Borenstein: Rejoice, the Oakland A’s ballpark scam is over
Oakland residents should rejoice that the great A’s ballpark scam is finally over.
The team’s billionaire owner, John Fisher, and his lackey Dave Kaval were never “Rooted in Oakland.” They didn’t care about building a ballpark adjacent to Jack London Square on the port’s Howard Terminal.
As I wrote two years ago when the team released sketchy details of its proposal, the plan was a massive waterfront development deal that happened to include a ballpark, not the other way around. The announcement late Wednesday night of the team’s departure bears that out.
Assuming Nevada officials sign off on the deal, the A’s are headed for Las Vegas, where they plan to build a new ballpark for $1.5 billion. Notice that, unlike their plans for Oakland, they’re only talking about a ballpark in the desert, not building a small city there.
If the A’s had really wanted to keep the team in Oakland, they could have had a stadium here for roughly the same price tag. They could have built it at Howard Terminal or, if they hadn’t turned up their noses at their current Coliseum location, which has tremendous space and existing public transit access, they could have had a new park built there by now.
Kaval claimed two years ago that the Howard Terminal project would cost $12 billion, of which $1 billion would be the team’s share to develop the ballpark. Kaval’s numbers were never reliable, but they provided a sense of the ballpark cost and an indication of the real priority.
Fisher and Kaval only wanted to keep the team in Oakland if they could make a killing on a ginormous real estate venture: 3,000 residential units, a hotel, an indoor performance center and about 1.8 million square feet of commercial and retail space.
To help put the size in perspective, two of the buildings in the development would have been 600 feet high, about 50% greater than Oakland’s current tallest building.
The problem was that the project never penciled out. Fisher and Kaval were counting on massive taxpayer subsidies to provide the needed infrastructure. Then-Mayor Libby Schaaf, a fountain of public optimism about keeping the team, kept insisting taxpayers wouldn’t subsidize the project even while she went begging to the county, state and federal governments for money.
But through two years of negotiations, and through two mayors, the city administration was never able to publicly provide cost estimates that demonstrated how the project would pay for itself — how city taxpayers would be protected.
A big problem Kaval and Fisher faced was that most of Oakland’s elected officials didn’t fall for the ballpark scam. They treated the project for what it was — a massive development — and insisted that it include lots of affordable housing as other developers are required to provide.
City Council members, who would need to ultimately approve the Howard Terminal development, kept saying that they wanted to see the numbers. They weren’t going to be suckered by the A’s as Alameda County supervisors had been.
Alameda County, which co-owned the Coliseum with the city of Oakland, agreed in 2019 to sell its half to the A’s for $85 million. It was a sweetheart deal, with no public bidding, for valuable public land the team said it wanted to develop to help fund the Howard Terminal project six miles away.
County supervisors — only two of whom are still on the board — said then that the deal was aimed at keeping the A’s in town. But there was no requirement in the sale that the team would stay.
Adding insult to injury, the A’s 50% share in the Coliseum now gives the team veto power over proposed development plans there. So, while the A’s might be leaving town, the East Bay hasn’t heard the last of Fisher and Kaval.
It will be sad to lose the A’s and the exciting memories of their glorious past, which predate Fisher’s purchase of the team. It will be sad even though Fisher’s penny-pinching has turned the A’s into Major League Baseball’s worst team.
The good news is this could have been much worse. The city dodged a financial bullet. It has enough problems to confront without Fisher, who has a net worth of $2.2 billion, tapping the public coffers.
“Financially, Oakland is better off today than it was yesterday,” Stanford sports economist Roger Noll said Thursday. That’s because sports teams do not pay their way.
They might enhance civic pride, but, as Noll has said previously, the common arguments for public subsidies “are based on the idea that a sports team is a magnet for other things. That’s the part that’s not true.”
Don’t fool yourself. Fisher and Kaval never planned to keep the team here unless they could milk the city and its taxpayers. For Oakland that would have been a foolish investment.
Divorce is hard. But this was an abusive relationship. As Mayor Sheng Thao said, “the fans and our residents deserve better.”
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