It’s been a while since anyone has reported on the $1 billion or more in infrastructure spending — much of it to build new underpasses and overpasses and shuttle bus routes to get fans to an otherwise largely inaccessible industrial area — that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf is trying to raise for a new A’s stadium, and today the San Francisco Chronicle decided to give a shot at tallying up where all the potential subsidy money would come from. The answer: wherever Schaaf can find it.
- “The city said it is in the process of securing $321.5 million … in state and federal grants, and local funds.” This will presumably be mostly from the state slush fund that California Gov. Gavin Newsom set up last summer for the project, but which still hasn’t been formally allocated because reasons.
- “The city said it has applied for more than $180 million in federal grants and is looking at another $140 million in regional, state and federal grant opportunities.” City Administrator Ed Reiskin said the city isn’t likely to get approved for all this money, leading to…
- “The city said it’s looking into issuing a limited obligation bond, which would raise money for infrastructure upgrades, then use hotel, sales and parking taxes generated by the project to pay off the debt.” The city has already agreed to kick back $495 million in property taxes to help the A’s make the Howard Terminal site stadium-ready, don’t forget; the new bonds would allow Oakland to siphon off other tax revenues from the development and spend it on off-site traffic and transit upgrades.
Reiskin said he doesn’t have an estimate for the total amount the city would have to cover — you’d think somebody in the city government would have crunched numbers on that by now, but maybe they don’t want to provide headline fodder — but simple addition shows that Oakland is now looking at collecting $1.13 billion in city, state, and federal money to spend on turning Howard Terminal from an isolated port facility to a place with lots of easy traffic and transit access, berms to block sea level rise, and all sorts of other goodies that would make it far more profitable for A’s owner John Fisher to develop. This is, needless to say, not the sort of thing that a typical property owner can demand to improve their hard-to-get-to, climate-crisis-flooding-prone land, but savvy negotiators creating leverage works on city officials, even if it’s mostly in the form of ominous tweets.
The Chronicle buries the lede a bit not only by not tallying up that $1.13 billion total, but also by failing to note that Schaaf’s solution to not wanting to saddle Oakland taxpayers with more costs is to saddle residents of the rest of California and the rest of the U.S. with more than $640 million in A’s site prep, which is what economists call “a fuckton of money.” Reiskin didn’t go into detail exactly what kind of grants he’s looking to tap, but as I warned last November, Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure act makes for a mighty big target:
While the Biden infrastructure bill is certainly designed to fund a whole lot of genuine public benefits like keeping bridges from falling down and keeping the power grid from failing, if there’s a a loophole that even part of a stadium or other pet development project can be rammed through, sports owners and their friends in local government are going to find it.
There are lots of interesting oversight questions here about how to let the government spend money on actual public goods without creating a slush fund for anything that people with enough lobbyists want funded with tax dollars, but that’s one for the libertarians and the bears to fight over. Right now, we have Oakland city officials wandering the earth hoping to find some other level of government to help them spend a billion dollars or so on keeping their local baseball team from threatening to move to a nonexistent stadium in Las Vegas, and that’s plenty to worry about for one blog post.
At this point the hilarious bottom line is: (1) there is a site for building a new stadium within the city of Oakland that is currently VERY TRANSPORTATION FRIENDLY and would require little in new infrastructure for either mass transit or cars, and it is the place where the present stadium already is; (2) there are numerous economically viable sites for building a new A’s stadium in northern California outside the city of Oakland but they are principally south of San Francisco in places in regard to which a nonbinding gentleman’s agreement was made in the 1990s WHEN THE A’S HAD EQUAL ATTENDANCE TO THE GIANTS and the Giants ownership has prevailed in enforcing this agreement among MLB club owners; and (3) A’s ownership, notwithstanding once having been slightly ahead of some analytical curves, has done nothing to deserve anything from the public for two decades.
This is all very easy guys, if anyone actually wanted to “solve” it.
I don’t know if to request $1.3 billion for something you already have at another site all because you say you will make more money at the other spot is the greatest insult to the general public but it’s got to be top ten.
Neil,
If Oakland finds those golden seat cushions and gets the $1.3 billion it’s looking for, would that be a record for public financing of a stadium/sports venue? While not technically for the actual ballpark, the funds are related to its ingress/egress while allowing A’s/Fisher to make tons of money on adjacent real estate deals.
I like Kenny’s ideas above: really wish the A’s would consider Coliseum site or revisit $an Jo$e. The current boondoggle effort is utterly ridiculous!
San Jose will never happen. The Giants will never give up the territory rights to something as lucrative as Silicon Valley, and the courts have already come down on their side.
As for the Coliseum, well, by that logic, it would’ve made more sense for the Giants to rebuild at Candlestick rather than a new stadium in the industrial wasteland that was China Basin. Fans want places to spend their money after the game, and teams can’t just hope development magically sprouts up around their stadium.
This has been said before, but the bonds don’t siphon off other tax revenues. They are “but-for”, meaning if the stadium doesn’t get built they don’t exist and the city gets nothing. And the grants are a competitive process: they will be given out by the feds either way, and if Oakland doesn’t get them, they go to another city.
I have no love for John Fisher, and the A’s have bungled this a million ways since it’s started. But disdain for ownership does not mean I want to see my team leave (my motto is, “support the team, not the regime”).
“industrial wasteland” is a bit of a stretch, at its worst (as per my grandfather) you would find the occasional dead hobo floating under the Lefty O’Doul Bridge.
“This has been said before, but the bonds don’t siphon off other tax revenues. They are ‘but-for,’ meaning if the stadium doesn’t get built they don’t exist and the city gets nothing.”
Not really, because some of them will be cannibalized from elsewhere — most obviously, sales taxes on hot dogs at the Coliseum go to Oakland, but sales taxes on hot dogs at Howard Terminal would be partly kicked back to pay for developing the stadium. Also, the stadium development getting built adds costs along with those taxes: If there’s housing there and the kids who live there need to go to school, and the property taxes are already committed to pay for the stadium, then taxpayers elsewhere in Oakland have to cover those costs.
“And the grants are a competitive process: they will be given out by the feds either way, and if Oakland doesn’t get them, they go to another city.”
Sure, but some other city might spend it on something that benefits more people than just the local rich guy. (Very possibly not, but we can at least hope.)
The “lucrative-ness” of Silicon Valley to the Giants IS A MYTH propped up by the pro-Giants, pro-SF media! Always has been. The Giants get no tax revenue from SV residents, their season tix base in SV is minimal, and even their direct corporate support from SV proper is minimal at best (from SVLG studies of early 2010’s); most likely still true today. If your SV claim was true the LA, CHI and NY teams would be fighting hard to carve out territories in their perspective metros. Sharing is caring!
So instead of building a new ballpark at supposedly “Candlestick East,” let’s spend $1.3 billion + in public funds on one of the worst spots in the Bay Area to get to/get out of?!
Neil already addressed your “free money falling from the sky” defense of the $1.3 billion +, so no need for me to go there.
SV is very lucrative! It’s not that the Giants currently get money from there, it’s that they own those rights which are quite valuable. Obviously, they have no need to build another stadium there right now.
When Lew Wolff tried to get those rights, the Giants asked for more than Wolff was willing to pay, hence the impasse.
It would make sense to have a team there due to the good climate, large population and corporate / individual wealth. But MLB doesn’t operate based on what’s best for the League as a whole.
Vinnie,
I sometimes wonder if Fisher (Wolff in retirement) see what they’re gonna pay at HT in poor a$$ Oakland ($12 BILL+) or Vegas (Relocation fee $1 BILL) and say to themselves “you know, the price that Larry (Baer) was offering for SV wasn’t that bad after all..” I’ve read it was around $250 MILL in 2013, and A’s ownership balked because the A’s granted those rights to the Giants back in 1992 for a whopping $0! BTW, I’m still waiting for the Giants to relocate down here to $J/SV and live up to the reasons they have said rights in the first place.
“But MLB doesn’t operate based on what’s best for the league as a whole”; damn straight!
Couple of things in case anyone is still reading.
1. The courts have said that MLB can prevent the A’s from moving to San Jose. This in no way precludes MLB owners from doing the obvious, simple, thing and recognizing that there is no serious or contractual sense in which the Giants have the “right” to San Jose.
2. When I lived in Oakland I did not want the A’s to move to San Jose, and I don’t believe there’s any special reason they should, as a competent franchise could do just fine in Oakland AND THIS ONE DID FOR SEVERAL DECADES. I do think any understanding of the absurdity of building at the Oakland port includes an understanding that San Jose – and many other easier to build, more accessible spots – are just sitting there.
3. I’m old enough to remember the location where a downtown Oakland stadium might usefully have been planned in 2000-02 – the Uptown neighborhood, specifically the area that became the anchor downtown housing project between San Pablo and Telegraph and 17th through 20th Street. Much as this space was idea for combining center city baseball with excellent transportation options, much as I love baseball, and much as the actual house I really did own about 20 blocks away at that time would have benefitted from this, it is hard to argue that this would have been a better use for the space then the housing that was actually built.
4. On the other hand, the various Bayfront locations, away from BART, detached from the center city because of the 880 corridor, and with extremely narrow geographies created by the needs of an extremely important container port, have always defied logic. Of course the current A’s management dreams of a downtown stadium because that’s how baseball has evolved in some other places, but there is a reason its been hard to convince anyone that these spaces are a good idea even before getting to money.
You know where the A’s could probably do fine in Northern California and fulfill the dream of a downtown/riverfront location? Sacramento.
5. There is a huge amount of denial and stupidity around concerning the demise of the A’s fanbase since the 1990s – people act as though the Bay Area is too small for two major league teams (insane when you stop counting narrowly what counts as the “area” and realize the hugeness of the overall Northern California market and how that compares to elsewhere in the country) or as though it was always inevitable that the Giants were going to be way more popular than the A’s (they were not in the 1980s-90s). It is true that the new Giants stadium and the three World Series have fundamentally changed things. But the demise of the A’s started with the building of Mount Davis at the Coliseum, which change the baseball watching experience dramatically, and continued with the anti-fan Moneyball strategy of continually trading and letting go of best players, in the face of direct competition in San Francisco, where spending more was always directly related to making more money.
6. There would be significantly less difficulty reimagining the land owned by the Coliseum authority into a viable space than moving elsewhere in the city while making a ton of money on housing development over there. Both existing sports facilities can be taken down, and all that surface parking is doing nothing for anyone. While this is not “downtown” – no place in Oakland is downtown compared to San Francisco downtown – it is still an urban area comparable to the locations of several other MLB stadiums. (It is in fact comparable to the places one finds the similarly market-positioned White Sox and Mets.)
Of course people would come to a new stadium in that location if the team offered them something to root for. On the other hand, a new stadium along the port with a nonspending management sounds like the worst of all worlds.
I’m not sure anyone seriously disagrees with the notion that building at the present site would be a better option than the disaster (financial and otherwise) that is likely to unfold at HT because the city won’t say no.
At best, it seems to me, the city is going to spend $1bn+ to turn it’s working port waterfront into… well… Cleveland.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that that is where we are.
Unless the city managers and elected officials grow a set and tell Fisher and co that they will contribute a fixed amount to rebuilding at the coliseum and NOTHING to the corruption of Oakland’s working port, we are likely to continue to see these idiots bidding against themselves in a ‘bribery’ auction over a franchise that appears to have nowhere better to move to anyway.
“On the other hand, a new stadium along the port with a nonspending management sounds like the worst of all worlds.”
But a new stadium would surely result in increased player spending like it did in Miami with the … uh, I withdraw my objection.
Great point but one clarification: the Moneyball startegy wasn’t created initially so theh could trade good players it was created BECAUSE they kept trading thise players.
This doesn’t defend what ownership has done since or cheap firesales (which my Blue Jays have been beneficiaries of).
It had been a while since I went to the old Oakland Arena, but I was there a few months ago for Paul McCartney. I suddenly remembered how lousy that location is. There is nothing to do outside the arena; the parking lot is large, but the ingress and egress are lousy; and so on.
But $1.3b in public funds makes me think the A’s need to just move on. They don’t need to look far to find two examples of how to finance these privately.
The A’s are suffering from a failure of imagination more than anything. Going to A’s games is torture because their ownership has no vision. They should sell the team.
If you could see before and after pictures from the areas around Oracle and Chase in San Francisco, you’d see the location isn’t the problem, it’s a failure of vision. Going to a Warriors game is fun because of the development around Chase. But when it took us 30 minutes to get out of Oakland Arena, then an hour to get out of the parking lot, and there really are no restaurants around these two facilities, this is a huge failure of vision.
I feel like the A’s are trying to make attending games miserable. That plan is working.
This is a good time to point out that the presence of a team(s) does NOT work on its own to bring economic revival to an area. The area around the Coliseum is still economically depressed despite having NFL, MLB and NBA teams there for decades.
People brag that the new Giants/Warriors brought vitality to that area.
Mission Bay has been the target of development for a long time. There’s the huge new UCSF development, hospitals, new light rail line and tons of new housing. This all would have happened with or without the Warriors being there.
Also, the area to the north of Oracle Park has seen an enormous increase in upscale high-rise apartments, etc. It’s because SF is a huge business hub and a great place to live, not because people want to live near Oracle Park.
I will be happy to create numerous things to do in the vicinity of a new A’s stadium in East Oakland for lots less than 1.3B.