambling problem.

“Golden Gate Fields, along with other horse racing tracks (in the country), profit immensely — by the billions — off gambling addictions,” Chau said.

“And even worse,” he added, “countless amounts of horses are systematically exploited, separated from their families and eventually killed if they’re found to not profit god-awful places like Golden Gate Fields.”

Staff writer Katie Lauer and the Associated Press contributed reporting.

The incident hits home in a region where a surprising lack of available SAT testing sites has forced students to commute long distances from their home cities. Students affected in Saturday’s Wi-FI breakdown now await a rescheduled date — and a full refund.

The canceled test was supposed to be administered at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Oakland — a location that, in most cases, would be unusual for the standardized test used by more than 4,000 U.S. universities and colleges to help evaluate student admission applications, according to College Board International, the private nonprofit that administers the SAT.

But the city’s school district stopped using campuses as testing sites in the pandemic, and now rely on alternative sites like the Marriott.

This testing-site squeeze is not unique to Oakland; College Board reported that there are now fewer than half as many SAT testing sites in California as there were pre-pandemic.

“We deeply apologize to all affected students,” Holly Stepp, a representative for College Board said about the cancelled Oakland test in an email.

The SAT went fully digital in March, becoming the latest education staple to fully rely on strong Wi-Fi networks.

Stepp said similar problems haven’t played out at testing sites in other states since the digital rollout, and that “California is a unique case.”

“Student demand has exceeded capacity for SAT weekend administrations in California’s Bay Area because of a shortage of high schools and other institutions willing to serve as SAT Weekend test centers,” she said in the email.

That demand remains high might come as a surprise to some Californians. In 2022, the CSU and UC systems stopped requiring aspiring students to take the test.

But quietly, other universities have reinstated SAT requirements just a few years after joining the national wave to de-emphasize the test’s importance. In April, Harvard and Caltech resumed requiring either SAT or ACT scores for applications.

“We were getting away from corporate, big-box standardized testing,” said Jorge Lerma, an Oakland school board director. “We were going to make education a personalized experience. Now, all of a sudden, what we see creeping back in is a reliance on these external, impersonal assessment devices.”

The cancellation at the Marriott strikes local education advocates as concerning. But even more pressing is a larger fight playing out at the state level over the future of broadband access.

Last year, state technology officials removed urban areas like East Oakland and South Central Los Angeles from a funding map for broadband internet expansion, relying on data provided by internet-service providers expected to build out the fiber infrastructure.

The state’s Public Utilities Commission has acknowledged the data is flawed. Speed tests conducted locally, meanwhile, contest the notion that East Oakland enjoys smoother internet connection than wealthier suburbs, such as Walnut Creek, which remain on the funding map.

Separately, the commission is still reviewing objections by Comcast and AT&T to $14 million in broadband expansion funding in East Oakland, where students struggle to maintain a high-speed home internet connection.

“Things are going in only one way,” said Patrick Messac, a former Oakland teacher who heads the digital equity nonprofit #OaklandUndivided. “Education services are moving online. We feel a tremendous sense of urgency to ensure all students have digital access.”

The city will speed up existing plans to eventually transfer its 50% ownership share of the 155-acre property — including the soon-to-be-former A’s stadium, a nearby arena and lots of parking space in between — to a local Black-led group of developers.

Few details of the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG)’s grand redevelopment plans at the East Oakland site have been finalized, but the organization this year will begin paying the city installments of what’s expected to be at least $105 million over the next two years.

Leigh Hanson, chief of staff for Mayor Sheng Thao, said the final terms are still being negotiated between the city and Loop Capital, a Black-owned investment firm in AASEG’s coalition that manages funds worth billions of dollars.

In turn, Oakland will take the rare step of putting revenue from the sale of a major capital asset toward its general purpose fund, which mainly pays the salaries of thousands of city employees.

It is a bold move by city officials that reflects just how concerning Oakland’s ongoing budget crisis has become.

The city faces a projected $177 million shortfall by the end of the current fiscal year in June, and will likely face a deficit next year as well without significant changes.

Thao is expected to release later this week a proposal of adjustments to the budget in the middle year of a cycle that ends in 2025.

In interviews, financial analysts were critical of the city’s last-ditch effort to shore up the budget crisis with a one-time revenue boost.

“Good elected officials of all stripes know that you should not sell off capital assets,” said David Crane, a lecturer of public policy at Stanford University. “When you sell capital assets, you should use the money for something that produces a benefit for many years.”

For now, city officials hope the sale is a worthy bet on AASEG’s success in eventually transforming the neglected Coliseum property into a new hub of live sports, retail, nightlife and some affordable housing — an ambitious redevelopment that may take years to fully realize.

By purchasing the city’s half of the Coliseum, AASEG would no longer be required to buy the other half-share of the property before moving forward.

That other half-share will soon be owned by the A’s, which agreed in 2019 to buy it from Alameda County for $85 million — a much lower price than what AASEG will pay.

The group, led by Oakland native Ray Bobbitt, is in talks with the A’s about buying the team’s half-share of the Coliseum.

Bobbitt first became involved in the Coliseum’s future as an Oakland Raiders fan lobbying for the Las Vegas-bound football team to stick around. Now he is at the helm of one of the most ambitious real-estate developments in the region’s history.

“Every time one door closes, four open up,” he said at a Wednesday news conference formally announcing the sale. “At the end of the day, there’s a new beginning, a new chapter, new sports teams, new housing, new developments. That’s what this is all about.”

AASEG has stressed community involvement, pledging to build 25% affordable housing in any upcoming residential developments and build with local labor.

They can’t get started until the A’s sell them the franchise’s share. Bobbitt signaled Wednesday that the talks are progressing; in an interview last month, A’s President Dave Kaval spoke positively about AASEG, saying the group “has a really interesting vision” for the Coliseum complex.

“The arena has actually done very, very well,” Kaval said at the time.

Neither the A’s nor AASEG’s respective purchases of the public property shares can be finalized until January of 2026, when the city and county finish paying longstanding bonds they took out to make improvements to the Coliseum site back in the 1990s.

Workers at the Radisson Hotel near the city’s airport were owed $20 an hour instead of the $15 rate they made between July 2019 and April 2020 because they declined health benefits — a wage-increase measure approved by voters in the 2018 election.

Last fall, the city’s Department of Workforce and Employment Standards found the Edes Avenue hotel owed more than $400,000 in back pay to housekeepers, front desk staff and other employees who were almost all laid off when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

But the local chapter of UNITE HERE Local 2 now says the affected workers still haven’t seen a single check, even though the Radisson missed a deadline in December to appeal the city’s finding.

“The owner hasn’t even said anything to the effect of ‘I don’t have that money,’” said Sonya Karabel, a campaign researcher for the union. “These workers have been waiting years and years to receive the money they earned.”

The hotel’s owner is the Houston-based K&K Hotel group, which operates a number of hospitality sites and carries the Radisson brand at the Oakland airport location.

Soon, the 300-room hotel will shut down and be converted to affordable housing, part of the state’s Project Homekey initiative that first launched as a way to shelter homeless people during the pandemic.

Officials at K&K and Radisson management didn’t respond to requests for comment.

California Supportive Housing, the nonprofit acquiring the Radisson, is separately overseeing the rehabilitation of a Quality Inn motel near the airport — a process for which the city in January received $20 million in state money to facilitate.

Leaders of the hotel workers union have said they don’t want to interrupt the Radisson’s conversion to housing. Instead, they’re pressuring the city attorney’s office to sue K&K over the unpaid wages as a measure of enforcement.

“Until now, we have not received anything,” Ana Bermudez, a former laundry worker of three years at the Radisson, said in Spanish at a news conference last week outside the hotel. “We want the Radisson to pay attention to us and pay us what they owe us.”

Using federal data that outlined workers’ home addresses, researchers at a Rutgers University lab found as many as 14% of workers may have experienced yearly minimum-wage violations across San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont and surrounding cities between 2014 and 2023.

Dan Galvin, who led the study published this month, noted the finding that Black and Latino workers throughout the state were more likely than white workers to be illegally denied proper wages.

“It’s very common for employers who are found liable for wage theft to either just refuse to pay or sometimes they open up a new business under a different name so it’s harder to find them,” Galvin, who is also a professor of political science at Northwestern University, said in an interview.

For the hotel industry, though, he added, “I would assume it’s harder for them to get out from liability to pay.”

Union representatives spoke Tuesday morning in front of City Hall to insist that city officials should instead address all the tax money they haven’t collected from local businesses — one of several revenue streams that are falling far short of earlier projections.

It is yet more fallout from the financial woes stressing out city officials in an election year. Mayor Sheng Thao is expected to release an outline in the coming weeks of potential adjustments to the city’s $4.2 billion budget as it enters the second year of a cycle that concludes in 2025.

By the end of the current fiscal year in June, the city expects that its business-tax revenue will fall short of earlier projections by $9.5 million, which represents just 5% of the current projected shortfall. Other factors, such as the real-estate transfer tax and police spending, are far more significant.

But union representatives point to the taxes that local businesses haven’t paid on their licenses, which had reached $34 million over the past three fiscal years through the end of March.

At Tuesday’s news conference, the reps held up a giant phony check made out to the city of Oakland to illustrate that amount.

“This has a serious and deeply unfair impact on our city’s ability to deliver services,” said Julian Ware, a leader at IFPTE Local 21, which represents engineers, attorneys and other employees. “Don’t make Oakland pay for tax evasion.”

City officials insist the $34 million total is misleading, given that the number may have changed since it was reported publicly in March, though it’s unclear by how much.

Much of the uncollected revenue, officials said in interviews, may not actually be possible to collect if it was expected from businesses that quietly have shut down — a common trend during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city does not currently track how many businesses remain active, how many are truly avoiding their taxes or how many may not yet have paid because of some misunderstanding or mail issue.

There are 6,960 businesses that haven’t paid their licenses taxes this fiscal year, and it’s unclear how many of those are actually “delinquent,” as the city puts it.

The more immediate budget problem when it comes to the shortfall is that the city’s finance team is overestimating its projections of future tax revenue, leading the revenue to come up way short in reality. This was also a major cause of a historic $360 million deficit that Thao patched up last year.

City officials, including Finance Director Erin Roseman, set estimates of tax revenue based on reports from the business owners who predict how much money they’ll gross in the next year. The realities of crime, such as persistent break-ins, can often muddy the outlook.

The license tax is charged to anyone who shares in the ownership of business, even those who simply rent spare rooms in their homes to others (at a rate of $13.95 per $1,000 of rental income).

In the 2022 election, voters approved a new tax that left nearly all the city’s businesses with a larger burden each year, though the highest-grossing firms are charged higher rates than the smaller ones.

Nearly two years later, the city has indeed seen a net increase in revenue from the business tax, but fewer businesses are paying up.

This appears to be another consequence of the pandemic, from which most cities and California itself are still struggling to recover. The state is projecting a $27.6 billion deficit, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has promised to balance the books without raising taxes.

As far as possible layoffs go, city officials have hinted that public safety jobs would be protected as much as possible — especially as Oakland begins to make progress combating its crime problems. But the unions fear certain positions may be left unfilled. The city is currently in a hiring freeze.

“Our team has never been staffed well enough to keep wait times as low as we all want — and the prospect of budget cuts is just too harsh to imagine,” said Antoinette Blue, the new president of SEIU Local 1021 and a dispatcher for Oakland’s 911 system, which has struggled with staffing.

Zac Unger, the president of the Oakland firefighters union, said layoffs weren’t likely to be an issue among firefighters. But at Tuesday’s rally, he worried aloud that the city may close down one or more fire stations from the two dozen in operation.

“A house fire doubles in size every minute, and what we’re looking at is an increase in response times from 4 minutes to 8 minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes,” said Unger, who is running to replace Councilmember Dan Kalb in November.

“Are you willing to roll the dice and hope that it’s not your home — not your loved ones — who are living near a firehouse that has nobody inside it?” Unger added.

But for years, Oakland has struggled to establish a large-scale vision to place the waterfront — with its nightlife hub at Jack London Square and the industrial harbor a short walk away — at center stage in the city’s attractions.

“People see an incredible amount of potential in the neighborhood,” said Savlan Hauser, executive director of the Jack London Square Improvement District. “It’s not so much about needing to change it, but (rather) about realizing the full vision of a waterfront neighborhood.”

In a recent court settlement, a major Bay Area regulatory agency quietly reversed a key decision that would’ve helped transform a sizable port property, Howard Terminal, into a 35,000-seat ballpark and thousands of waterfront homes.

The reversal was a major victory for the port’s shipping industries, which have long opposed housing on the land south of the railroad tracks along Embarcadero West.

The development at Howard Terminal, proposed by the soon-to-depart A’s, has long since fallen apart. Any new plans at the port would need to start from scratch, likely encountering legal, regulatory and environmental hurdles.

So where does the Oakland waterfront go from here?

In a lengthy report unveiled this spring outlining Oakland’s plans for downtown, the waterfront and Jack London Square feature heavily for their various existing offerings: restaurants, bars, historic monuments, a hotel, a bowling alley and a terminal that sends ferries to San Francisco.

But the same plan notes that areas to the west of Jack London Square — including Howard Terminal, the site of the doomed A’s redevelopment — will be “maintained for industrial uses.”

Business owners around the waterfront say the commercial district is mostly faring well but could use a significant boost in foot traffic, given that it is cut off from downtown Oakland by I-880.

Hauser, of the improvement district, was among those excited to see the A’s potentially build the massive ballpark-and-housing development at Howard Terminal, which encompasses 55 acres of port land currently used as a staging area for shipping containers and trucks at the busy industrial harbor.

The A’s aren’t done fighting legal battles on the waterfront, despite being set to move to West Sacramento next year, potentially en route to Las Vegas.

Last week, a federal judge sent to trial the baseball franchise’s legal complaint against longstanding manufacturing plant Schnitzer Steel, which would’ve neighbored the A’s development and which the team has accused of failing to prevent air-quality violations and environmental hazards. Radius Recycling, the parent company of Schnitzer Steel, did not respond to an interview request.

In a statement, the A’s noted an investment of $100 million over six years to bring the team’s ballpark dreams to life.

On an average weekday afternoon, the Bay-facing Jack London Square is somehow both scenic and full of businesses — but also noticeable for its relative quiet. Mostly empty walkways are filled by seagulls.

A smattering of tourists and port workers on lunch breaks amble around with no shortage of places to sit. The A’s haven’t said when they will close the team’s headquarters, which sits adjacent to the square.

“The stadium would’ve brought more business to the economy and this area,” said Juan Ferrell, a manager at Scott’s Seafood Grill and Bar, which opened at the square nearly a half-century ago. “We need more attractions here. I was sad that it wasn’t possible.”

In the wake of the city’s divorce from the A’s, Mayor Sheng Thao had said the Howard Terminal property was still ripe for any developer who wanted to step forward.

Oakland had cleared multiple regulatory hurdles and raised nearly $260 million to support some kind of public-facing real estate there, Thao had reminded the public at the time.

But much of that progress was undone last month when the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission agreed in a court settlement with a shipping-industry coalition to reinstate a clause that Howard Terminal must be prioritized for maritime uses or the shipping of goods by sea.

The two sides settled after agreeing that the A’s deal is officially dead, in part because the team’s negotiating period with the Port of Oakland expired over a year ago.

As a result, Oakland likely won’t have any housing or commercial real estate built right up against the bay waters any time soon — especially when there isn’t a major professional sports franchise leading the charge behind a development.

In March, private shipping industry groups developed a summary of how they’d instead like to “advance the industrial waterfront.” Charging stations for electric-powered trucks and off-shore wind energy projects ranked near the top of the list. An industry representative said there’s some wiggle room for other plans, but not a lot.

“We were philosophically opposed to giving up the property for” the A’s development, said Mike Jacob of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, “but as a practical matter, we were interested in sitting down to (discuss) seaport compatibility with a ballpark and not housing. It would’ve smoothed the path toward some non-maritime redevelopment.”

These obstacles are, in some ways, not a bug but a feature of the waterfront, which infamously — and illegally — fell under the full ownership of Horace Carpentier, the first mayor of Oakland in the mid-19th century, who eventually sold his control of the land at a profit to Southern Pacific Railroad.

The messy history of the waterfront is fresh on the mind of Elliott Myles, a co-owner of Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon — the bar where American novelist Jack London himself would study in his youth.

Myles, who has witnessed multiple ambitious redevelopments at the square in his time, always thought the A’s proposal was a “pipe dream.” Envisioning the waterfront’s economic future, he said, is more complicated than it seems.

“If you want more bustle, you need to do something with the square other than restaurants and bars,” Myles said. “People need something else to do.”

Horn Barbecue, which caught fire last November and has remained closed amid its owner’s legal troubles, will now reopen 11 a.m. Friday at 464 8th Street, a short walk from the BART station in downtown Oakland.

“It’s first come, first served, so make sure you arrive early,” Horn wrote on his Instagram account about the big reopening. “A heartfelt thank you to everyone for your unwavering support–your love has been our strength during this time.”

RELATED: Matt Horn’s new “Kowbird” cookbook offers up plenty of chicken-centric inspiration

The acclaimed barbecue eatery will open at the same address as one of Horn’s other restaurants, Matty’s Old Fashioned, a happy-hour burger spot, with the two sites apparently blending their menus in a hybrid setup.

The move will take Horn Barbecue away from its old home in West Oakland, where Horn owns a third restaurant, Kowbird, which is known for its fried chicken.

The barbecue site’s reopening resolves a messy saga that began last fall when the Mandela Parkway location mysteriously caught fire, just days after Horn had publicized that the building had been tagged by graffiti.

The reopening also coincides with another resolution for Horn. Last week, he signed a new legal agreement with his former business partner, David Kim, who had sued him for $167,000 in allegedly unpaid wages.

Under the new agreement, Horn will make regular payments to Kim — whose attorneys previously had alleged that Horn had begun ducking them after initially sending checks. Details of the deal are confidential; an attorney for Kim declined to comment.

Horn also owes an $83,000 settlement to his former meat distributor over allegations of unpaid invoices, and he was ordered by a court last month to pay $64,000 to Cooks Company Produce, a San Francisco-based distributor that had sought damages from Horn over a contract dispute.

Horn’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The acclaimed restaurateur has received help along the way, including $130,000 from a GoFundMe launched after last year’s fire, plus $100,000 in federal COVID-19 relief money from Alameda County — funding that the county supervisors unanimously approved in February.

For years, the city and the county have co-owned the former Raiders practice site, which houses an athletics facility and multiple soccer fields in Alameda, as well as the Malibu property, a giant parking lot adjacent to the Coliseum in East Oakland.

It is an arrangement that both sides agree has often been awkward, particularly when negotiating with sports franchises who want to use one of the sites — most recently, Oakland Roots SC, a popular minor-league soccer club.

Now the city is proposing to buy the county’s half-ownership share of the old Raiders site for $12 million, and its equal share of the Malibu lot for $8.7 million. The acquisition plans will go before the City Council on April 30.

Precise details of the sale still need to be worked out, but if successful it would keep the fast-growing Roots franchise — plus a companion women’s team, the Soul — anchored in and around Oakland.

The proposed move comes as jilted fans are still feeling the sting of the A’s leaving for Sacramento en route to Las Vegas, signaling the end of major pro sports in Oakland.

Currently, the Roots train in the old Raiders compound at 1150 Harbor Bay Parkway in Alameda. Earlier this year, San Francisco real estate firm Prologis offered to buy the entire 16-acre property for $24 million and lease it to both the Roots and the Soul, which had its inaugural season last year.

The Roots and Soul also hope to build a temporary, 10,000-seat modular stadium on the 8.8-acre Malibu lot. While it’s being built, the teams next year will begin playing nearby, in the concrete ballpark that houses the departing A’s. It will mark the Roots’ return to Oakland after two years in Hayward.

“We look forward to this coming to a conclusion as quickly as possible,” team President Lindsay Barenz said in a statement to this news organization supporting the city’s acquisition of the properties.

The journey to this point involved a number of convoluted twists and turns, demonstrating the tricky nature of two separate governments co-owning properties together.

Months of negotiations between the two entities and the Roots left the agencies in disagreement over how much the sites were worth.

The city also rejected previous offers by the county to simply swap the holdings, which would’ve kept the Malibu lot in the county’s hands while the city owned the Raiders compound.

“I guess initially when it was set up this way, there were merits and advantages,” Supervisor Nate Miley who chairs the county board, said in an interview. “I think over the course of the last 20 or 30 years, it’s been shown that both entities being in negotiations hasn’t served the public very well.

Discussions of a resolution appeared stuck Tuesday at a county supervisors’ meeting until Leigh Hanson, chief of staff to Mayor Sheng Thao, called in to propose the city outright buy both the county’s shares. The supervisors were mostly receptive.

Oakland is counting on revenue from the sale of the Raiders compound to help patch up a historic budget deficit that is threatening severe cuts to city departments — possibly even layoffs.

Perhaps the most complicated real-estate partnership between Oakland and Alameda County is their joint shares of the Coliseum property, which includes the stadium, arena and vast parking space in between.

The county sold its share of the complex to the A’s for $85 million in 2019, while the city more recently entered exclusive negotiations with a development group to sell its share for $115 million.

That firm, the African-American Sports and Entertainment Group, is currently in negotiations with the A’s to buy out their ownership share. Officials on both sides of those talks have declined to comment on the details, citing a non-disclosure agreement.

Both city and county officials have been supportive of a deal on that front, with Miley suggesting it would heal some of the “ill will” felt by the public toward the baseball franchise, which is set to leave Oakland next year.

The minor-league Roots, meanwhile, are competing in the U.S. Open Cup, a historic tournament where both major and minor teams participate.

After defeating El Farolito Soccer Club, a San Francisco team owned by the popular Bay Area burrito chain of the same name, the Roots’ next opponent on May 7 will be the San Jose Earthquakes — the major-league franchise owned by none other than John Fisher, who also owns the A’s.

“Even if we don’t come up with a win, just a ‘F– John Fisher or ‘sell the team’ chant would be sufficient,” said Jorge Leon, an A’s superfan who led fan activism efforts to keep the team from relocating. “But a ‘dub’ would be a cherry on top; it’d be amazing.”

So when the A’s migrate 86 miles northeast next year — abandoning the country’s largest ballpark, left largely vacant by a jaded fanbase — they should expect to be greeted with open arms by a community aching to prove it deserves more than just three or four years of their time.

West Sacramento, home to the ballpark where the A’s will play, is not actually in the city of Sacramento — or even in Sacramento County, for that matter. It’s a sleepy Yolo County city of about 50,000 just across the river from its urban namesake, which is five times larger.

But here, in both this riverfront community and the unsung state capital that it neighbors, exists an earnestness that now feels foreign in Oakland.

Major professional sports in Sacramento are not seen through the lens of wealthy franchise owners dangling nostalgia as an excuse to run a perennially disappointing baseball franchise.

To the people of this region, the promise of a Major League Baseball team is instead an opportunity to nudge the region forward in its ambitions of being taken seriously, both economically and culturally, as a California metropolis.

On Thursday, after a fairly quiet lunch hour at Kin Thai Street Eatery in the city’s midtown — which is slowly recovering from a loss of bustle during the pandemic — a lifelong A’s fan and Sacramento native working the counter had high hopes for his favorite team’s arrival.

“I watch every single year, and it sucks when they lose and trade away all our good players,” said Daniel Samas as he cleaned a table. “But no, I’m excited for them to play here. We need some more exciting things to do in Sacramento.”

The way sports has galvanized the city was especially apparent in the Downtown Commons, where residents attribute a recent revitalization of the district to Vivek Ranadive, the owner of their beloved basketball team, the Kings.

“I think keeping (the Kings) here revamped our downtown and … uplifted an area of the city that was dilapidated,” said Jason Duvall, a Sacramento resident hanging out at Henry’s Lounge, a midtown sports bar. “You know Gotham after the bad guy comes through? That’s kind of how it was. There was nothing going on down there.”

Many envision Sacramento as a cultural success story in the making that can fully blossom when another major sports franchise arrives.

In some cases, these residents are able to balance that hope with real empathy for Oaklanders who are heartbroken about the A’s departure.

“When a team leaves, they aren’t really rooted there anymore, and it changes their identity,” said 18-year-old Dominic Godi, who stood outside the Golden 1 Center, just before the Kings were set to play a game that held high stakes over their postseason fortunes. “I think it’s sad the A’s are leaving Oakland; the owners don’t care about the fanbase.”

But in more conservative corners of Sacramento, locals are quick to cast the jilted East Bay city as having blown its chance at retaining its sports teams, despite millions of dollars in grant money officials there raised to support a new waterfront stadium development.

The Coliseum “is almost 60 years old; it was never going to work,” said Brian Smithey, an A’s fan since they first arrived in Oakland in 1968 who’s now excited about the relocation.

This perception appears to persist even amid a large influx of Bay Area transplants who moved to Sacramento during the pandemic. The A’s are hardly the only ones to make the journey; the spokesperson and city manager of West Sacramento are native to Vallejo and San Jose, respectively.

Sacramento culture is “being more diluted every day,” said Kings fan Barry Brun. “They’re bringing the Bay Area culture here.” His partner, Nancy Wynn, jumped in: “Some of it is good! But I guess that’s the growing pains of growing more populous.”

Meanwhile, despite its unique riverfront, the heart of West Sacramento is akin to the sprawling commercial district of a suburb, packed with fast-food places, wide roadways and a successive run of strip malls.

Tucked within one of those giant plazas is the Kick’n Mule Restaurant and Sports Bar, a prime spot to watch games. On Thursday afternoon, the owner and manager were busy plotting business strategies for the upcoming A’s era as sporting events played out overhead across numerous television screens.

Would serving calamari, they wondered, help attract Bay Area crowds who might pre-game there before heading to the nearby ballpark?

“Whether the A’s stay or go, we’ll earn the popularity and volume while they’re here and capitalize on that,” said the owner, Ravi Ram. He added later about Oakland, “You just hear about all the bad vibes there; I avoid it these days.”

Ironically, Oakland and Sacramento seem to share in the underdog spirit commonly found in mid-major cities trying to subvert the reputations that precede them: Sacramento as sleepy and uninspiring, Oakland as dangerous and dysfunctional.

Ranadive, who resides in Atherton, sold his minority share in the Golden State Warriors last decade to become majority owner of the Kings, keeping the NBA franchise in Sacramento after the previous owners had tried to facilitate a relocation to Seattle or even, for a few dramatic days, to Virginia.

The city contributed $223 million to the Golden 1 Center’s construction through bonds and other new fees — an initiative ushered along by former Mayor Kevin Johnson, a retired NBA all-star.

Ranadive, meanwhile, was an architect of the new A’s deal to play rent-free in the 10,000-seat West Sacramento ballpark, which hosts another team he owns, the Giants’ triple-A minor-league affiliate River Cats.

ESPN reported this week that Ranadive, a friend of A’s owner John Fisher, is privately wagering that the A’s vision of constructing a Vegas ballpark ultimately crumbles and the team winds up staying for a much longer term.

“We do see it as an opportunity to showcase to Major League Baseball and the world what can be done at Sutter Health Park, and brand ourselves as a place that can support a sports team,” Aaron Laurel, the West Sacramento city manager, said in an interview.

Unlike the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the A’s will not be known as the Sacramento A’s of West Sacramento when they arrive, but instead simply as the Athletics — a team from nowhere, in transit.

But if the A’s do eventually want to stay in the Sacramento area, they would likely want to build a new stadium rather than continue at Sutter Health Park, where at full capacity 4,000 fans would crowd an outfield lawn that saw just a few dozen scattered on picnic blankets during an evening River Cats home game.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing all-stars play in my backyard,” said Chris Holdaway, who sat on the grass with his 10-month-old daughter, Emilia. “But yeah, this place will get pretty busy.”

The walkways of the stadium’s clean, understated concourse were filled with hip-hop and country music alike as the River Cats readied for a Thursday game against the El Paso Chihuahuas.

Amid a sea of black River Cats merchandise was a man in a familiar, unmistakably green-and-white SELL T-shirt — the all-caps directive that summarizes the Oakland fans’ message this past year to Fisher, the A’s owner.

Carter White, a Richmond resident who commutes to Davis for work and often stops by River Cats games afterward, waited patiently for a teenage girl in a cowboy hat to finish a rendition of the national anthem on the field as some fans clutched their chests and sang along.

White then returned to bashing Fisher, vowing to never watch another A’s game while the team is owned by the man who took it away from Oakland.

“The idea with Sacramento is it’s not the Bay Area,” White said of the two regions’ dynamics. “I don’t think Oakland has the same insecurity toward San Francisco as the perception in Sacramento.”

What followed that night was a high-scoring contest typical of the minor leagues: the River Cats fell behind 7-1 early, and by the fifth inning some fans were headed back to the enormous parking lot. As she strolled out, one woman told an usher, “I hope they have better luck after we leave!”

By nightfall, her hopes had come true; the River Cats stormed back to clinch a 10-9 victory over the Chihuahuas — a fitting comeback for a city with much bigger sports dreams, where giving up on a team is the only sign of defeat.