This was too easy. Me, six days ago:
If the news cycle demands an extra booster shot of threatdown, we could maybe see [Oakland A’s president Dave] Kaval fly to Vegas or Portland and meet with local officials there, because that often works.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Monday night:
Oakland Athletics officials will visit Southern Nevada next week to explore moving the Major League Baseball club to Las Vegas.
The Review-Journal goes on to report that, according to “sources,” the A’s move threat team plans to meet with officials in other cities as well. It adds that Kaval and owner John Fisher are looking for “a private-public partnership” like the one that built the Las Vegas Raiders stadium, which readers will recall involved Raiders owner Mark Davis getting $750 million in public subsidies and paying $0 in rent, so really who wouldn’t look for that?
The question everyone will be asking now is “Are the A’s serious about moving or just bluffing?” and the answer, as always, is “Why can’t it be both?” There is no harm in burning a few thousand frequent flyer miles to, as Pittsburgh Penguins owner Mario Lemieux once said, “go and have a nice dinner and come back,” which serves the dual purpose of seeing what other cities have to offer and sparking headlines back at home about how a move is imminent if the team’s owner doesn’t get what he wants. If you play your cards right, you can maybe get a bidding war going between multiple cities; but even if you play your cards wrong, it’s a proven way to get subsidy-shy legislators back to the bargaining table, or maybe even resetting the clocks so that a stadium bill can be approved before a midnight deadline.
Weirdly, hardly anyone seems to see much wrong with elected officials in cities like Las Vegas enabling this kind of extortion scheme, even though it’s been 26 years since Arthur Rolnick and Melvin Burstein of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve decried it as a wasteful “economic war among the states” that leaves everyone worse off:
When states compete through subsidies and preferential taxes for specific businesses, the overall economy suffers. From the states’ point of view each may appear better off competing for particular businesses, but the overall economy ends up with less of both private and public goods than if such competition was prohibited.
Everyone worse off but for the team owner who ends up with a new stadium with someone else footing the bills, that is.
Rolnick and Burstein called for Congress to use the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to regulate interstate bidding wars for relocations of everything from sports teams to auto plants; if you prefer, there’s still David Minge’s excise tax on corporate subsidies idea. Or maybe we could start with a little public shaming, since if nothing else that’s the 2021 thing to do? Hey, Carolyn Goodman, why are you helping a California billionaire play off cities against each other to extract the biggest taxpayer check? Do you hate America, Carolyn Goodman? I’m thinking you hate America. #CarolynGoodmanhatesAmerica
I still like to think that a time can come when people across the political spectrum can see that this is a game where only the respective owners win. That naivete just won’t go away.
I think a lot of us would like to see sanity in the subsidy game. I am not opposed to all subsidies all the time. There are (rare) occasions when a modest subsidy can generate real and long term benefits.
More often, though, the subsidies are massive and the benefits – if any – are not well defined and are not tied to any of the subsidy and/or funding.
While the A’s are being especially egregious in their behaviour, who wouldn’t want Jerry Reinsdorff’s “I was thinking more like three thirds from you and no thirds from me” funding model?
Cities don’t have to say yes. In fact, they don’t even have to take the meeting in which the question is asked.
Mlb will be worse off but if there is a city that could get a deal done very quickly it would be Vegas. I wouldn’t get too cute thinking the Athletics have no fall back position
Every sports team has a fall back position. That is what the perceived “ownership” of theoretical franchises in every city that doesn’t already have one sports cartels are all about.
If Oakland city officials drink the koolaid on “we might lose our team” (when they are not the owners and the team does not belong to the city or it’s fans any more than Amazon belongs to a city that hosts one of their warehouses/sweat shops) then they are already finished.
Fisher owns a baseball team. If MLB has changed it’s position on the portability of that asset then he can move it wherever he wants and can get approved by the owners group.
If Carolyn Goodman wants to get into a bidding war to host the A’s (which would be on their fourth home city by then), then she is the patsy, not Oakland.
But who knows? It wouldn’t be the first time a mayor noted for playing (semi) hardball (Schaaf) utterly caved and gave the sports owner more than he was actually asking for.
Question I don’t know anything about Cali Politics but is Schaaf a future candidate for Senator or Governor? I think the decision to let them go or to keep them has already been made. What is going on right now is just a very slow walked theater to prep the public for whatever the decision has been made. They are just figuring out of to soften the blow. Whatever the decision the Pols are going to be in the doghouse with someone. The question is how big and how bad.
She hasn’t started any ambitions for higher office. Even if she had, again, polling shows that voters really don’t care about the status of pro sports teams as a campaign issue.
Anon, feel your pain. Not going to waste anymore energy.
Greatly appreciate the bay breeze you sent this way today.
It’s very ironic that an invasive scam monopoly, the fed, decries any other form of scam lol What I can’t understand either is how all these examples about the machinations of sports owners/leagues and buddies in gov isn’t carried over and is magically isolated from gov’s, “popular” movements out of nowhere, “emergencies” of all types, the cognitive dissonance(double mind of St James 2000 years ago) of the last 50 years in the western world is flabbergasting.
It may be highly ironic, but it’s not a surprise. Who would understand the game better than someone who already plays it?
As several of the banks and insurance groups who created the 2008/09 bust out of the US/World economy noted, ‘ if an SEC investigator ever figured out what we were doing we would just hire them on the spot for more money than they ever dreamed of making’.
Amazing! Saw one person here in the Bay Area who supports the Howard Terminal plan write that the proposed $855 million in TIF is “found money” and “no cost to the city of Oakland.” If that’s the case, every municipality across this country should be transformed into massive TIF districts to claim all that free money!
FYI lots of land adjacent to The Rio (soon to be a Hyatt brand) in Vegas that could be used for a ballpark and related real estate development. Former owner Lew Wolff is a hotelier who’s run/owned Hyatt’s in the past; hmmm?…
I was hearing similar (the same?) arguments in a Tweet today. They say it’s the ‘District’ that will owe the money, forgetting that the District is effectively the same as the City. If $855 million in bonds are created, someone is going to want to be paid back.
Paid back with interest!
Oakland can play this game too. Have dinner with Amazon and other shipping company reps and show them this sweet piece of real-estate that may be available soon.
Yes. Didn’t the A’s sign a one year lease extension last season? Or have I missed a renewal somewhere along the way?
Either way, if they do make an agreement to relocate, I’d be in favour of the city refusing any and all extensions. Go.
I keep bringing up the Coliseum site when talking about this. After a Planning Commission meeting where the problems with the HT proposal were thoroughly discussed, I more firmly believe that HT is a feint, that the A’s ownership is using this as a distraction while they get all of the very valuable Coliseum land at a good price. Then they say HT was just too hard, the Coliseum site doesn’t work for baseball, and we’re off to ???.
I heard a rumor that Fisher is pushing the A’s now because their first payment on the Coliseum property (the half sold to them by the County) is coming due soon. If the A’s and City don’t come to a deal, the A’s would be in the weird spot of owning half the rights to the land with a hostile partner.
I disagree with Neil that HT will happen at all. As one who is familiar with the politics of Oakland, I don’t see the City Council going for a deal that would cost even as little as two or three hundred million. And that amount probably doesn’t pencil out for Fisher, UNLESS he gets the development rights for the Coliseum site. Could the Oakland City Council fall for that? My guess is no but I could easily be wrong.
Why would have Fisher purchased the county land in the first place. Did the city mislead him in thinking he would get a deal with them
I tend to agree with you Vinnie. I don’t believe the A’s are at all committed to HT. It is just expedient to use the city’s own preference for that site to their benefit.
I also have my doubts that Fisher sees Vegas as a viable alternative (for the reasons Neil has espoused in detail on similar threads). But why not use it? What’s the worst that could happen? He doesn’t have a bidding war now and if he fails at gaining traction in Vegas (or Cheyenne or Boise or…) he still doesn’t have one.
As discussed on another A’s post, no-one seems actually sure what Fisher owns here. He bought out (or intends to buy out) the county’s interest in the jointly owned parcel, but there is no demarcation line as to what he physically owns and what he doesn’t. He can’t have acquired the county’s interest in the JPA as that organization doesn’t exist (and, as a private entity, would be unlikely to be able to hold such a regulatory interest anyway). The land does not appear to have been transferred to a private corporation of any kind that is jointly controlled by the city and the entity that Fisher has no doubt created to receive his share of the parcel.
So it’s all a bit weird. You can’t own something without either a title or shares in the company that holds the title. As far as I can tell, Fisher appears to hold neither at present.
Does he actually have anything other than an agreement to purchase?
Good question. It reminds me of the story of two friends who bought a boat together. They’re no longer friends. :)
I think they figured the City would also ‘play ball’ and just let them get full ownership.
This joint ownership is an odd situation. I don’t think either party could build something without the others approval. Given that one of the parties is the agency that would approve any development or General Plan Amendment is even stranger.
If Fischer gets bad vibes from the City and can back out of the purchase, that’s certainly an option for him.
Listened into a committee meeting of the Oakland CC today. This will be on the Council agenda on July 20 with a possible special study session before that.
There were a few comments from some influential groups in Oakland arguing against the project.
The City Attorney mentioned that they need to clarify the title of the item as the term sheet has multiple versions going around (?).