Alameda County may discuss $350m A’s stadium tax kickback on Oct. 26, or not

Everything surrounding the proposed Oakland A’s stadium at Howard Terminal has been pretty much on hold since late August, when Alameda County, which the Oakland city officials had pegged to help contribute $495 million in tax kickbacks to pay for new roads and overpasses and underpasses and other “infrastructure” improvements around the proposed stadium development site, called the plan “too speculative and uncertain” and said it didn’t plan on holding a vote in September as had been previously expected. But now it looks like the county’s board of supervisors will at least talk about the plan at an upcoming meeting, according to the Bay City News Service:

The discussion will take place at the regular board meeting scheduled for Oct. 26, said [board president Keith] Carson’s letter, which was addressed to Elizabeth Ortega-Toro of the Alameda Labor Council, a coalition of labor unions, and Andreas Cluver of the Alameda County Building and Construction Trades Council.

The meeting is scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m.

At least, maybe, possibly. The San Francisco Chronicle, which first broke the news of the existence of this letter last week, put it this way:

“Given the magnitude of this issue and the fact that it has been stated many times publicly by the A’s representative that a final decision date on this project is December,” Carson wrote that the earliest the supervisors could discuss the ballpark is Oct. 26.

That’s not quite the same thing! There’s no agenda posted yet for the October 26 board meeting, so it’s not entirely clear yet what is actually going to be discussed.

It’s also not clear yet how much county tax money we’re talking about. The Bay City News Service cites Carson’s letter as saying it would be “more than $350 million of projected future revenues,” based on “the 45-year life of the financing district”; that may be just totaling up future annual tax kickbacks even if they’re made far in the future, though, which is like calculating how much you just spent on a house by adding up all your future mortgage payments. (The most apples-to-apples way to figure out cost is in present value, which can be calculated either by plugging future payments into a formula to discount them based on costs in the future being worth less than present-day ones, or by just looking at how much in present-day construction bonds can be covered by the future payments, which is the equivalent of seeing how much house your future mortgage payments will buy.) The total amount of money to be raised by siphoning off future property tax payments from the stadium district is $495 million, which includes a slurry of city and county taxes — it’s possible that Carson has gotten a breakdown of which level of government would give up what, but if so he hasn’t shared it yet.

The problems with tax increment financing, or TIFs, which is what this funding plan is, are by now well documented, and can be summed up as “just because the government would only be rebating new property tax revenue doesn’t mean it would be new new tax revenue, in the sense of free money falling from the sky.” For instance, the Chronicle story cites Oakland’s consultant Century Urban — a real estate management and advisory company that has worked for the San Francisco Giants, so surely is not inclined to see things through MLB-colored glasses — as saying the amount of property tax money the county would get from the stadium site would rise from $70,000 a year to $10.7 million a year. But 1) that doesn’t take into account that all the new housing and businesses will require spending on new schools and police and fire services and other things that those property taxes would normally be used to pay for; and 2) there’s no indication whether some of that property-tax money would come in anyway from new development elsewhere the demand for which will instead be cannibalized by the Howard Terminal buildings.

(The good thing is that these two forces work in opposite directions: If Howard Terminal is just shifting development around, it doesn’t really increase the cost of city services. The less-good thing is that only of them has to be true for that $10.63 million in “new” tax money not to be a windfall at all.)

All this should make for an interesting county board meeting on October 26, if it ends up on the agenda at all. Maybe we’ll also find out more about where Oakland plans to come up with the other $360 million in infrastructure funding A’s owner John Fisher is demanding. The clock is ticking, as Fisher is set to announce which cities he may or may not consider moving the A’s to sometime after the World Series, a period of time that starts on November 4 and ends when the Earth runs out of oxygen a billion years from now. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Games of chicken can drag on a while, that’s just how they are.