Lew Wolff’s concept of a ballpark village is about to look less innovative as housing giant Lennar and the city of Anaheim are about to embark on a massive mixed development project immediately to the west of Angel Stadium. According to a fresh-off-the-wire press release, the development will encompass 54.1 acres with up to 3,813 homes and nearly 200,000 square feet of retail/commercial space. The release claims that the project will be “Orange County’s LARGEST urban redevelopment and FIRST downtown American ballpark community!”

The first thing that hits is the name: A-Town. I feel mildly offended since the Angels have been using the “A-Team” moniker informally for some time, yet there’s only one true team called the A’s. In actuality, it’s a clever, ambiguous name. People can associate the project with the Angels or Anaheim, which could be convenient if Angels owner Arte Moreno follows through on his off-in-the-distance threat to move the team (which is highly unlikely).

The devil is in the details. To build the project, 54 acres of light industrial land called the “Platinum Triangle” is being cleared out and rezoned. Does that sound familiar to anyone? In this case, the Angels aren’t involved in getting the project built. They apparently aren’t partnering with anyone either (based on reports I’ve read so far) so they wouldn’t see the proceeds, as the A’s would for their ballpark village plan.

In essence, the project is simply infill housing with a “ballpark” brand affixed to it. The City of Anaheim has other infill projects in the works. The towers being built near AT&T Park make mention of their proximity to the ballpark, but don’t use it as a chief selling point. Padres’ owner John Moores bought much of the land surrounding Petco Park to build his hotels and condos. A-Town has some interesting similarities to what Wolff has envisioned. Conceptually, it’s not as thorough since direct links to the team aren’t there, but it should provide a reference point for those looking to keep track of such projects.

Among other election-related items, respondents to a recent poll commissioned by the Merc were asked how they felt about the city spending public money to bring MLB to San Jose. The results were negative in a landslide: 53.6% were against the idea, while 32.1% were for it.

The San Jose effort has been marred by three specific issues:

• The Gonzales stench. The decidedly unpopular mayor (26.7% approval) publicly campaigned on behalf of the city over a year ago at spring training (the misspelling incident). He tried to have a ballot measure for a ballpark scheduled for November’s general election (bad move, quickly dismissed). He now believes that his successor should figure out a way to avoid a public vote. That won’t happen even if City Hall were scandal-free.
• Dissent in the ranks. Baseball San Jose is made up of numerous civic and business leaders. Sometime after the Selig visit in September, the group became somewhat fractured as there was no consensus built about how to further pursue the A’s. Some wanted to keep a low profile in keeping with Bud Selig’s typical M.O. Some wanted to directly challenge the Giants and MLB. Others wanted to retreat and regroup – waiting for an opportunity to arise when efforts in Alameda County failed. BBSJ’s website went dark and so went the best outreach arm the effort had. Few BBSJ members showed up at the publich outreach meetings. Any chance they had to shape the dialogue with the public was lost. On the political side, there are two mayoral candidates (Michael Mulcahy and Dave Cortese) who happen to be BBSJ leaders that are campaigning against each other. They may be splitting the pro-baseball vote, with Cindy Chavez getting a small portion as well.
• No sizzle, no steak either. The city has been hamstrung by its inability to engage directly in a dialogue with the A’s. Sure, San Jose leaders see and talk to Wolff frequently (because he is one of them after all), but the territorial rights issue has effectively put up a soundproof glass wall between them and the A’s. As long as there is no dialogue, no substantive ballpark plan – with ancillary development – can be debated. It’s unknown what the public’s share would be beyond the land acquisition. It may very well be that if the poll respondents were answering a question more along the lines of, “Would you support the acquisition of land for a baseball team as long as there were no other public expenditures to get a ballpark built?” it might be a completely different result. The city has its hands tied because it can’t explain the economic side of a ballpark concept.

Does this mean that the San Jose ballpark plan is dead? No, because things can change rapidly. San Jose is stuck being “Plan C” (if Oakland were “Plan A” and Fremont “Plan B”) and there’s very little it can do about it. Should the Fremont plan move forward and result in a ballpark, the San Jose effort (at least the $700K spent on the EIR) would be rendered moot. At least they’ll be able to recoup redevelopment’s land grab by selling off the property for housing. Should Fremont collapse and if Oakland and the A’s aren’t able to put a workable proposal together, San Jose could move to the forefront. Some would argue that was Wolff’s plan all along. Considering the bullet points above, I have to respectfully disagree.

Chris De Benedetti of the Fremont Argus wrote about the A’s Baseball to Fremont website and the effort behind it. There’s a comment from Cindy Bonior, head of the Fremont Chamber of Commerce:

“It’s been a slow process because the city warned us the A’s are obligated to work with (Oakland),” Bonior said. “We’re looking to be more vocal. We’re just waiting for the right time.”

For those who were wondering why we took so long to get the Fremont site going, that’s a big reason.

Kuiper: What has made the Fremont site so attractive to you?
Wolff: One of the things is the size of the land. As you know, land is scarce. We had a friendly welcome in Fremont, we had one in Oakland too… The economics of the ballpark village will pay for the ballpark… We’re going to need a lot of help from the city and the county.

Fosse: How long will it take to get started?
Wolff: It’ll take a year to design it and get a building permit. I’d say that it’d take two to two-and-a-half years to start building. It might take a year-and-a-half to get it built… There’s an environmental impact report on the site already. If we can get a revised report (instead of a new one), we can take six months off the time required.

Fosse: Talk about the luxury suites.
Wolff: We’ll have 40 4-person suites at the 15th row. We’ll also have regular suites. The suites will be packed with technology.

Fosse: What will these 4-person suites look like?
Wolff: Behind it will be a private area for bathrooms and food. It looks pretty neat from the drawings we have… The 18 to 20-person suites require a (huge base). If you have a law firm or a family, the 4-person suite makes a lot more sense… Milwaukee is the worst at selling suites, and we found out that the type most in demand there are those smaller suites.

Fosse: Will it be “underground” or above ground?
Wolff: It’ll be above ground. (Note: This is probably due to the location’s low elevation – 27 feet above sea level – which makes it susceptible to tidal flows.)

What’s unclear to me is why it would take so long after the the team gets the permit. There’s no demolition or remediation that would need to be done on the site. It might take a few months to get it ready, but since it wouldn’t be a sunken field, there wouldn’t be a significant amount of excavation. I’ll have to defer to the people in the know on this one.

If that timeline is right, the ballpark could open in 2011 or 2012 at the earliest. That would coincide with the A’s desire for a Coliseum lease extension to 2013.

Two nights ago I hung out around the perimeter of AT&T Park. While I was disappointed in the numerous empty seats, the noise promised to be especially heavy for Barry Bonds as he attempted to tie the Babe. When Juan Pierre robbed Bonds on his shot to deep center, the circumstances were perfect. More on that in a bit.

Many of AT&T Park’s signature elements make it a poor design for placement into a residential neighborhood. Chief among them is the open outfield design. Still, when San Jose looked around for a ballpark study, they went with AT&T Park design firm HOK. The sketches in the EIR had the ballpark oriented east-northeast (similar to the Coliseum’s orientation), with large open spaces beyond the outfield walls. The resemblance is rather uncanny:


The grandstand shape (beneath the foul lines) is virtually the same. There’s more space in right field for seating since there’s no pesky body of water in the way, but otherwise it’s a pretty good copy. That’s good for skyline views, bad for containing noise. The noise contour sketch shows noise spilling further out past the right field fence as opposed to the left field fence. This may be due to the grandstand’s shape. In the left field corner, the grandstand and the roof above the upper deck make a near right angle turn towards the foul pole. In right field, no such grandstand turn exists, allowing the noise to escape unabated. The SJ design has a two levels of seating beyond the right field fence, but it’s not nearly as tall as the grandstand and doesn’t have a roof. More noise would escape over the top of those seats during games.

To test the assumptions made in drawing up the contour, I monitored noise levels from three points outside AT&T Park. The top picture depicts those three points:

• 1 – The promenade or knothole area along McCovey Cove. I was at the railing, approximately 200 feet from the center of the stadium.
• 2 – The other side of McCovey Cove, near Willie Mac’s statue. This location was approximately 800 feet from the center of the stadium.
• 3 – The South Beach Harbor playground, near the funky sculpture that looks like a big red compass. This location is also approximately 800 feet from the center of the stadium.

The distances are important, because sound loss is based on distance. With every doubling of distance from a sound source, there is a loss of 6 dB. In reality the loss may be more like 3-4 dB because sound can bounce off the ground and other surfaces without being absorbed. Accoding to most documentation I’ve read, a drop of 3-4 dB is barely detectable. Keep increasing the distance and it adds up. A loss of 10 dB means that a sound is half as loud. Drop 20 dB and it’s only one-fourth as loud. (This also works in the opposite direction, so a 20 dB gain equates to four times the loudness.)

Baselines were set around the perimeter of the ballpark. At the intersection of King and Third Streets (Willie Mays Plaza), ambient noise was usually 65 dB, though traffic or MUNI Metro trains could cause the meter to spike 10 dB or more. At point #1, the typical ambient noise (uninterrupted by the PA, music, or loud cheering) was 72 dB – the volume of a running vacuum cleaner. Below is a table showing readings taken at various times during the game. Margin of error is plus/minus 3 dB.

Notice how the readings from point #3 are uniformly, consistently lower than the readings from point #2 even though they’re the same distance away from the source. The grandstand (and the attached ramp) appears to have really shown its absorption capacity, and that’s only partial containment. Additional noise mitigation could be achieved by further enclosing the structure. I’m not talking about building Mt. Davis. It would be more akin to the outfield seats built in San Diego, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Sacrifices would have to be made regarding the skyline views. Is such a compromise worth it? Maybe not. Then again, if the final design resembles the 360 architecture concept, those outfield structures (hotel, party suites, condos) will reduce noise leakage just by being there. They’ll also restrict the view – just by being there.

The Trib’s Dave Newhouse presents the City of Oakland with a challenge in today’s column: Show us the site. And by “us” he doesn’t just mean the A’s or the media – he means all of A’s fandom. Unlike his colleague Art Spander, Newhouse finds Wolff relatively trustworthy:

Lew Wolff’s at the plate, and he wants your best pitch, Oakland. Or any pitch. Perhaps a mystery pitch, because he’s plenty mystified. Anyway, it’s up to you, Oakland. Wolff hasn’t changed his stance.

Newhouse then starts to turn the screws:

Oakland talks, but like Loaiza so far, it doesn’t deliver consistently or accurately. And Wolff, unlike his predecessor in the owners’ box, is willing to foot the entire bill for a new park, which is a $450 million check minus the tip. He just wants some help with, say, environmental issues. And a good price on the land would help, too.
…
But if it can be done in Fremont, why can’t it be done in Oakland? It can if Oakland would stop hurling junk and come in with a high heater that would not only brush back Fremont but also drive it out of the box.

Funny how Loaiza keeps coming up (my fault there). Credit goes to Newhouse for asking the question. There’s an air of resignation in the East Bay, yet there are Oakland proponents that insist that there’s a solution out there that for whatever reason isn’t being publicized (Wolff’s supposed reluctance to deal with Oakland is often cited). Rumors are floating around about two or three sites being considered at City Hall. And Ron Dellums may know of others that are working on their own plan. It’s time to publicize. You can’t get the public to rally behind something they know nothing about. If Wolff is challenging the city, then the city should challenge him right back.

The A’s Baseball to Fremont website is up, folks! There isn’t much there yet, but there are links to a survey and a bulletin board. As more information becomes available about transportation options and the plan itself, the site will be the place to go for information. Also, please take a look at the site’s mission statement. There is no blanket endorsement of the A’s moving to Fremont yet, and there won’t be until greater detail is released. Note on the survey: 59 responses came from a single Comcast IP address (yes, I get that information). I haven’t blocked anyone out because I’d like to see all survey feedback, but any abuse of the survey will be handled quickly and vigorously. So far the tally among mostly Fremont-based respondents is 60% positive, 40% negative.

An article in today’s CoCo Times compiles feedback from fans, pols, and economists on the A’s possible move to Fremont. Ignacio De La Fuente gives his usual unproductive statement, while Larry Reid all but starts up the moving vans – which is sad, considering Reid was the guy who said he’d stake his political career on the August plan.

Andrew Zimbalist opines that the A’s departure from Oakland wouldn’t have a significant impact on Oakland’s economy. This is probably true, since the only money the city got from the A’s was the small, yearly rent check. If the impact of the A’s departure were compared to the prospect of an A’s stadium in downtown Oakland, it could be significant. However, that’s not a black-and-white issue either, since any positive impact in Oakland would have to be weighed against public costs (funding if necessary) and opportunity costs (what could be built in its place). I have to give credit to Wolff for not trotting out the “economic development” argument much during his quest. The only time he really used it was during his Coliseum North presentation. Statements about the Fremont deal have had little to do with benefits; they’ve been more about paying for the ballpark.

Dave Newhouse’s new column in the Oakland Tribune profiles the three mayoral candidates with respect to their stance on the A’s. Newhouse stays away from giving an endorsement here, and I don’t blame him. While all three express their interest in keeping the A’s, none of them given any details as to how it would be done:

De La Fuente believes a site can be found in Oakland. He has two or three in mind that he won’t disclose. But he’s confident the A’s will sign a lease extension, which gives Oakland more time.

After talking to Wolff, Dellums said, “I found him a very honest, refreshing, candid person. What he said to me was, ‘Don’t break your pick on this one. You’ve got other priorities.’ I thought I heard him very clearly.”

Very clearly: Ground won’t be broken on a new ballpark in Oakland.

However, Dellums added there is a group “working very diligently” on a new location in Oakland now that the downtown site and the 66th Avenue site across from the Coliseum Complex appear buried in the dead stadium file.

The only place I can see it being done in Oakland is the Broadway Auto Row site, but maybe I don’t see something that makes more sense because I’m not an Oakland resident, and therefore not as familiar with the city as some. Of course, if Broadway Auto Row is a legitimate site, Nancy Nadel will have to be won over.

I mentioned on an AN diary that it couldn’t hurt Ignacio De La Fuente to appeal more openly to A’s fans in Oakland. Though the A’s have trumpeted the notion that Oakland is not out of the running, the timing of the A’s plans has allowed certain circumstances – development sites disappearing – to grease the skids out of town.

Extending the comment period for San Jose’s Ballpark Draft EIR to last Thursday fairly allowed for a much greater amount of time for neighborhood residents and interests to properly review the document. Again, the traffic and parking estimates were roundly assailed as unrealistic or incomplete given the nature of event traffic. If you’re interested in understanding the tenor of these comments, I refer you to the recap of the first outreach meeting.

Now it’s come out the the Sharks have expressed concerns about the ballpark plan. From the Saturday Merc’s Barry Witt article:

A consultant for the Sharks wrote that the report “does not demonstrate that the baseball stadium can be developed without causing significant negative traffic or parking impacts on HP Pavilion.” Among other complaints, the Sharks questioned a conclusion that wider sidewalks near the ballpark would help keep large numbers of people walking toward games from tying up vehicle traffic.

This may be the Sharks’ way of saying “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” It could also be a way of the Sharks’ trying to get concessions out of the ballpark plan. Look at the graphic below (taken from the EIR, click for a more expansive version) and you’ll see why.

The dotted gold line represents a boundary 1/3mile away from the ballpark site. If you’ve frequented HP Pavilion, you’ll see that the parking that exists there is the exact same parking that would be claimed for the ballpark. As the SJWC lot is developed, parking there would be at least temporarily impacted, making it difficult in the near term to fulfill the city’s obligation to provide at least 6,650 spaces within 1/2 mile of the arena. The numbers on the map also tend to be misleading because not all parking lots and garages are used the same. Adobe, for instance, doesn’t allow event parking in their existing garages because of security concerns. If Adobe goes ahead and builds another set of office towers on the SJWC east lot, how can Pavilion management and the city convince Adobe that it’s safe to allow event parking?

Should the city proceed with plans to redevelop the area between the arena and the proposed ballpark, even more parking would be reduced. The parking lots immediately to the east of Diridon Station are generally full during the weekdays because of commuters taking Caltrain and downtown workers, who use the lots as cheap all-day parking (they get a free shuttle that takes them downtown).

Complicating matters even further are the possibility that Diridon will become a major transit hub in the future. The station already services Caltrain, ACE, Amtrak, and VTA light rail. A BART station is planned for the area, and should high speed rail become a reality, Diridon will serve as either a terminal or hub station. Add all of that demand up and it would seem absolutely essential for additional parking to be built – not just for a specific interest such as HP Pavilion, but to properly accommodate all of the different services that are supposed to be built there in the next 10-20 years. That’s not even including the ballpark’s several thousand spaces or the requirements of high-density residential that could be built in the area.

San Jose desperately needs to have open, frank discussions with residents about its plans for Greater Downtown. The infrastructure that’s currently in place is not going to cut it, and if city leaders want to build more infill housing, greater commercial opportunities, or entertainment options like a ballpark, it can’t be assumed that existing resources will even come close to satisfying the needs of each project.

One thing that might be a saving grace for San Jose could the influx of mass transit options. The expected impact of greater development would eventually dissuade many from driving downtown. While redevelopment and planning officials referred to this, they didn’t give many details. It would make sense for city planners to allot for 3,000-5,000 additional spaces (that’s 6,000-10,000 total) on both sides of Hwy 87 to properly accommodate increased demand for commuters, downtown workers, entertainment seekers, and residents. This can’t happen until a Greater Downtown development document is discussed and written.

I haven’t gotten into the traffic problems. I’ll let Marc Morris’s traffic comments handle that. And the residents of the Shasta/Hanchett and Delmas Park neighborhoods are rightfully concerned, though I still believe that there are mitigation measures for them that can significantly reduce impacts to them.

Yesterday San Francisco made the list of five finalists for the US Olympic Committee’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. The others are Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Notably absent is New York City, winner of the 2012 bid that eventually lost to London. USOC officials are scheduled to visit San Francisco for two hours on the afternoon of May 18, after first visiting LA in the morning. BASOC has a press release touting great business support throughout the region.

The debates that surrounded the last organizing effort at times highlighted how fractured and territorial the Bay Area is. There was criticism that the too many venues were centered in Stanford, not in San Francisco. The idea of bringing BART all the way around the Bay was also heavily debated, just as it still is today with the BART-to-San Jose effort. Plus there’s always a question about whether or not hosting the Olympics is just a gigantic pork barrel project.

What should be interesting is how the SF bid will look once it’s available to the public. Many things have changed since November 2002, when NYC narrowly beat SF in what shouldn’t have been considered a shocker (post-9/11 patriotism), but was a shocker nonetheless. Among the changes:

• Stanford Stadium, which was going to be rebuilt as the centerpiece Olympic Stadium, is being converted to a much smaller, 50,000-seat, football-specific venue. It could be a great soccer stadium for the Games, but it won’t handle much else.
• Where would the new Olympic Stadium be built? Would it be the 49ers’ new stadium? The Candlestick Point/Lennar development could be shaped to fit a Stadium/Olympic Village concept.
• Baseball and softball have been, for the time being, taken off the Olympic competition list. That would render AT&T Park and a future A’s ballpark useless, unless both were used for other field sports such as soccer or field hockey, or unless the IOC were petitioned to bring the sports back into the fold.
• An extensive plan was in place to develop Moffett Field into the Olympic Village. Since then Moffett has been split into multiple uses: consolidated military housing run by the Army, Air National Guard post, expanded NASA center, Google-plex. Would the Olympic Village even be feasible at Moffett at this point? And could someone figure out what to do with Hangar One?
• The 2012 bid had beach volleyball at Edwards Stadium at Cal. Since we’re conveniently located on the Pacific, how about having beach volleyball on, I don’t know, an actual beach like Santa Cruz Main Beach or Ocean Beach in SF?
• The tennis venue would not be at an existing facility, such as Taube Family Stadium at Stanford. A new complex would be built at Mission College (not sure how this would go over with my parents, who live in Sunnyvale less than a mile from the site).

Not to belabor the points, but the keys to this bid have to be the Olympic Stadium and Olympic Village. It would be best to place them in areas that are easily accessible by mass transit (BART or the very least MUNI or VTA light rail), yet are also easy to secure. Either Candlestick Point (if someone can figure out how to keep the place warm at night during the summer) or the Coliseum complex could be good candidates. Either way it would be expensive. A track stadium does not have preferable design characteristics for a NFL stadium, so it would have to be designed to temporarily accommodate the Olympics and permanently handle football. However, it would appear that such construction would be the only truly significant project to undertake, which, relative to what’s been done at previous Olympics in Atlanta and Salt Lake, would be peanuts. Many of the area’s venues have been built, recently renovated, or are undergoing renovation. This includes Stanford Stadium and Maples Pavilion on the Farm, and Memorial Stadium and Haas Pavilion in Berkeley.

That leaves the transportation problem. Several issues abound there – even if Santa Clara County Measure A passed in June, there’d be a big scramble to get BART up and running by the time the Olympics began. Caltrain would absolutely have to be electrified to make it efficient enough to provide the number of Peninsula trips that would be required. There’d be a few venues spread out in places like Napa and Sacramento, but those are for more genteel pursuits like equestrian events or niche water sports like canoeing and kayaking. How would the region deal with the traffic? Would BART run 24/7? Caltrain?

The Olympics’ possible effects on the A’s? Probably nil.

Before I left work today, I went to 511 and took a quick snapshot of the East Bay traffic scene. The typical choke points were heavy as usual, except for greater traffic near the Coliseum due to tonight’s game (click the pic for a larger version).

SFGate A’s blogger Vlae Kershner picked up on the snake-mongoose vibe between me and drummer510 through our traffic-related posts from a couple of days ago. That makes this snapshot a good illustration of where the problem doesn’t lie. 880 South from San Leandro on down is pretty clear, with an expected slowdown at the 92 interchange and another one at Mowry Ave in Newark. 680 south has a couple of short bad spots near Danville and Walnut Creek, while everything from the 580 interchange south is smooth sailing. 238 is acting like 238 does, so a detour from 580 along Fairmount/Hesperian would be in order.

From the South Bay, 880 is remarkably clear coming towards the ballpark (the pink “X”), while 680 has its usual backup as it approaches Mission Blvd/262, a few miles before the Sunol Grade. 237 eastbound is in better shape than usual. And from the Peninsula, both the San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges are fairly congestion free, at least until they reach 880.

Periodically, I’ll take other snapshots of this reverse commute and of the journey into Downtown San Jose.