https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7TgZ0eyiFc
Oakland News Online Blog – vlog by Zennie62 YouTube. OaklandNewsOnline.com is the original blog post for this content.
Oakland A’s Moving To Las Vegas As Dave Kaval Makes It Unofficially Official To Las Vegas Media.
Oakland A’s Moving To Las Vegas As Dave Kaval Makes It Unofficially Official To Las Vegas Media
Well, the news I said was going to happen on November 21, 2021, is now unofficially official: the Oakland A’s are leaving Oakland and ditching Howard Terminal for a 49-acre plot of land at the corner of Dean Martin and Tropicana, just down the I-15 Freeway from Allegiant Stadium, home of what was once called The Oakland Raiders.
Oakland Sports has moved to Las Vegas. Let’s talk about how we got here on this livestream.
For me, this started on late September of 1997, at the meeting of the Oakland Community and Economic Development Committee. I represented then Oakland Mayor Harris and put on the agenda for discussion the need to build a new ballpark for the Oakland A’s. The talk was short but not sweet. “We already spent $200 million to bring the Raiders back to Oakland”, said Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, “Now, we have to spend money for the A’s?”
But, even as the personal seat license system used to raise money to pay for the new East Side went south, and left a bad taste in the Oakland City Council’s mouth, the fact is the opening of Camden Yards in 1993 formed a tidal wave of demand for new, family-friendly, ballparks.
Then, in from 1997 to 2002, Oakland City Manager then Oakland City Administrator Robert Bobb worked to get a downtown ballpark built in what is now called Uptown Oakland. But then Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown fired Bobb because Jerry did not want “A damn downtown stadium” built while he was Mayor of Oakland.
Mr. Bobb took off for Washington D.C., where as Chief Administrative Officer, he brought the Montreal Expos to town to become the Washington Nationals.
Then, Oakland Mayors Ron Dellums and Jean Quan focused on something called Coliseum City, but a combination of a lack of a financing plan and developers without the capacity to deliver, caused more delays. So much so that by 2011, the Oakland Raiders already had designs on moving either to San Francisco or San Antonio, until it looked like Oakland was starting to focus on Coliseum City.
But Raiders Owner Mark Davis never wanted to do a stadium in Oakland because Sheldon Adelson was wooing him to come to Las Vegas. The man worth $30 billion was able to pave the political way for Davis, and get something passed called Senate Bill 1. That formed the bond issue for the $750 million subsidy needed to build what is now called Allegiant Stadium. Eventually, on March 26th, 2017, the NFL granted Davis the right to move the Raiders to Las Vegas.
As that happened, Joe Lacob set his sights on a new arena in San Francisco. The motive force of government to have the Warriors stay in Oakland left when Fred Blackwell took the job of CEO of the San Francisco Foundation in 2015. He was the Director of Economic Development and then City Administrator – Oakland’s point man on the Warriors Arena. But his boss Oakland Mayor Jean Quan was not going to be re-elected, so he jumped ship. Libby Schaaf was the new Mayor of Oakland in 2015.
To make a long story short, the efforts by my friend Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf were long on words, short on process. Libby hated public task forces and seemed to be alergic to bringing in a star developer like Kofi Bonner (I know because I tried to get them together), and did not push for a focused, public organization to get the job of sports facilities for the A’s and Raiders done. Davis and Schaaf did not get along and he went behind her back and took off for Las Vegas. But Libby did not learn to take her face out of the public eye, hire a competent public developer, and bring the business community together.
So, in 2017, I put the idea of using tax increment financing to Dave Kaval, and he worked with Nancy Skinner to create SB-293 Skinner, Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law in 2019, October 11th – but it was never implemented. Mayor Schaaf’s subpar City Staff made a ton of mistakes, kissing away a potential tax increment revenue of as much as $9.7 billion.
The City spent too much time on negotiating and politics and environmental impact issues, and zero time on a path laid out in SB-293 Skinner: create the public financing authority, make the infrastructure financing plan, approve the TIF zone, and hire bond underwriters to form the bond issue, set a pay-go-plan, and an eventual date to float the bonds. Hard to do anything without money and the means to get it.
That blew any chance of the A’s getting a deal done in Oakland. The focus never changed off of soft-issues, and after two years, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said on March 31, 2021, that the A’s were given the go-ahead to look at Las Vegas. Only then did Mayor Schaaf call the County of Alameda and start the ball rolling toward tax increment financing. But, as I had said, it was too late.
Part Two: Libby’s false promise
Stay tuned,
via IFTTT
Note from Oakland News Now Blog, Zennie62 YouTube, and Zennie62Media: this Oakland News Online Blog video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018, originally on Zennie62Media , Inc.’s Oakland News Now. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. This is what we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a search for YouTube video under “Oakland News” then that YouTube video is uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Online Blog site and Zennie62Media -created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, thus less chance for Oakland News Online Blog, Zennie62 YouTube vloggers to be robbed. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners. This process is entirely within YouTube terms of service, where embedding of videos for use on websites and platforms is allowed and encouraged.