After the release of the Howard Terminal Draft EIR, I waited for the compiled comments to become available. Beneath the pleas from transit agencies and housing groups, there was a video provided by none other than Union Pacific (UPRR). The well-produced video comment is not much longer than a typical music video and comes with a highly professional voiceover.
Video illustrates hypothetical train parked in front of Howard Terminal
Union Pacific continues to raise concerns over the project, saying that it will impact its operations. The chief problem is that when a train stops at UPRR’s yard to the west of Howard Terminal, it will often be stuck there for 10-45 minutes as a long train is effectively split into three parts to fit it into the tracks at the yard. After that switching activity is completed the train can be loaded or unloaded. Presumably, the train has to be reassembled to some extent in order to begin its next journey.
Okay, we knew that going in, nothing new, right? Ah, but there’s a twist. UPRR acknowledges that despite its concerns, the City of Oakland could plow ahead with the project anyway. If that happens, UPRR is prepared to make demands. The big ask, which I heard from PMSA’s Mike Jacob in a discussion with Zennie Abraham yesterday, is that UPRR will request that all construction traffic be grade separated from the active rail line before construction on the rest of the project begins.
Block or charge? You make the call
It’s a reasonable request from a safety standpoint, one that I could see the Federal Rail Administration, Caltrans, and Amtrak supporting. If you’re going to reduce the risk of train-automobile or train-pedestrian/bike interactions, putting in a grade separation at Market Street (location not finalized) makes sense. The problem with that what we’re really talking about is putting in a big concrete bridge at Market, a piece of infrastructure that the A’s have been hesitant to commit to. As UPRR’s Robert Bylsma wrote in May:
Of course, a fully grade-separated entrance to the site that can handle trucks and heavy iron won’t be cheap. It’s not a showstopper, since if that’s the cost of doing business at Howard Terminal, that’s the cost of doing business. It does push a major project cost to the front of the line where it would compete with other line items. Plus there’s the visual issue of an eyesore bridge going up before the ballpark or anything else along the waterfront. During last week’s session, City staff still considered the vehicular grade separation an alternative, not a requirement.
Kalb brings up grade separation including the pedestrian bridge. Maybrun cites transit hub on 2nd Street as a mitigation measure. The vehicular grade separation would be near Market/Brush, is listed as an alternative, not a requirement. #oakmtg#HowardTerminal
With the separate vehicular and pedestrian bridges added to the project, the grade separation cost alone threatens to run into the $300 million range. There’s no surprise there. Good quality infrastructure costs money. When HT was considered 10 years ago for a ballpark, guess how much a new BART station at Market or Brush streets was estimated to cost? $250-300 million. I guess in hindsight I can see why A’s ownership is being so tightfisted about an item as fundamental in 2021 as affordable housing. Even if your budget is projected to hit $12 Billion, every $300 million counts.
It’s the early morning of July 8. In less than two weeks, the City of Oakland is scheduled to vote on a term sheet, which despite it being a non-binding document, could play a major role in determining whether the Oakland A’s remain the Oakland A’s. Will it be the term sheet submitted by the A’s? A term sheet written by City staff? Or a compromise version that incorporates key principles from both parties? Or will the parties reassess this mess of a situation, and punt?
Towards the end of today’s study session, Council Member Dan Kalb, who chairs the Community and Economic Development Committee, offered his assessment of how Howard Terminal has progressed since the beginning of the year:
Kalb: Prior to April 2021 I thought City staff and the A’s would present the proposal together for the Council to approve. Term sheet and what City had were very different. What efforts are the A’s willing to make to ensure that both are on the same page? #oakmtg#HowardTerminal
Tonight I’m hearing from the optimists that this all smacks of negotiation in one form or another. Looking at it through Kalb’s (and the other City Council members’) prism, the view is much more chaotic. We are now to believe that the A’s provided their term sheet in January with every intention of getting it approved with minimal changes. Then, having not received much feedback early this year, the A’s publicly released the term sheet in April. City staff, with its divergent goal of getting a term sheet in place that would get enough votes for the Council to approve it – a markedly different goal from the A’s take-it-or-leave-it proposal – scrambled to get that passable term sheet in place. As of now it’s still not finalized. Once it is, if it is passed, it will go back to the A’s for their approval or markup. Or the A’s could find points to compromise and approve it, or dismiss it altogether.
That’s a wide range of outcomes to have at this artificially late stage of the game. There are major deal points that have not been agreed upon yet, chiefly the issues of affordable housing within Howard Terminal and the fate of the “offsite” IFD encompassing much of the area north of Howard Terminal and going west to Mandela Parkway and east all the way to Oak Street. I tweeted out a snap poll to gauge which was most important among the four main issues I identified.
Post-mortem question: Which is the toughest #HowardTerminal issue to tackle?
The affordable housing question seems like the most cut-and-dried issue. Simply put, any major development in Oakland requires a percentage of it to be considered affordable housing. The target is 15%, though because Howard Terminal is under the Oakland Army Base redevelopment rules, the target at HT is only 8%. That equates to 240 affordable homes in the final buildout. A lowered goal should be achievable, right? Not for the A’s, who feel they’re already providing enough via tax increment from the development that could fund affordable housing elsewhere. That argument worked well 20 years ago when California’s housing crisis was less stark. Now it’s downright unreasonable to expect that a developer could go this route especially with the historically poor yields of finished affordable housing throughout the Bay Area.
To illustrate, let’s posit that a newer one-bedroom apartment at HT costs $2,300/month. Under one measure, affordable housing could mean that apartment costs a qualified renter $1,500/month, plus an $800 monthly subsidy paid by an affordable housing fund. That subsidy translates to roughly $10,000 per year, which multiplied by 240 units equals $2.4 million per year. I recognize I’m oversimplifying the problem with this illustration because I’m not tackling levels of affordability, but it should serve the discussion well. No matter how you slice it, that’s a hefty expenditure to be paid by tax increment, a developer, or a renter.
Next up, let’s look at the non-relocation clause. The City wants a term of at least 45 years, which would keep the A’s in Oakland for the next generation or two. The A’s are promising only 20 years, which they say is in keeping with other markets where, as Dave Kaval pointed out, the ballpark is often publicly financed (meaning the City is putting skin in the game). If the City isn’t directly subsidizing the ballpark, the A’s have less reason to take a longer than standard contract. From a practical standpoint, it’s rare to see relocation occur when the first lease term ends, mostly because a team has spent enough time and resources cultivating its home fanbase that it seems wasteful to pursue another so quickly. That generally holds true in baseball, where the last relocation was in 1972 (Washington Senators-Texas Rangers). In other sports it’s far more common, whether you’re talking about the Raiders or hockey in Atlanta. Usually whatever complaints a team has about its venue or market can be addressed by upgrading the facility or building elsewhere in the same market. The A’s sudden scorched earth campaign has sort of laid waste to Oakland, leaving Howard Terminal as the only desirable spot in the East Bay market.
The other major issue concerned the two IFDs or infrastructure financing districts. The A’s prefer two, one at the 55-acre Howard Terminal site and the offsite JLS site. City prefers a single IFD which would essentially be Howard Terminal with few surrounding parcels. City thinks the single IFD structure would be easier to get buy-in from Alameda County, which as you might have heard, isn’t exactly jumping for joy at the prospect. For their part, the A’s continue to say that they need both IFDs to ensure there’s enough tax increment revenue to cover all of the infrastructure and other costs. The problem with this is that without the JLS IFD there’s a major funding gap. As @hyphy_republic noted, City has identified Port-related sources that could backfill that need. Those would have to be studied thoroughly for their efficacy. As I started processing this detail, it occurred to me how ironic it is for the City go to the Port for funding while alienating Port stakeholders who are among the harshest critics of the proposal.
Lastly, there’s a question about the amount of community benefits in the package. The concern is that most of the money raised by tax increment usually goes straight to hard infrastructure in a straight line, or perhaps affordable housing. Other community programs may be more likely to be sacrificed in the event of a budget crunch or just plain old-fashioned value engineering.
Remaining milestones assuming it gets that far: Tell me how the City of Oakland is supposed to make a final approval of this project in September as Dave Kaval suggests
Look, I have no idea if the term sheet will pass in less than two weeks. It might, and then in September the County could choose not to take part, wrecking the project. Again, someone could punt on 7/20 and hope MLB doesn’t accelerate relocation talks. All I know is that this project has now come up in three separate major public hearings in the last two months: the Oakland Planning Commission, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, and now the Oakland City Council. In every venue there was serious tension and rancor between the governing body and the applicant (the A’s). You’re not going to just wipe it away by calling it negotiation. This is much deeper than mere negotiation. The City and the A’s appear to be at cross purposes, and if you throw the County into the mix, all three are. This is what I worried about when Howard Terminal was first proposed and when it came back to life. It’s an already complex set of circumstances made all the more complicated by the current regional economy. Maybe there is a breakthrough on the horizon. Judging from CM Kalb’s reaction, he was expecting a breakthrough sometime ago. It ended up being a mirage.
—
P.S. – The City has officially opened up discussions on its half of the Coliseum complex. I’ll save that discussion for another day.
P.P.S. – You read that right earlier and I almost forgot to mention it. During the hearding, the A’s filed a suit against Schnitzer Steel alleging a Clean Air Act violation. Now that’s some multitasking.
While Houston entered MLB with the flashy Astrodome and then retractable roof Minute Maid Park, the Dallas-Fort Worth area resisted domes for almost 50 years. They spiffed up a minor league park and made everyone endure the sauna that was Arlington Stadium. Successor The Ballpark in Arlington was a handsome structure during its baseball life, but it didn’t solve the existential crisis facing any MLB franchise in Texas: it’s too damn hot. Eventually North Texas would have to learn its lesson, so Arlington chipped in a third time to build Globe Life Field. For $1.1 Billion it does its job of keeping everyone comfortable while watching a baseball game. But as Jeremy Clarkson often asks, is it any good?
The correct answer (to me) is 5 (including the suite mezzanine).
Is it any good? Before I attended a couple of games at Globe Life Field to answer that question, I took the brief 60-minute tour there. It was the lowest tier of tour packages, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to go on the field or into any clubhouses. What I learned from the tour, combined with the experiences from the two games, will inform my experience at every ballpark I visit in the future. Because like it or not, Globe Life Field is the new standard, being the last ballpark built in the 30+ year run of new ballparks.
A better look at the seating arrangement from the lower club level
The tour and the main entry for both games I attended started in left field, where a large public plaza leads fans into the main concourse. From inside you can get a sense of the ballpark’s size and complexity. Black columns and beams evoke an erector set appearance. There are five seating levels including a separate suite mezzanine, with the upper deck and club level both split into upper and lower sections.
Arched concourse, a nod to the old Ballpark in Arlington
On the tour I was told that the Rangers set the climate to 72 degrees year-round, regardless of whether there’s a game. In light of Texas’s recent power problems that seems reckless. The justification is that it would be more costly to turn the air conditioning on and off instead of maintaining a constant temperature, a more relatable phenomenon in Texas (or Arizona where I live) than in coastal California. The main stadium entry I used happens to be sponsored by TXU, a leading provider in deregulated Texas. TXU is also owned by Vistra, which also owns the small power plant next to Howard Terminal.
Coming in from 90-degree humid Texas heat to 72-degree air-conditioned comfort is, well, bliss. It’s truly a nice improvement over my experience at Minute Maid Park, where the cooling system wasn’t nearly as efficient and I spent a lot of time sitting directly under a duct in the upper deck.
So is there anything else to rave about besides the HVAC system? A little.
Summer officially started the week I arrived, and there was no chance I’d get to see the roof open or experience an open-air game at GLF. That’s too bad, because the way the roof is designed it probably would be the best open-air experience of any retractable roof stadium aside from T-Mobile Park in Seattle. Unlike most of the retractables of years past, GLF’s roof doesn’t open towards right field or symmetrically like in Phoenix or Milwaukee. In Arlington the roof opens to the west and stows behind third base. The Rangers open the roof during April and some May homesteads depending on weather. Whether the roof is open or not, there remains a fixed roof in right field that houses the scoreboard and part of the outfield as well. The roof takes 12 minutes to open. The resulting opening is 5.5 acres in size, much larger than the football field-sized hole at JerryWorld.
View of roof from center field upper concourse
About that GLF roof: I’ll be nice and say it’s functional. Like US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, the top of the roof is covered with mostly transparent ETFE panels. ETFE allows for natural light to filter in. Unfortunately, the other two-thirds of the roof (nearly 4 acres) is covered with a rubber membrane. The Rangers got some flack locally when they revealed this, as their initial renderings showed a glistening roof that would’ve been covered in ETFE. Sadly, value engineering won out because of materials costs and the need to control the energy bill, so they went with a better insulating material for most of the roof. When I saw pictures of it online a couple of years ago, I thought the rubber sections were actually steel, as is often used in retractable roofs. Only when I got closer did I recognize what happened. The explanation made more sense in hindsight. It’s really too bad they didn’t use ETFE all the way around, as it promised a visual appeal that isn’t possible now. That said, I wonder if it would’ve been like what was done originally at the Astrodome, where skylights were installed to help grass grow there. That experiment failed miserably.
The retractable part of the roof meets the fixed part in right field, scoreboard visible
The field at GLF is 50 feet below street level. Fans can take separate escalators to the upper decks or the lower club level, which is more easily reached by elevator. The playing surface is Shaw Sports B1K, just like the recently installed turf at Chase Field. Something about how these surfaces diffuse and reflect light makes them look better in person than on television, where the effects appear harsher. At GLF there’s a normal dirt infield while the warning track is made of crushed brick.
The closest row of seats is only 42 feet from home plate, though the seats are part of one of the lower club suites. The Rangers pioneered the bunker suite at the old Ballpark, expanding the offering at GLF. Now there are suites all the way around foul territory with the exception of the dugouts. Add to that the netting from foul pole to foul pole, and you have the first ballpark with no field-accessible seats. For that, GLF deserves the moniker “first post-pandemic ballpark.” If the best regular seats are a buffer and a net away from a fake grass field, is it truly baseball? I suppose it’s a type of baseball, and given the compromises, worth it for some.
One of the many unused picnic tables
Throughout GLF the Rangers installed touches to give it a more cozy feel. Like the old Ballpark, picnic tables are all over many of the concourses. While they look inviting, they’re rendered unnecessary in a climate controlled environment. At the old ballpark, the picnic tables were a nice refuge for fans stuck on the concourse in the sticky heat. At GLF, where the walks to the seats are shorter thanks to shallower seating decks, fans aren’t as compelled to find a respite and are more motivated to return to their seats. As a result, I rarely saw any fans using the picnic tables during the two games I attended.
Rocking chairs on upper concourse
Former Rangers minor leaguer Alex Smith started his own company, Rockerman, which supplied wooden rocking chairs for use in the upper deck in left field. After some fan confusion about whether the chairs were ticketed seating or first come first serve, the team decided to sell them for games. The chairs help humanize a place that surprisingly lacks much of the down home Texas charm I expected coming in. Maybe that will all settle in the way a person breaks in a pair of jeans. Maybe not. The upper deck in left field also has an lounge area that doesn’t require a separate admission to enter, making it convenient for meetups.
Open office plan or ballpark?Mall or ballpark?
The upper concourse behind home plate is truly baffling. It’s a cross between a hospital wing and an incomplete mall extension. Unlike other concourses, there is no view of the field. Instead there are stairs and tunnels leading fans to their seats, including a half-level serving the 300-level sections. What’s missing is fun and color. If the Rangers are guilty of value engineering the roof, they’re equally culpable for the upper concourse drabness. It’s nothing that couldn’t be fixed by some paint and vinyl, but you have to wonder how much regard the team has for fans in the cheap seats when they couldn’t be bothered to provide fun branding or signage (ads?) when the place opened.
Airport terminal or ballpark? Note impressive ductwork
I know many of my critiques come off as reverse snobbery. Believe me, I understand that there’s a budget, and every project has to set priorities as no budget is unlimited. As a venue, GLF comes off as competent. The scoreboard is huge and well placed over right field. The main goal, to get more fans via a more comfortable experience, is working to an extent. For now, though, Globe Life Field feels way too uptight. The black beams everywhere are a step towards formalwear when all you want to do is get rid of the button-up and wear a T-shirt. The sound is decent and will be tested by Elton John, who plays GLF in September as part of his farewell tour. Someday I’d like to come back when the roof is open. Maybe that’s all the place needs to loosen up.
Comparison of three generations of Rangers ballparks
During its baseball tenure, I visited The Ballpark in Arlington (now Globe Life Park) three times. Other than the last time I went in early April 2017, every time it was as hot as hell. After living in the desert for a few years, the pure heat doesn’t bother me anymore. The humidity can be stifling. On Thursday I walked the neighborhood around my hotel, a mixture of budget accommodations and light industrial buildings. If that sounds like the Coliseum, it’s not far removed.
Left to Right: Globe Life Field, AT&T Stadium, Texas! Live, Globe Life Park
Anyway, a mile into my journey I checked my watch, which showed it was 90 degrees outside at 10 AM. I was feeling the humidity, so I decided that after I completed my walk and returned to the hotel I would take a quick shower because I was feeling sticky. For all its retro design cues and outdoor feel, the old Ballpark in Arlington was not designed to comfortably accommodate tens of thousands of people during the brutal Texas summers. It became obsolete for that reason alone. When an opportunity arose to extend an Arlington sales tax to build a new retractable roof ballpark nearby, Arlington jumped on it. The Rangers, who previously flirted with moving to Dallas, jumped on board. The rest culminated in air conditioned bliss.
There were talks in the past about building a retractable roof over the old 17-acre ballpark, which fits into a neat superblock within the Arlington Sports and Entertainment District with little buffer around it. From an engineering standpoint that made it difficult to plan how to incorporate the retractable roof, which would require additional acreage to store itself when it was open. In addition, the cooling costs for a more voluminous building and footprint were clearly not attractive from a business standpoint. The Rangers looked across the street for a site where architect HKS could conceive the team’s 21st Century requirements: fewer seats, more concourses, and most importantly, air conditioning.
They ended up with Globe Life Field on that spot south of Randol Mill Road, covering 13 acres to the east of the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium. Adjacent to GLF is Texas Live!, a combination of restaurants, a Loews hotel, and public congregation space. Just outside the commercial development is a tiny standalone 7-Eleven location.
I saw a 7Eleven on the map next to Globe Life Field and thought it was a mapping error. Sure enough… pic.twitter.com/FU5uSKO79L
While Globe Life Park is a bigger stadium on a bigger parcel than successor Globe Life Field, when combined with the ancillary development Texas Live!, GLF’s footprint is larger. Before the game on Wednesday, I explored Texas Live! to get a feel for it. Wanting a pre-game bite after the 1 PM tour, I settled on the Lockhart Smokehouse location in the complex. It was mostly empty as you would expect several hours before a game. I asked the bartender if this was normal and what business was like during games. She said it’s pretty slow around 2 (when I dropped in), picks up quickly for the pre-game crowd, and drops off once the game starts. I followed up by asking if fans are allowed to go back-and-forth between the restaurants and the ballpark after first pitch. She replied in the affirmative, though she said that it hasn’t happened yet. It might be a behavioral conditioning phenomenon, as fans may not yet be aware that they could order from their seats, walk out to pick up food from one of the restaurants, then walk back. Pro-tip: If I was with family or on a date, that’s how I would roll. Incidentally, I had a half-pound of the brisket (fatty, excellently cooked, could use better bark) and jalapeño mac-and-cheese, washed down with a couple of Shiner Bocks.
Texas Live! including the Arlington Backyard 5,000 outdoor concert venue
As I had time to kill, I wandered out to AT&T Stadium and the Wal-Mart across the street to pick up a couple of items, as there are few places for provisions in the area. After picking up my items, I decided to walk all the way back to the hotel. Curiously, the 1.7 mile distance was nearly the same length as the entire Jack London Square IFD in Oakland from west to east. As you can imagine, I had to take shower when I arrived at the hotel. Then I took a nap, which prepared me for Wednesday night’s 7 PM first pitch. I took a Lyft to the ballpark, where there was a proper queueing area for rideshare, unlike the predecessor.
View west from outside Loews Hotel with Globe Life Field in the background
The Rangers upgraded ballparks in a big, expensive way with the opening of Globe Life Field. Arlington itself remains remarkably the same. Decades ago the city fathers decided to remake the area with a focus on sports and entertainment, creating an economic district to that effect. The first company from the industry was Six Flags, which opened its Six Flags over Texas location in 1961. Next was the Rangers, who moved into an expanded Turnpike Stadium in 1972 after the mayor directly solicited teams by handwritten letter. The Ballpark in Arlington replaced Arlington Stadium in 1994. The Cowboys moved from nearby Irving to Arlington in 2009. During the intervening years, Arlington attracted the International Bowling Hall of Fame from St. Louis, an eSports venue, and soon a small convention center on the site of Arlington Stadium. Globe Life Park is being redeveloped, with the field converted for football/soccer/rugby use, new office tenants including the world headquarters for Six Flags, and approved residential uses on site. Despite Dave Kaval’s insistence that a MLB ballpark must be built “downtown,” Arlington is the antithesis to this notion. Downtown Arlington is 2 miles southwest of the Sports and Entertainment District and has far less overt corporate branding. A rail line runs through the Downtown area, another nod to the city’s Wild West origins. Sadly, there is no train depot. The nearest train station is near DFW airport. Public transportation remains pathetic. Bike lanes are scarce. Large stretches of streets have no sidewalks. Arlington is an urbanist’s nightmare.
The City of Arlington knows what it is: North Texas’s playground
Arlington got these attractions and got itself on the map in the process. No pro team will ever name themselves after Arlington. Yet its population is nearly 400,000, just behind Oakland and slightly ahead of Cleveland. It has a large commuter school (UT-Arlington) on the other side of downtown. How much is it worth to be the playground for North Texas sports/entertainment even if you don’t get much credit for it? Judging by Arlington’s desire to keep this economic model going, they seem to be okay with it.
Later this weekend I’ll post my review of Globe Life Field. For now, consider the choice Arlington made, and how it in some ways mirrors what Oakland has done over the past 50+ years.
I made my last post of 2019 in mid-December, thinking little would happen between then and the following FanFest. In hindsight that was a miscalculation. That’ll teach me to take a break, I guess.
What happened during that gauzy holiday season? You may remember the A’s were in talks with Alameda County about acquiring the County’s share of the Coliseum complex. Having followed the trials and tribulations of the post-Mount Davis Coliseum era, I figured this would be a relative cakewalk compared to the lawsuits and threats of the past.
On this point I was wrong.
The talks dragged on for months, culminating in an announcement on December 23, which also happens to be my baby brother’s birthday. So you’ll have to forgive me for the familial distraction. When the announcement was made, I saw it and retweeted it. There was no post about it as I didn’t feel it merited the effort. I figured the A’s would simply assume the payments on the debt payment schedule and assume control once the schedule was completed. On that point I was correct. But I missed a pretty large detail which only became prominent when the A’s and MLB started exploring markets outside of Oakland.
Remaining payments due on Coliseum debt
Again, I was wrong.
The Coliseum’s debt was refinanced a while back, extending the payment schedule out to 2026. That’s two years after the last season on the A’s current lease, which ends with the 2024 season. In the negotiation, the A’s got a bargain basement price for the County’s half of the complex, $85 million. During last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson admitted that the deal was done to encourage the A’s to stay in town. You might call it a literal hometown discount.
Okay, the A’s got a deal on the land. So what took so long, and what did the County get out of it? This was the detail I missed. As I was in yet another debate over a related topic on Twitter, I went into the archives for the County’s press release on the deal. I found an important detail I hadn’t noticed before.
The missing detail
Practically, this shouldn’t matter much if the A’s stay in Oakland, regardless of whether it’s at Howard Terminal or the Coliseum. In that context it’s a reasonable exchange. The County added a poison pill provision in which the A’s have to pay off all remaining debt within 180 days of announcing they will move away from The Town. Hypothetically, if the A’s announce they’re moving this week while they’re hobnobbing in Vegas, they will owe the County $65 million by the end of the year. Presumably, that’s on top of the existing lease obligations with the Coliseum JPA, of which the A’s won’t be a full partner until the debt is retired.
Before you tell me this is no big deal or not a poison pill, let me refer you to the Warriors’ lease at the Coliseum Arena. When the Dubs announced they were moving to SF, it was assumed that the team would pay for the lease on the years the continued to play there, then leave the JPA stuck with the remaining bill. The JPA fought that tooth and nail, eventually winning in court in 2020. When the move was announced I said at the time that the Dubs might not be able to easily escape the remaining years on the lease. I was told back then that the Dubs would win out. The dispute dragged on for 5 years and may have killed the prospects for a Bay Area WNBA franchise in the process. In my estimation the Dubs have been on a pretty steady losing streak since they moved to SF, on the court and in the courtroom.
This matters vis-a-vis the A’s situation for a couple of reasons. First, there’s now obviously a precedent set thanks to the Dubs. And since the County set up an agreement for the A’s similar to what they did for the Dubs, it’s probably equally enforceable. That’s good for the County even if you think they were lowballed, which they willingly were. At least the bills are getting paid.
Second, if you think ahead a few years there are a number of endgame scenarios. Let’s say the A’s, frustrated about the progress in Oakland, formally announce they will leave for Vegas on Opening Day 2024. Based on the lease terms they would be absolutely in the right to do that. Under the existing lease they would have no obligation past 2024, a clean exit. But because they entered into the purchase agreement with the County, they’re now on the hook for $15 million a year in 2025 and 2026 for a place they left in the rearview mirror. Sure, in the process they got development rights and veto power over future plans at the Coli. The right of first refusal almost as powerful as any development agreement. Yet $30 million is a tough pill to swallow if, as the A’s keep saying, there is no future there. Does that make any sense to you?
The other more extreme endgame scenario would be to announce they are leaving now. That also doesn’t make sense because the A’s would be responsible for $65 million, plus whatever’s remaining on the lease through 2024. Not to mention there is no MLB ballpark in Vegas for them to move into for 2022. If you think teams can break leases as easily as a lothario breaks hearts, look at what’s happening to the Tampa Bay Rays. They are stuck at The Trop until 2027 thanks to an ironclad lease. The A’s have effectively brokered a deal that does the same thing. Maybe that dovetails with moving into a Howard Terminal at the now-2027 opening date. It’s worth emphasizing that they didn’t have to do any of this. They could’ve stuck with the existing lease and walked away after 2024 with clean hands, or negotiated yearly leases after 2024 while a site elsewhere shook out. If you think $30 million is pocket change to a billionaire, what makes you think John Fisher would so cavalierly dismiss $30 million given how frugal he is?
In my pondering the implications of this detail, Chronicle Sports Editor Christina Kahrl promptly pointed out that her colleague, reporter Sarah Ravani, included the detail in her summary the day it happened. All credit is due to the real newspeople, of which I am not one. Have I mentioned how wrong I was about this?
In the end, it’s yet another wrinkle that adds some color to the existing ballpark talks. The City of Oakland is holding out, even talking about competing bids for their half of the Coli. The A’s are in Vegas right now, continuing to say “HT or bust” while perhaps formulating a strategy to get out of the lease/purchase terms. It’s all so petty. If history serves as any guide, that scheming will be futile. Maybe they leave anyway. It won’t be without a fight.
Globe Life Field from the parking lot, photo by Michael Barera via Wikipedia
A unique quirk of the 2021 A’s schedule is that they have no games against the Texas Rangers until June. Of those contests, trips to Arlington are scheduled for late June (this coming week), early July (before the All Star Break), and early August. The choice of consecutive months dovetailing with wider availability due to the easing pandemic allowed for greater planning flexibility for me, a fan with a natural desire to visit new ballparks.
As I have other travel planned this summer, I decided to get the Globe Life Field trip out of the way first. I mentioned in the Travel Grid post that I’ll head to Arlington this week, catching the final two games of the A’s-Rangers series. My itinerary has me arriving at Love Field on Wednesday morning, going straight to GLF for a tour, followed by a game that night, and a day game the following day. Then I’ll fly back to Phoenix Thursday night, a tidy and efficient junket, all boxes checked.
A’s ownership is also heading out to Arlington to research the retractable roof ballpark, in an effort to understand how something similar could work in the Vegas desert. It matters little that retractable roof ballparks already exist in the Sun Belt (Chase Field, Minute Maid Park, LoanDepot Park in Miami). What matters is that GLF provides an example of a mixed-use development going up around a new ballpark, which the A’s are planning regardless of location. And if the Vegas dry heat is more akin to Phoenix, Arlington’s more humid, sweltering summers provide a reasonably good comparison from a practicality standpoint.
Before I visit GLF, the biggest “improvement” I can see is a logistical one. The getaway game on Thursday is scheduled for 1:30 PM local (Central) time, an impossible option in previous summers at outdoor Globe Life Park. The Rangers actually lead the American League in attendance this year, due as much to a less restrictive capacity limit and the novelty of the park (remember it technically opened in 2020) as anything else. The fact that the Rangers are mired in the AL West cellar doesn’t matter at all, people want to get out to see Khris Davis Joey Gallo. Or they just want to get out of the house.
I likely won’t cross paths with anyone in the A’s delegation as I’m a mere pleb. Before they do their research on GLF they’ll head to Southern Nevada to get updates on the stadium site search there. Then they’ll raise the hackles of folks in the Bay Area. Naturally.
I’ll have plenty more observations when I arrive in the Metroplex.
Before I begin, I’m going to direct you to two blog posts on other sites. The first, by Jeff August, is at his own site, Jeff August Ego Trip. Jeff is a good friend and remains in the credits in the sidebar, though he hasn’t contributed to this site for several years. His viewpoint on Howard Terminal evolved over time, and while I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it and I disagree with his conclusion, I fully respect it because it comes from an honest place.
The other link is from Alex Espinoza’s blog, The Rickey Henderson of Blogs. Espinoza did the inhuman task of compiling observations from Tuesday’s extraordinarily long Alameda County Board of Supervisors meeting. The 6,000-word entry is truly impressive in its scope. I admitted to him while reading it that there’s no way I would try to take such notes as I would have to watch it twice to do so.
Espinoza also interviewed me before the baseball season started to discuss ballpark stuff and economics. If you haven’t checked out that podcast episode yet, you should.
After reading both posts, I immediately recalled comments made by Oakland City Administrator Betsy Lake regarding the planning aspects of the Howard Terminal Ballpark project. Lake considered the current A’s/City proposal fiscally irresponsible. Lake was asked by Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan about why the City is going through with the Howard Terminal if it’s not expressly for the purpose of building a ballpark. That brought on the following awkward exchange:
Chan calls the City’s claim that the County won’t be on the hook for the EIFD *sophistry*. Chan asks why County is doing this if it’s not to build a stadium. This is a great line of questioning that I will go over in a future post. #HowardTerminal#AlamedaCountyBoS
Chan gets Lake to admit that if the ballpark isn’t built, waterfront area out to West Oakland becomes available for redevelopment. 💥 #HowardTerminal#AlamedaCountyBoS
Before Maybrun presents, Miley asks Lake to confirm the “but for” status of Howard Terminal. She walks it back and says nothing gets built there without the ballpark. 💥 #HowardTerminal#AlamedaCountyBoS
That brings me to the belated thesis of this post. It would be one thing if the A’s built a ballpark on a 14-acre city block downtown, one that conformed with the existing city and neighborhood plans. The A’s, to my complete befuddlement, are instead proposing a mega-development with its own taxing authority (HT IFD), with ancillary infrastructure funded by a separate taxing authority (JLS IFD), yet nothing is being done to amend the City’s Downtown Specific Plan or West Oakland Specific Plan to properly accommodate those changes. The Downtown Oakland Specific Plan and EIR are still in Draft form and don’t include Howard Terminal, an odd choice given that Howard Terminal is being promoted as at least downtown-adjacent. It’s entirely a cart-before-horse scenario.
At the Oakland Planning Commission hearing in April, there was a mention of the Google Downtown development in San Jose, which went through the full planning process including a certified EIR. Not only that, San Jose expanded its definition of Downtown San Jose to fold in the previously separate area, which includes Diridon Station and SAP Center west of CA-87. Construction begins in 2023. Ironically, the catalyst for that entire effort was the planned A’s ballpark south of the train station. At the time San Jose went through with the exercise with no guarantee of obtaining the baseball club. But they did something that seems utterly novel when compared to the chaos in Oakland: they made a contingency plan.
That’s right, they had a Plan B.
San Jose Downtown West, dominated by Google
San Jose knew that as Silicon Valley grew eventually there would be demand for residential and commercial real estate in the newly-minted Downtown West area, which besides the arena was mostly surface lots and low-slung light industrial buildings. It was ripe for redevelopment, and despite Jerry Brown killing RDAs years ago, was assembled for a completely new vision with existing Caltrain/VTA light rail and future BART and HSR anchoring a transit hub, preposterously named the “Grand Central of the West.” Location and accessibility would earn attractiveness for a high-profile employer, most of whom generally avoided Downtown San Jose until that point. Next, the ballpark proposal died with the Giants’ legally upheld territorial claims, San Jose started looking for suitors for Plan B, and Google entered the picture. The rest is history in progress, with San Jose residents asking (and getting) more from Google in the form of a Community Benefits Agreement. Oakland is watching San Jose and is wise enough to take notes. The funny thing is that Oakland started pursuing Howard Terminal as a ballpark site years before San Jose did theirs. If you count the original HOK study which featured Howard Terminal, the site has been in an on/off pursuit for better than 20 years. Oakland, caught between trying and failing to keep their sports franchises, attracting new non-sports employers, and catering to the needs of its entrenched business interests (Port) as well as its unique and diverse population, showed the kind of indecision that could doom its ballpark plans, even its future as a MLB town.
San Jose Downtown West’s current state is humble and nondescript, not for long
Look, I am fully aware that San Jose and Oakland are worlds apart economically. Not as far apart as Oakland and San Francisco, but close. San Jose did the right thing by expanding their scope, by not limiting themselves to the pursuit of a sports franchise. If the A’s moved to San Jose, great. Maybe Google would look elsewhere for a secondary campus because the A’s partners would’ve gobbled up most of the nearby land. The A’s didn’t move south, which allowed San Jose to have the Adult Conversation about its vision with residents and businesses. That conversation is something I clamored for Oakland to have since nearly the start of this blog. It happens in fits and starts, never getting above a din peppered with occasional protests. Recently, Oakland asked Alameda County to participate in the Howard Terminal IFD by pledging its share for the on-site infrastructure. County Supervisors were taken aback, though if they were honest, they should’ve seen it coming and prepared for it. I didn’t expect Oakland to pull this off on its own. No one should have given how dysfunctional Oakland is. That said, Alameda County sold its half of the Coliseum in an effort to get out of sports. The Supervisors’ outrage at being put in this situation by Oakland is consistent with previous actions.
Unfortunately, the confusion over Oakland’s plans (or lack thereof) is also consistent with its previous actions. Friends, that is not a good sign. The Supervisors and their Oakland City Council counterparts put a positive spin on how things are progressing. HT supporters slurp it up without bothering to inspect the problems beneath the surface. The bottom line is that the Council is divided. The Board of Supervisors is also divided. Everyone wants to get to Yes, as Supervisor David Haubert suggests. The problem is that no one knows what Yes means except in the most vague, general terms. As Jeff pointed out in his post, 33 regional/state/federal agencies have to approve this project. Howard Terminal should be part of the Downtown Specific Plan, but that would have first required removing its maritime designation, cleaning up and disposing of the land through a public process, and numerous other steps which can’t start because of related complications. According to the A’s, time’s running out for Oakland. I don’t believe that because I believe in practical, real solutions. The A’s and MLB’s greatest tactical weapon is to ratchet up the tension on Oakland to get their desired outcome, whatever that is, however long that takes. They’ll do it again and again until they see results. It’s easy to confuse tactics with strategy, which so far the A’s and baseball have not shown an ability to execute either in Oakland or Tampa Bay. Yes, in absolute terms the A’s could move, but MLB has made it intentionally difficult to do so. I wouldn’t worry about that in the near term. Right now there’s a drought and a heat wave in the Bay Area. It’s not even summer yet! Frankly, it feels poetic.
Be safe out there.
–
P.S. – Google is not moving its headquarters away from Mountain View.
P.P.S. – The City of Oakland will release a revised term sheet after its study session on July 7. The release will occur no later than 7/16, which will give them 4+ days to review the terms prior to the 7/20 vote. My reaction to that news:
The revised #HowardTerminal term sheet puts the 6/15 #AlamedaCountyBoS meeting into new light. If they didn’t have the benefit of the info from the revised term sheet, what were they supposedly voting to approve? They were right to table it.
I’ll drop in more of the select tweets as I go through the night. Enjoy the process.
My favorite moment of the long night:
Carson clarifies from Lake the City is asking for a NON-BINDING vote. He then launches into a great anecdote about how NON-BINDING is like telling your child you’re planning for a Disneyland trip and then watching the $ signs add up. #HowardTerminal#AlamedaCountyBoS
Valle with the first sports analogy: County is in the bottom of the 9th down a grand slam. They were brought in late in the game. #HowardTerminal#AlamedaCountyBoS
Issues for Oakland to address before 7/20 1. When did City realize that it wouldn't be able to go it alone w IFDs? 2. Did they communicate this to anyone in AlCo in the past 2 yrs? 3. If the JLS (offsite) IFD doesn't get approved, how is feasibility affected?#HowardTerminal
Another thing to consider about #HowardTerminal – Now that Alameda County kicked the can to possibly September, what does that mean for the City of Oakland’s sense of urgency? Do they feel more pressure to approve on 7/20, or do they ask for more time?
We’re more than a quarter through the 2021 season. Personally, I didn’t feel good about releasing the Travel Grid until I saw restrictions loosening to the point when people could start coordinating trips. So here we are. On the day media were allowed back on the field at the Coliseum, I finished the Travel Grid. The latest Travel Grid comes in three formats:
Enjoy. I’ll go to the A’s-Rangers series in Arlington in a couple weeks, Oakland for a Padres-A’s game in August, and if time allows, the A’s-Blue Jays series in Buffalo (assuming they’re still playing in Buffalo) around Labor Day.
newballpark.org 