Ok, here’s the totally, completely, unvarnished, hard, difficult truth why the City of Oakland is so far behind where it should be in helping the Oakland Athletics build a ballpark at Howard Terminal. The simple set of reasons I am about to roll out can be summed up in one word: over-politicization. That’s right: over-politicization.
Robert Bobb’s Downtown Ballpark Dream Dashed By Jerry Brown
The fact is the structure for Oakland’s bureaucratic slowness was formed with the passage of “Measure X”, then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s version of a long-sought-after form of government called Strong Mayor. Passed in 1998, it took effect in 1999, and matted Brown with a person who was every-bit his match on the city administrative side: then-City Manager Robert Bobb.
Mr. Bobb, who was trained in the traditional fashion of city managers, to, well, run a city, including it’s public-private-partnerships, and who wanted Oakland to “Host Super Bowls and build ballparks” as he said at an early February 1999 city staff meeting I attended (as the new city consultant who was Economic Advisor to the previous Mayor Elihu Harris) to plan for Oakland’s then-annual trip to Las Vegas for the International Council of Shopping Center’s Spring Convention.
As it turned out, Bobb’s dreams for Oakland clashed head-long with Brown’s in Bobb’s pursuit of a downtown ballpark for the Oakland A’s in 2002 (and after Bobb hired me to form a bid for Oakland to host the 2005 Super Bowl). Brown fired Bobb, who then was almost immediately snatched up by Washington DC, and successfully brought Major League Baseball there, along with a downtown ballpark. In short, Oakland’s version of strong mayor pushed out many a trained city-builder, and left in its place an organizational habit of elected officials using big projects to burnish their own images, and accomplish nothing in return by completing those big projects. The Oakland A’s quest for a ballpark home has been victimized by it. Indeed, Oakland’s version of strong mayor is why Oakland has lost almost all of its professional sports teams, is on a path toward losing the A’s, and has done nothing to try and replace any of them.
Ron Dellums Plays Political Games With Oakland’s Ballpark Dreams
In the case of the now-late Ron Dellums, the great congressman had the sad habit of playing ballpark advocates against each other, with one wanting a building at the Coliseum and the other at Howard Terminal, and both coming up short. Rather than one giant task force to determine what should be done, and one that should have been led by Oakland’s Economic Development Department, and a person who was trained at implementing large-scale projects, Dellums allowed many task forces to form, even one by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, who’s job is to help the City of Oakland, and not lead it in a direction of its own making. But, to be sure, the person who’s face was on the entire affair was Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, and no one else. Oakland Councilmember Larry Reid worked to try and carve out a larger role, but again, it was an example of an elected official’s hand being in the pot, and not a city-building city official. Then came Oakland Mayor Jean Quan.
Mayor Quan Doesn’t Let Fred Blackwell Be The Face of Oakland Sports Business Retention
Unlike Brown and Dellums, Mayor Quan smartly put Oakland Economic Development Director Fred Blackwell in charge of projects, including a new arena for the Warriors, a new stadium for the Raiders, and a new ballpark for the Oakland A’s.
Unfortunately, Quan and the Oakland City Council’s insistence on having themselves as the face of the efforts, led to bungled lease negotiations with the A’s and Alameda County, and the embarrassing idea that the financing fortunes of the planned Coliseum City were in the hands of the Prince of Dubai, rather than a complex financing plan typical of such large scale public-private partnerships. Then came Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.
Libby Schaaf’s Jerry Brown Playbook Fails As Raiders Leave Oakland
While Schaaf lost the services of Fred Blackwell (who was chased away by the forecast that his previous boss, Quan, was going to lose re-election and jumped over to San Francisco to run the San Francisco Foundation) Libby did have me to call on, and did so privately when she wanted to understand how to work with Raiders Owner Mark Davis. But during that call I also encouraged her to forms a task force and put Robert Bobb in charge of it – an idea that Libby strangely bristled at. Like her mentor and political supporter Jerry Brown, Libby clearly wanted to make herself, and not a cracker-jack city builder, the face of retaining sports in Oakland.
In an effort to get Libby off the idea of not having a specialist, in 2015, I tried to get her to talk to Piper Jaffray’s sports investment banking Managing Director Diane Paauwe, and my legendary UC Berkeley classmate and friend Kofi Bonner, who’s known for building Emeryville. Before that, I proved to Mayor Schaaf that the Oakland Raiders were working behind her back and planning a stadium in Southern California.
I even formed a spreadsheet-based plan to finance a new Raiders stadium using an innovative hotel-based-revenue stream that worked to get Mr. Davis the $400 million he said he needed for a stadium at the Coliseum, and got the backing of Oakland City Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan and then-Coliseum Boss Scott McKibben, as well as a six-person deal-team at Piper Jaffray. With all of that, Libby, perhaps starry-eyed by the players she was dealing with in NFL owners like Jed York, whom she struck up a friendship with, was content to go it alone.
It was that approach – and no task force of Oakland business and poltical leaders and city staff and consultants – that she took to her NFL meetings. It worked in New York for her first presentation in November of 2015, but fell flat in the second one at the 2016 NFL Meeting in Boca Raton. There, Libby’s lack of knowledge of stadium financing was obvious, and she, and Oakland’s effort, took a giant nose-dive.
But Libby never stopped playing Zorro, and when she elected to put a point-person in charge of the Raiders effort, selected her City Administrator Claudia Cappio, who one NFL representative commented was “nice, but clearly needed to be brought up to speed on a number of things.” Claudia was consistently puzzled by her role, and that led to NFL legend and would-be Raiders Stadium Developer Ronnie Lott waiting for her to complete a stadium spreadsheet she was weeks late getting to him. Claudia admitted to me she needed help; I offered, but Claudia never followed up with me.
Eventually, the Oakland Raiders got NFL approval to move to Las Vegas, but I believed Libby was going to throw a hail-mary, fly to Phoenix, bust-open the doors, and offer Mark Davis and the NFL Ownership a last-second-deal. I believed that because Libby called me that weekened and put me on watch for a letter she wanted me to help give out at the NFL meeting. I waited for her call, which came at 6 AM the morning of the meeting in Phoenix. And then it was clear there would be no Libby on a horse, let alone a plane, and no special deal – just a reciting of the “shovel-ready” Raiders stadium plan the NFL already rejected. The Raiders were approved to go to Sin City.
Did Libby have a task force of business leaders and city staff and consultants to review what went wrong? No. Was there any public introspection on her part? No. And so it should come as no surprise that Mayor Schaaf basically unfolded the same playbook and applied it to Howard Terminal? No. Because that’s what she did, but with a difference: an involved and engaged civic player in the Oakland Athletics, led by Dave Kaval, its President.
But because Libby was content to make herself the face of the A’s ballpark project, and then once-again tab people to help her more for reasons of putting on a political face than any real know-how, and one-again ignore forming a task force of business leaders and city staff and consultants, to get on the matter of building a ballpark either at Howard Terminal or the Coliseum. Libby let the A’s direct her, gave the organization indirect control over a significant part of Oakland’s waterfront, yet had no city staffers familiar with the kind of tax-increment finacing plans that I did for 37 years. Libby even admitted this to me on camera during a press conference in 2021, and has repeated that fact since what you’re about to see, below.
So, it is no surprise that Howard Terminal’s pre-development process has been piecemeal, with City of Oakland representatives attending community meetings, no task force, and no formation of a “Howard Terminal Public Authority” to formalize each step of the process toward ground-breaking, give a publicly-known database of meetings, reports, and updates, and plan and get Alameda County-backing for the use of tax increment financing.
So, it’s no surprise that the city’s timeline for Howard Terminal is not that, but a mess of press releases attacking this or that political criticism. And so it’s no surprise that on March 31st, 2021, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that the A’s were going to look at Las Vegas as an alternative. And it’s not a surprise that then, and only then, did Mayor Schaaf start the process of negotiations with Alameda County – an effort that should have started with the October 11th, 2019 California Assembly passage of SB293 Skinner, a version of California Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District legislation especially designed for the Howard Terminal Ballpark Project, and one that started with my suggestion to Mr. Kaval that he use tax increment financing. And it’s not a surprise that the A’s are on “parallel paths” even as the same Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said that Las Vegas was the focus for a future home for the A’s and that they were “Done talking about Oakland.”
Mayor Sheng Thao Continues Libby Schaaf’s Jerry Brown Mistake
New Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, like Libby Schaaf before her, is using herself as the political face for Howard Terminal and for Oakland’s sports business fortunes in the foreceable future. Mayor Thao’s the latest Oakland politician to get the fever that it’s all about her, and so the same playbook, and its failings, is being employed, yet again.
Oakland’s strong mayor system has created this problem of over-politicization, and Howard Terminal Ballpark is the latest casuality of it.
Stay tuned.