Try as Floyd Kephart and the City of Oakland tried to keep the Coliseum City proposal away from the public for 20 days, the key summary was revealed by BANG’s Matthew Artz late last night. As you might gather from the action to hide the documents from the public under a confidentiality arrangement, there was plenty to hide and precious little to tout. Kephart’s New City did get the documents to Oakland/Alameda County by the June 21 deadline, which is to be commended (somewhat). Beyond that, the whole thing sucks for a multitude of reasons.
Kephart’s New City Development pitched a $4.2 billion plan, which would include:
- $900 million Raiders stadium to be owned by team, land underneath to be leased by City to team for $250k per season
- Sale of public lands (Coliseum and surrounding) to New City for $116 million
- Proceeds would pay off Mount Davis debt
- Potential for additional proceeds to fund affordable housing subsidy; if not fully covered, bond issue
- Land reserved for an A’s ballpark through 2019
- 4,000 housing units
- 450,000 square feet of retail, 1.5 million square feet of office/R&D space
- 400-room hotel
- $100 million in new infrastructure (BART transit hub, roads), not including…
- $187 million in parking garages (financed by New City)
- Stadium and essential infrastructure completed by 2019, hotel by 2020, full buildout by 2022
- Sale of 20% stake in Raiders to New City for $200 million, half of which goes to into stadium
- Creation of “Stadium Company” to finance $300 million in debt for stadium (49ers have a similar entity)
- $500 million from the Raiders and NFL G-4 fund (combined)
The football stadium part of the plan has no magic bullet to cover the $400-500 million funding gap. The NFL and Raiders would their part, probably closer to $400 million. There remains an open question about how likely it is the Raiders would get that $400 million. It’s one thing to award the full $200 million G-4 loan (to be matched by the team) to the 49ers and Levi’s Stadium or the Vikings and Falcons, teams whose projects will certainly host future Super Bowls. The Raiders stadium would be smaller and less capable of hosting a Super Bowl and other big events. Its premium revenue-generating capacity would be much lower than other recently built stadia, which makes me wonder just how well the G-4 loan would be serviced. Chances are that the stadium would qualify for a smaller loan, perhaps closer to the old G-3 cap of $150 million. So when you really start to add it up, it’s much more realistic to expect $350-400 million as the “standard” private contribution from team and league. More than that is rather wishful thinking considering the stadium’s size and scope.
A “Stadium Company” would be created on the private side to manage funneling game revenues towards debt service. Its counterpart would be the Coliseum Authority (JPA) or its successor. If the sides ever got down to real negotiations, the real sticking point would be whether the debt would be issued publicly (tax free) or privately (taxed). On one page the Raiders are said to own the stadium, on another they lease the stadium. The model is similar to what the 49ers created for Levi’s, which means that the same questions would arise during the period leading up to the stadium’s opening. Can the Raiders and the various entities sell enough sponsorships and get a big enough naming rights deal to cover the gap? Or does this sound too much like Mount Davis?
Ancillary development, which has been already been dismissed by Mark Davis and NFL point man Eric Grubman, is still very much in play here. The worst part about it is that the money the ancillary development will generate won’t go towards paying for the stadium, or for affordable housing. New City would get to reap the rewards, pay a little towards infrastructure, not get saddled with the responsibility of financing affordable housing, and get a piece of the Raiders in the process. Sweet deal, eh? No wonder the NFL has been so averse to having “middle men” like Kephart involved in these deals. It prefers to have Goldman Sachs and big banks there as the established partner financing arms instead of deal makers.
The ballpark gets one whole line in the 19-page document:
Parcel 6 for development of the ballpark will be reserved through January 1, 2019.
In the Specific Plan Parcel 6 is to the right on the other side of 880 from the Coliseum
I can’t blame Kephart for reducing the A’s to one line considering how Wolff disregarded him and the project at every turn. If Kephart’s gonna go out, he’ll go out guns-a-blazing. Wolff was never going to take part anyway, so this is at least a modest allowance. Yet what is Parcel 6? We’ll find out more in a couple weeks assuming the documents are released as expected. For now we don’t have an updated site plan. If Parcel 6 is the same one identified in the EIR/Specific Plan, it’s the Hegenberger Gateway shopping center anchored by Walmart and other properties along Hegenberger. How does that get repurposed for a ballpark? I’ll let you know when BART builds an Airport Connector station there to service the site, more than a mile away from the Coliseum BART station.
Lastly, there’s the sale of public land. The document cites $116 million as fair market value, though that is entirely dependent on use and density. $116 million is ridiculously cheap, at around $1 million per acre depending on how much is actually used for the ancillary development. Lew Wolff’s Coliseum North plan was derailed because he lowballed local business owners, offering the same value ten years ago. Two weeks ago the City of Oakland pushed through a $5.1 million sale of one acre on East 12th Street overlooking Lake Merritt for housing, with the developer agreeing to provide $8 million towards affordable housing elsewhere. City Council sessions got so heated that housing activists took over the Council Chambers in the first meeting, followed by the City blocking off public access in subsequent meetings. All that because the process was supposed to dictate that the sale of public land in Oakland mandated use for affordable housing (if housing was the intended use). Now we’re looking at an exponentially larger project in the Coliseum area. How’s that gonna go over?
With the stench this deal is serving up miles away from any actual deliberation over its merits, recent revelations about an exit strategy and a backup plan for City/County should come as no surprise. That’s both good and bad, as the millions spent on Coliseum City will have gone to waste while that backup plan will have only a few months to gestate. That’s a great recipe for a terrible deal, one even worse than New City’s vision Coliseum City. There’s always a renovation concept to fall back upon, and Wolff’s biding his time waiting for CC to collapse. Looks like you’ll be on the clock soon, Lew.
newballpark.org 
Lew may not have been able to get SJ as his first choice, but winning Oakland by way of waiting out the Raiders isn’t a bad consolation prize.
Trust me, Wolff has not given up on SJ as his first choice. He just can’t publicly say it because he is technically one of the defendants in the SJ vs MLB lawsuit. Waiting for the collapse of CC is most definitely his Plan B or even C or D.
Easy to see now: Floyd Kephart is nothing but a joke. This entire proposal is a scam.
Two very reputable development firms already dropped out of Coliseum City, finding it unfeasible. I’m not sure we should have expected Kephart to pull any rabbits out of a hat with his proposal. He doesn’t have any magic tricks to get this done (as in, without public money). This proposal has been described as “worst by far” by one of the experts quoted in the Mercury News.
I’m not complaining, to be clear. I hope the Raiders go back to Southern California one way or the other and the A’s can build the ballpark they want if Oakland is the place for it. That’s more likely if and when the Raiders are out of the picture. It’s clear to see how awful this proposal is, yet there are still some Raiders fans out there who think this is viable and we don’t know everything about it.
Doesn’t sound promising, but on the other hand it shouldn’t be surprising. Kephardt’s proposed deal is one sided, but does check the box on some of the various stakeholder’s key specs.
– Allows for all 3 teams to stay – check. (Though the accommodation for the A’s is laughable).
– Existing debt addressed – check.
– Raiders off the hook for the existing debt – check.
– Stake in the Raiders used to close funding cap – very one sided as proposed, but Mark Davis did say he was open to this. My guess is if the city and Raiders consider this proposal even worth trying to negotiate, this element stays in but either the cash back to the Raiders goes up or the ownership percentage goes down.
– City’s desired redevelopment component – check.
– No government funding for construction – check.
So, not a great financial deal for the Raiders, but anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention knew it wouldn’t be. And again, Carson may be a better deal for the Raiders if the Chargers stay involved, but maybe not if they drop out and the Raiders are faced with trying to finance $1.7 billion on their own.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this proposal is DOA. On the other hand, it is only the starting point for negotiation. Revisions that allow for tax-free financing, more money from Kephardt for the public land, some contribution from Kephardt for the stadium, some form of risk sharing on construction overruns and PSL shortfalls, could maybe make this salvageable. (Assuming Davis is sincere that he’s just looking for a viable deal to stay in Oakland, and not his best economic deal). The numbers probably also get a little easier if they give up on the pie-in-the sky idea of also keeping the A’s and Warriors there, freeing up that land.
How is exchanging one set of bonds for another “retiring” of the Mt Davis debt? Yeah yeah… I know… TECHNICALLY it is but in reality it is just shuffling the debt around on paper, extending the payments out, and calling the debt something more friendly like “affordable housing financing” instead of “monolithic empty facade in multi-purpose stadium financing.”
But seriously, what did people expect from this proposal? They’ve had how many funding sources back out because they couldn’t see any value investing in this project? New City/Kephart knows this, THEY know there is no value here, so the only way they will take on all of that risk is if the city and the Raiders take the lion’s share of that risk.
Don’t you get it? The Mt. Davis debt is a sunk cost, so magically shuffling it onto new paper counts as “addressing the debt.”
The only way this proposal addresses the debt is as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for people who don’t understand the frictions associated with public entities accountable to voters. Santa Clara voters may be forgiven for taking on public debt because they 1) are in a better position to service it; and 2) hadn’t been taken to the cleaners already. JPA doesn’t have either of those luxuries.
@DTP and TribTowerViews
“How is exchanging one set of bonds for another “retiring” of the Mt Davis debt?”
“The Mt. Davis debt is a sunk cost, so magically shuffling it onto new paper counts as “addressing the debt.”
You guys must be reading something different than I am. What I read above was, Coli land to be sold, proceeds to pay off the debt. You can debate whether this is a good deal for the city or not (and at the proposed valuation, I would say it is not). But unless I’m misunderstanding something, this would be retiring the debt.
Now, if the city then decides to issue bonds to subsidize affordable housing, I would consider that a completely separate issue and decision.
You are ignoring the affordable housing requirement mandated by law. It is not a separate decision. Both are requied for a deal to happen. If if were this easy, a scrivener could close the deal.
@TribTowerViews
“You are ignoring the affordable housing requirement mandated by law. It is not a separate decision. Both are requied for a deal to happen. If if were this easy, a scrivener could close the deal.”
I’ll admit I’m no expert in affordable housing law, but so far as I know a lot of projects get built in the Bay Area without affordable housing. Am I correct in assuming whatever affordable housing requirement exists is per city or county ordinance? If so, it was a separate policy decision (albeit perhaps one that was made in the past).
Whether it’s a city/county ordinance or some other rule, I would also assume the requirement is triggered by inclusion in the project of a certain amount of market-rate housing. If so, it is a separate decision. The city/county could opt for no housing at the site and avoid this cost (in fact both the Raiders and A’s would apparently prefer it).
If affordable housing is a requirement it’s because some policy maker has made the judgment that it serves the public good. As Kephardt has proposed the project, the city would get to retire the existing debt AND gain the benefit of affordable housing AND additional sales tax revenue AND rejuvenate a bad part of town. This is not merely “shuffling the debt around on paper;” the city/county get to both extinguish an existing obligation and gain new benefits they would not otherwise receive.
Per Kephardt’s proposal it also seems possible that any affordable housing requirement might be met from the proceeds of the land sale without the need to issue new bonds. Presumably this is even more likely if they negotiate a realistic rate for the sale of the land, as they absolutely should do.
As proposed, Kephardt’s proposal is one-sided and unfair. But if you double the price for the public land and double the price for 20% of the team, it starts to look more reasonable. That’s what negotiation is for.
Without the affordable housing happening, this deal would be labeled as “gentrification gone wild” and would never pass because the public outcry in Oakland would be enormous and the lawsuits would come pouring in.
“Without the affordable housing happening, this deal would be labeled as “gentrification gone wild” and would never pass because the public outcry in Oakland would be enormous and the lawsuits would come pouring in.”
If that’s the case, then the situation is hopeless and Oakland probably shouldn’t retain any sports teams. Pulling off a privately financed NFL stadium for the league’s poorest team would be a tremendous accomplishment in itself; obstructing the path by larding up the ask with demands for a lot of free stuff the city would like the market to take care of (e.g. pay off our debt from the last deal we screwed up; help solve the Bay Area’s affordable housing shortage) is a likely path to failure.
Those are public problems for which the use of public funds is appropriate. If Coliseum City is lucrative enough to cover them, great. But if not, is it worth killing a deal over them? The debt and affordable housing problems will remain if all the teams leave.
This is starting to look really good for the A’s. I don’t want to dance on the Raiders grave but i don’t see them biting on this proposal. Make up the shortfall in PSL funding? Isn’t that what got the city on the hook for $200 million in debt in the first place in 1995?
This isn’t flying with anyone. As I sees it…Raiders will be gone in 2016. Worst deal ever…as Comic Book Guy would say. Raiders are GONE!! BY BY
Why does this “suck” ,its a great start in negotiating. If I were Kephardt, I would do the same he is trying to get a piece of the pie and why not, he is the only guy with the vision and deserves something.
Now its up to MD to push back and get this done for all of the East Bay.
I’d buy that stance if there was at least SOMETHING salvageable in this deal. Coming to the table with a first proposal of “you take all the risk and I will reap all the rewards” (if there even are any to be had) is not a very good-faith first take.
He was hired (I assume) to keep the city/county/jpa’s best-interest in mind and come up with something that works for all parties involved. That was not delivered.
I would think it’s a better idea to come up with a reasonably realistic proposal. This is not that.
No wonder Davis is seriously considering San Antonio – after receiving offers such as this, San Antonio appears to be plausible.
The problem is the fact that Davis is receiving offers and not making them. He has a for profit business. He wants a new stadium for his team because he thinks with a new stadium he can make more money.
He needs to be making the offers not receiving them.
As far as Lew is concerned he can take Billy and go to Portland for all I care and start something there. His commitment is to make money only for Mr Baby Gap and is not in the best interest for the East Bay.
MLB needs to change to a style more in line with the NFL, NBA, its rich vs poor model is not going to work and over time the MLB will loose.
You think sports owners aren’t in this for their own best interests, when they’re putting up the money and risk? Just how naive are you?
I mean, at least Wolff is trying to do it without a bunch of public money, but because he’s willing to play the waiting game and wants to do it on his terms, he’s the biggest bad guy around. That’s amazing logic.
What would be in the “best interests of the East Bay?” Wolff/Fischer being willing to lose Big Big $$ money building a ballpark? They are businessmen, not philanthropists.
We are kidding ourselves to think that the MLB is a viable model for success in the small market. Let me give you and example, Baltimore, a city like Oakland, in the shadow of Washington DC, has won the superbowl twice in 10 years. Do you really think Oakland A’s can win with the existing model its in? Just think if the Warriors did not sign Iguadala, you think Billy could sign a guy like that for baseball? Give me a break, let the A’s walk, go to hell MLB!
My hope is now that the supreme court is creating justice in the world for families, maybe they can do something to break the rich vs poor in baseball!
Remind me the last time the Raiders were relevant. Also, Iguodala wanted to play for the Warriors in large part because he saw in them a team that had a good chance to win it all. There are many baseball teams that spend a lot of money and have nothing to show for it, by the way. It’s not how much you spend, but how well you spend it.
This proposal shows why the Coliseum site only works for one team and if that one team owns the site.
If more than one team is involved or if the team doesn’t own the site, a middle man like New City has to be included. The middle man has to make money on the deal and there’s limited money to go around the site as is. Adding in the middle man makes things next to impossible.
The problem for the Raiders is that they don’t have the money or the skill set to do this on their own.
I don’t know if this would be of interest to anyone, but:
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/06/26/nfl-considers-temporarily-moving-l-a-team-to-27000-seat-stadium/?utm_network=facebook&utm_post=3856059&utm_source=FB%20-%20SNF%20on%20NBC&utm_tags=srm%5Bfootball%2Carticle%5D
I just hope that the Raiders will now reconsider a plan for a partial renovation/rebuild on the Coliseum footprint. This will be a lot less expensive than a totally new stadium. Also, it will not require much in the way of ancillary development. Instead, the new stadium will be surrounded by a sea of surface parking. At this point, such a plan could be the only way for the Raiders to remain in Oakland.
People are overreacting to this proposal.
The 49ers 90% privately financed their stadium and no one thought that was a bad deal.
The Raiders in LA or Oakland have to privately finance stadium period, no subsidies except for infrastructure and tear down and that is covered by the city/county here.
PSL’s failed in 1995 because they were only 10 years in length. The economy wasn’t booming like it is today either. I went to the Chiefs game on Thursday night and it was raining, every suite in Mt Davis was full.
The Raiders can easily produce 300m in suite/SBL revenue for this. Corporations love the NFL and the Bay Area is the richest market in the U.S.
This proposal is just the starting point, the Raiders won’t sell 20% for 200M to anyone. That and the fact none of the development helps the stadium being constructed?
They need to hash that out, but otherwise why is anyone surprised??
This isn’t a bad deal because the Raiders have to pay for the stadium. It’s a bad deal because New City gets all of the benefits and the Raiders and Oakland take all of the risks.
Everything has to be finalized by August. This proposal has literally been years in the making. After that much time, you don’t put out a starting point for negotiation that is so far off, with only 2 months left on the clock.
@Slacker Again, it’s a negotiation. The framework will either work as a starting point or it won’t. Details like valuing the land, valuing a stake in the Raiders, determining who takes risk of overruns, etc. can be negotiated in two months.
The problem with that stance is that we can fully expect Davis and/or Grubman to say, “We’re gonna cap our contribution at the G-4 and Raiders’ matching piece, no more, the Raiders can’t afford it.” That’s $400-500 million. Then what happens? Everyone’s back at square one. A funding gap of $400 million is not wiggle room. It’s a gigantic obstacle.
@ML Well, Davis has said he’d be willing to sell part of the team to help close the funding gap, so a fair valuation of that piece would go a long way (as would a fair valuation of the land). But in general, I would agree, if the Raiders/NFL stick to that stance there won’t be a deal.
For this to have any chance, all three parties will have to give a lot more and take a lot more risk than they would wish. It doesn’t look like this is going to be a crazy lucrative deal for any of them, but it still could be a profitable deal.
But everybody knew all this before hand. Given what the city/county and Raiders have said previously were their requirements, is there any part of this you find surprising? What else did you think we might see in this proposal that would help close the funding gap in a different way?
This would be a negotiation if the Raiders and/or the A’s had already signed on to Kephart’s plan at a high level. Because they haven’t this is a sales pitch. Kephart first has to get the Raiders on board and then negotiate the details with the Raiders and the city.
Considering how long this saga has gone on, it’s a huge stretch to think they can make any progress in 2 months.
“People are overreacting to this proposal.
The 49ers 90% privately financed their stadium and no one thought that was a bad deal.”
Sid makes a good point. How does this compare to the Niners deal overall? Certainly the Niners benefited from bigger naming rights deals and PSL sales, but isn’t this somewhat offset by the more modest scale of the Raiders proposed stadium and Davis’ purported willingness to sell a stake in the team? Doesn’t privately financed mean privately financed? Maybe a topic for another post.
If the goal was to get the Raiders to privately finance a stadium on their own dime, Oakland didn’t need to waste 3 years and several million dollars to reach that conclusion. Instead they brought in one money group after another in hopes of bridging the financing gap, even when the stadium concept was made smaller and less daunting. We can talk about how the 49ers stadium was a success. By the same token we should talk about how it’s an anomaly. No other newly built stadium has a remotely similar financing plan. Carson and Inglewood are to be privately financed, but they come with other events and teams sharing the load – and they aren’t building yet. The Raiders won’t have much if any of that help.
At this point Sid’s going to paste in his back-of-a-napkin plan, to which my response is: 1) Use present value, and 2) Base your figures off the AECOM report from 2013. Then you’ll see why we’re talking about this funding gap so much.
There are only 2 things that make sense about this proposal. Either Lew or Davis fronted Kephart 3 mil to give a crappy proposal so he would go away, or Kephart just decided to submitt something to save face. We’ve all been there. You have to submit project you were supposed to work on for months. It’s a really difficult project, you get down to last couple days, and the you just say, screw it, and you turn it in anyway. What doesn’t make sense, is why Kephart would let someone leak the proposal to frame it as a “joke”. He had to know it would get out. Why not frame it your way. Unless of course, he knows it stinks, and just submitted just to say he got this far.
Kephart had to submit something to get the $3M, no matter how meek the submission. I’m surprised he’s getting any sympathy in these parts, especially from bartleby and Sid, both of whom are very thoughtful, reflective commenters.
My frustration is that Kephart was pretty indignant when he would comment here the past few months. The tenor of his comments was always, ‘There’s more to this than you know,’ or ‘That’s a mischaracterization of the situation,’ etc. and guess what? Everything about his ‘deliverables’ was pretty much exactly what ML has been predicting for a long time.
And ML came to that conclusion faster, with more transparency, and without making $3M.
@Jacob Jackson Thank you for your kind words. I wouldn’t describe my thoughts about Kephardt’s proposal as sympathetic exactly, as I do think it overreaches in certain respects. But it does conform to the specs he was given by the city, so I’m still not clear why so many people seem so surprised by it.
re: A funding gap of $400 million is not wiggle room. It’s a gigantic obstacle. ….to put it in perspective, you could build 2 HP Pavilions at the 1993 price and have $70 million left over. It’s about twice the cost of the 1995 Raiders renovation, if I recall correctly. The NFL certainly could bridge the $400 million gap if it wanted to. Oakland would have to ask, “How many police officers do we need to lay off, which libraries do we need to close and which potholes won’t get filled so we can host NFL games 10 days a year?”
@pjk Next are you going to tell me how many times you’d circle the earth if you put 400 million dollar bills end to end? I have a pretty good handle on how much money $400 million is, thanks.
The NFL and Raiders certainly could bridge part of that gap, if they chose. A fair valuation of a stake in the team would help a lot, so would a fair valuation of the land. Oakland would also have to put in more than it wants, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to fewer police. It might translate to having to basically give away the Coli site, or backing a hotel or rental car tax that might be politically difficult.
If not, maybe Oakland shouldn’t have professional sports teams. You know, for all the handwringing about what a disaster the Mt. Davis deal was, the truth is Oakland spent far less to acquire a major professional sports team than just about any other city. $200 million is chump change compared to what most other cities have invested in their team(s). In a lot of other places, that would have been regarded as an excellent deal.
I agree – the $200 million spent to bring the Raiders back was a bargain. But not for a struggling midsized city that gets no help from the state; $200 million was enormous. Even if you throw in the whole county to help pay for it. I’ve said this before – Oakland got into major pro sports on the cheap in the 1960s. Now the bill has come due for new, modern facilities for the 3 teams – more than $2 billion, in all likelihood – and Oakland simply can’t pay it. And it’s not a strong enough market to make private financing worthwhile.
The sad thing about the $200 million is that if the city/county hadn’t gotten greedy that figure could have been a lot less. The city/county decision to make the PSL term only 10 years so that could try to dun more money from fans for the last 5 years was a disaster; who knows how many more they could have sold had they not done that. (And of course, we know how much additional money they were able to get from PSL resales).
Oakland is a struggling midsize city, but Alameda County as a whole could support new venues. Something like hotel, rental car and ticket taxes could help close the gap without reducing essential services or impacting local taxpayers too much, it’s just a matter of political will and priorities.
Not saying I think anything like that is going to happen or that this is going to go anywhere; I don’t. Just saying, given the parameters he was set, I don’t know what people are finding surprising about Kephardt’s proposal.
The problem was not the PSL sales: they needed 50,000 to break even with the amount stated in the agreement and sold 35-40,000. The problem was that the renovations cost twice as much as they were supposed to, thanks to poor calculations and a wet winter during construction.
@manimalof7 I would say then the problem was both. Falling 33% short of projected PSL sales was certainly a big part of the problem; that would’ve significantly reduced the overall number whether there were cost overruns or not.
Let the A’s go to SJ already. Oakland is a football town……..only.
No? Disagree?
Then let them all go. Let Wolff go. By 2016. Please, or sooner.
The migraine is beyond F5. We don’t need “major league” status. We are (pimps from Oakland; from Wedding Crashers) and (or they do in the streets of Oakland; from Mississippi Burning), Oakland doesn’t need an identity. Anywhere in the world.
We are good. For sure. Leave.
Good luck.
Amen brother. Let’s concentrate on a league we can win in (revenue share)and go all the way! This “can’t sign anybody” is really depressing!
I’d rather root for a 3-13 raiders team than get to the playoff, loose in the first round and then trade everybody. I’m tired of this model. LEAVE WOLF NOW!!!
Instead of inputting an email account for Twitter or this website, can there be a test. The question on the test is:
Please spell Lew Wolff. If you can’t spell it, you don’t get an account. If you hate him so much, learn to spell his name.
How about “loose?”
from the LA Times: It would be a major headache if all three teams apply for relocation, even though we appear to be headed that direction now. There aren’t going to be three teams moving to L.A., so if three teams were to apply, at least one of them would be sent back to a market it tried to leave. That’s not good.
…I’ll bet the Carson proposal is deep-sixed while Kroenke’s gets the NFL’s thumbs-up on the condition he accommodates the Chargers. The Raiders? Welcome to Levi’s.
Could be, the Chargers also might still plan on staying in San Diego and are exhibiting good negotiating skills in their debate with San Diego city officials. Davis does not want to lease, and Kroenke doesn’t a partner – so the Raiders won’t be moving to Inglewood.
It’s hard to know exactly how this plan will work since there are a lot of unknowns; supposedly, it is incomplete.
– The affordable housing component relies on selling revenue bonds, which I think is unacceptable for the city. Why should they rely on selling bonds to raise money for affordable housing with a project of this magnitude? They need to have a guaranteed source for this, i.e., from the developer, and a specific amount. Better yet, they need a commitment that the project would contain a specific number of low income housing units, like 20%.
– Why should the city/county be contributing money for parking? This is a private development and New Cities should be responsible for providing it.
– What happens if there are shortfalls in the expected revenues, as there appears there would be? Who is on the hook if it all fails to materialize?
– The main point should be that the developer or the Raiders take care of the existing debt, pure and simple. If the land sales are used, the developer needs to guarantee retiring of the debt if the land sales don’t cover it.
– 450,000 sq. ft. of retail is a huge amount and without having a very good idea of exactly what type of retail and who the tenants would be, this seems unrealistic and unattainable. While this is a developer risk, the city would lose out on revenues if the space doesn’t get built and leased, and it would turn into an undesirable area.
The pressure on the city to approve this, or a modified, negotiated version of it, will be big. If they do approve it, or some form of it, the A’s are gone. If they don’t approve it, then the Raiders are gone and there is no guarantee that the A’s will offer anything better. In fact, Lew will know exactly where the city is coming from and will be in a position to offer a plan that does not meet the city’s objectives, only his. Then the city will have nothing else, and if they don’t approve his plan, the A’s are gone to SJ. Manfred will have 75% of the Lodge in his pocket, including a financial settlement for the Giants, and tell the Giants to take it or leave it. SJ will drop its lawsuit, Lew will say “I tried”, laughing all the way to SJ. It will be a very sad day for Oakland.
for what it’s worth and for many it’s not worth much. dolich was on ystl said that what he envisions for the coliseum is the a’s building a park there and for the area surrounding it to be mission bay 2 or what the a’s planned in the fremont project YEARS ago.
funny that wolff has said he doesn’t want the land to be developed and rather have the space surrounding any potential baseball park built be parking space.
any chance if wolff were to build the baseball park in the coliseum parking lot that down the road either he and or the city of oakland would ever develop the land to be sort of an entertainment district.
Good write up as to whoever leaked the CC initial proposal is big douche bag! (ahem Nate Miley trying to sabotage the project)?
http://asfanradio.com/
You should be more worried about any government agency that has “confidential agreements” with developers than who leaked it.
IF Nate Miley leaked it, I say good for him. He’s serving the people’s best interest.
you can’t kill something if it’s already doa.
I like what I see Coliseum City will happen