Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced a thing yesterday:
The mayor of Oakland announced that the city has reached a framework agreement with the Ronnie Lott group for a new stadium, with the hopes of keeping the Raiders in Oakland.
“It is exciting that we have reached a conceptual framework agreement with the Lott group,” said Mayor Libby Schaaf.
So what exactly would that be, a “framework agreement” with a developer to build a stadium for a football team that isn’t actually party to the agreement? Schaaf’s office hasn’t actually announced anything — and her press spokesperson didn’t respond to my queries — but NBC Bay Area’s Ray Ratto sums up the state of things as follows:
That stadium is considered by most experts, including Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, to run in the neighborhood of $1 billion, with the city and county’s contribution limited to infrastructure improvements that are loosely estimated now at around $190 million, to be generated by some new tax or taxes as opposed to access to the general fund.
So: The city and county will put in maybe $190 million for infrastructure, which it will get from somewhere, while the developers will put in $1 billion, which it will earn back by charging the Raiders something. Or maybe getting an equity stake in the team. None of which has been worked out yet with team owner Mark Davis.
Maybe someone on the board of supervisors or city council, who would have to vote on this, can shed some light?
Alameda supervisors discussed the proposed deal behind closed doors Tuesday morning, but Supervisor Scott Haggerty, the president of the board, downplayed Schaaf’s comments that the county was close to voting on Lott’s proposal. Haggerty said the city has not released information supervisors have requested. He would not say what that information was.
Well, then. Maybe Schaaf and Lott have actually agreed on something, but if so, they aren’t saying what it is, and even then, it may not matter unless Davis agrees to have the Raiders play there. She got her name in the paper under “getting things done” headlines, though, so I suppose that’s a short holiday work week well spent if you’re a mayor.
Conceptual Framework sounds a lot like “we have an agreement on the things we will need to have an agreement on in order to even begin discussing the construction of a stadium”… but whatever. As you say, I suppose it gives Schaaf the ability to claim something has been achieved without specifically naming anything…. more or less the equivalent of quasi presidential tweets about how organized and efficient things are, without naming the things that are organized and efficient, much less providing any supporting or corroborating information.
A couple of questions though: How can they know how much the stadium will cost when they don’t even know how big it will be, where it will be or what the design might feature?
Assuming they aren’t building a 73,000 seat version of Jerryworld, why would it cost the equivalent of that?
Haven’t most people “involved” agreed that the Raiders actual capacity need in Oakland is in the 50-55k range?
Stadium politics always starts with a bunch of hoo-hah that means nothing. It’s the mustard seed that eventually grows into a publicly funded billionaire’s palace!
Well then I guess it’s good that Mark Davis is so poor that he’s not even a billionaire… just a several hundred millionaire.
He inherited his way into the Club of 32 where he’s not well liked. Of course, getting the publicly funded palace could be his first step on the way to being a billionaire! But I think he’s not bright enough to make it.