Two articles by the Trib’s Paul Rosynsky today. First off is a report with quotes from numerous property owners who may be willing to relocate if the price is right, but also hate eminent domain with a passion. Next is an article detailing a request from Lew Wolff to the City of Oakland, asking for someone within City Hall to assist with the plan (land acquisition, zoning, planning). Oakland did have just the man for that job once upon a time, but Robert Bobb was never supported by Mayor Brown, and so he left to a place where his skills could be utilized: Washington, DC. Larry Reid, as much as he may be committed to this, will not get the job done alone. There needs to be someone on the inside who can navigate the political maze and broker the necessary deals to get everything in place. At my day job, we call this person a “champion.” The champion is willing to do the leg work, the follow-ups on all related parties – someone who has considerable influence within but won’t be distracted by other issues, as an elected official would. Will the city produce such an individual? We’ll find out shortly.

The Chronicle has a new editorial that has the same tone as Thursday’s Tribune op-ed. I imagine Wolff must be a pretty good poker player, though I imagine he’s more likely to play hold-em, stud, or baseball than no-peekie. Then again, with so many Saturday evening games, perhaps he’s a fan of night baseball.

Eric Lai of the East Bay Business Times has an excellent article on the impending land acquisition efforts. There are some mind-blowing numbers, including an estimate by the paper’s analysts that the land in question could be worth up to $315 million. Or, at the below market rate of $20 per square foot, the land would cost $126 million. Keep in mind that the purchase of the land would not be a cost borne by the City of Oakland, but whatever the final figure may be, it’s a substantial investment. The payoff potential is enormous though, as Wolff and his partners could net hundreds of millions if not billions if they built, say, 5,000 market rate condos on the site. The piece ends with a rather ominous note:

Wolff has set a one-year deadline for garnering the political and monetary support for his project. That assumes unrealistically quick cooperation from a wide range of government bureaucracies, critics say.

“Lew might have come up with something so big in order to see Oakland fail,” said Zennie Abraham, a former Oakland mayoral adviser and sports business owner.

Having made his best effort, Wolff would then be free to negotiate moving the A’s to a city such as Portland, Sacramento or Las Vegas, all of which are clamoring for a Major League Baseball franchise and willing to pony up more money than Oakland is.

The CoCo Times’ Guy Ashley mentions an important nugget not previously reported from the 8/12’s JPA meeting:

Though Wolff said the team is open to all possible alternative sites, the preferred one appears to involve a compact new A’s stadium in the Coliseum’s north parking lot, and a massive new parking facility on the south side of the Coliseum near Hegenberger Road.

One East Bay official at the center of the A’s ballpark initiative said the site repeatedly comes up as the most logical Plan B for the stadium project.

“It’s his fallback position,” said Oakland City Councilman Larry Reid, who spoke with Wolff about the Coliseum scenario days before Wolff went public with the baseball team’s grand Plan A to transform a tired swath of land along I-880 between 66th Avenue and High Street.

While it’s not the major development plan proposed at the meeting, it’s a reasonable fallback should acquisition of parcels within the preferred site prove difficult. However, it does pose issues involving financing. Limited acreage makes the investment potential at the Coliseum North/South lots far less. There’s also a question of whether such an option, which places the ballpark on the north end and extra parking along Hegenberger, makes sense. The Raiders don’t want garage parking. They want surface lots for their fans to tailgate. It makes more sense to put a ballpark on the Malibu lot and build other parking along Hegenberger, so that interference with the Raiders’ interest is minimal. They’d also have a chance to further develop the Hegenberger land, which would be a short walk from the ballpark itself. Whatever Plan B actually is, it’s good to know that at least there is a Plan B.

Another item of interest is the fallout from the federal transportation bill (Fremont Argus). While San Jose Congressman Mike Honda inserted language that will help the BART-to-San Jose project, other projects were hurt because they didn’t receive federal matching funds that are desperately needed to complete them. The BART Warm Springs extension and the BART Oakland Airport People Mover are two local projects that received nothing. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission may have the ability to shift money around to get some of 10 projects on the list going, but they’re going to need to be creative. If something doesn’t happen to bridge the funding gaps for each of these projects, they could be delayed at least two to four years, or even indefinitely.

The final item today is a report from the Chronicle on the closure of the Parisian sourdough bakery in San Francisco. An institution for 149 years, Parisian was swallowed up by Interstate Brands (Twinkies, Wonder Bread) several years ago.

Interstate Brands, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, is shutting down two San Francisco bakeries as part of a cost-cutting move, an effort “to right the ship,” said Interstate Bakery spokesman Jason Booth. The second bakery, on Bryant Street near San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, made Wonder Bread, Twinkies and Ho-Ho snack cakes. It also closed Friday. Interstate said neither plant was profitable.

The point of all of this? Interstate is keeping their Oakland bakery open. In a previous post, I noted that this is the landmark Colombo bakery, which just so happens to take up several acres of the land Lew Wolff is trying to acquire. There are a couple of possibilities here. Since Interstate has two factories that they would have to liquidate, it may be possible for Councilman Larry Reid to ask Interstate to relocate their Colombo operations to San Francisco, if that’s feasible. Of course, that’s probably not an appealing notion to workers at the Colombo bakery. There’s also the possibility that because Colombo is a healthy brand and may have some special strategic importance to Interstate, that they may be unwilling to sell the property. Everything has a price, but there are certainly valid arguments for making it either more or less difficult. Only when these parties are engaged will we know for certain. Add to that the fact that negotiating with every individual company or landowner is a unique set of circumstances, and you can start to appreciate the effort that will be needed to pull this deal off.

Prior to a vote in the Appropriations committee, SB 4 was amended again. This time, there’s a wholesale change in how the funding system works. The biggest change is the elimination of the California Public Performance Facilities Authority, the body that would have approved or rejected any stadium or venue projects that applied for funding through this new state-based process. Instead, now all approvals would go through the State Infrastructure Bank’s board.

The impact is huge, in that the I-Bank’s board is made up of much different characters than the Authority’s would-be board. The Authority board would have been comprised of entertainment and sports industry veterans. The I-Bank’s board is made up financial and policy wonks, who collectively may be less inclined to approve some of the more questionable projects than the Authority’s board would have been. The net effect is that the bill’s potential power in practice has been significantly reduced. In fact, the I-Bank’s staff provided the following comment:

Conversely, staff at the Infrastructure Bank believe that this bill would not provide to the state any new tools from those currently available to a local government or joint powers authority seeking to finance these facilities.

Will the bill come up for a vote in the Assembly and then get signed by the Governor before the end of the short session? I’d say no, at least not in this rather neutered form.

Update (8/19): The bill was just placed in the Appropriations committee’s suspense file, which means that it will be further studied because of its fiscal impact. Another vote in Appropriations is scheduled for Thursday, 8/25.

Todays’ editorial from the Oakland Tribune shows optimism in the ballpark plan, but withholds judgment on it until more details come out. An important issue that is brought up in the piece is the High St/880 interchange. Will it have to be revamped to handle additional residential, commercial, and event-related traffic? Would the same have to happen for the 66th Ave overpass as well? One of the few good things about postgame traffic from the Coliseum is that the cars in the north lots have to exit via 66th Ave, while those in the south lots exit via Hegenberger Rd, splitting traffic. That wouldn’t be the case with a new ballpark whose traffic would be largely centered around 66th. A new thoroughfare could be constructed to take northbound traffic to High St, but that traffic could end up running through a residential neighborhood, which isn’t ideal.

There’s also a larger philosophical question here: Does this mean Oakland is near the end of its image as a blue collar town? While it’s possible that not all of the businesses that would be displaced would leave Oakland completely, the plan is a classic case of gentrification. Like many other cities with a long manufacturing and industrial heritage, Oakland has been struggling for several years with the idea of gentrification (and the economic benefits it brings) against maintaining its gritty image. Many of the food processing companies that once called Oakland home, such as Mother’s Cookies and Fleischmann’s Yeast, left long ago. Colombo Baking may leave as well. Some may bemoan this major change as the loss of Oakland’s soul. Others may welcome it, saying it’s a better fate than that suffered by Detroit or Cleveland. Considering the fact that yesterday, 12,000 people lined up outside the nearby Wal-Mart in East Oakland to apply for only 400 openings, perhaps progress isn’t the such the bitter pill many make it out to be.

The ballpark site photo overview is now available. The file is slightly over 1 MB and is in PDF (Acrobat) form. A permanent link has been created in the sidebar as well. Here’s a sample photo:

In tangentially related news, L.A.’s Staples Center (owned by Anschutz Entertainment Group) is getting $10 million in video and seating upgrades. Staples is only five years old, but AEG wants to preserve Staples Center’s reputation as the most glamorous, feature-packed arena in the nation. AEG is also developing land near Staples, including the big 1,200-room hotel that it is building with Maritz, Wolff & Co. The hotel is scheduled for groundbreaking in the fall.

I received a response from Linton Johnson, Chief Spokesperson for BART (and former NBC-11 anchor/reporter). The answers he gave indicated how early in the process all of this ballpark and ballpark village talk is.

According to Johnson, the $70 million figure is based on “rough paper estimates” on how much it would cost to build a new station. A complete study would have to be undertaken for BART to be able to obtain firmer figures and a breakdown of costs. More interesting facts:

• The cost would depend largely on whether the station is on-line (used during all operating hours) or off-line (used during games only). So far, no stations on the current system operate on an off-line basis, but it was considered for some of the stations between Colma and SFO.
• The 10 car estimate is based only on operating a station on an off-line basis. An unknown higher number of cars would be needed if the station were to operate on-line/full time. The final number of cars needed would depend on a final study.
• The A’s have not called BART yet to ask them to explore this further.
• The process of getting a BART station approved and built involves some of the typical studies such as an environmental impact report (EIR) and a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process.
• About prioritizing such a project, Johnson said, “Money and politics will determine priority.”

So the rough costs cited were very rough, and could inflate quite a bit when all is said and done. Another item from the drawing is the pedestrian footbridge that would have to be built from the station to the village, similar to the existing Coliseum BART bridge. The cost of such a bridge would have to be included. For reference, a similar bridge project being built between Petco Park and Harbor Drive/San Diego Convention Center just received $2.8 million in federal funds. Oh, infrastructure!

In other news, columnist Evan Weiner of the Bergen Record/NorthJersey.com details the trend of ballpark village developments occurring in MLB cities.

The Legislature is back after their month-long recess. That means it’s time to check on SB 4. According to the latest update from aroundthecapitol.com, SB 4 is scheduled to hit the Assembly Appropriations committee on Wednesday. This legislation could have an enormous impact on the final deal between the A’s and Oakland/JPA, because of the tax-free financing that would be available, as well as the ability of groups to use that financing to fund all sorts of infrastructure – including transit improvements like a new BART station or off-ramps, pedestrian bridges, etc.

From the San Jose Business Journal: San Jose’s Redevelopment Agency is continuing with its efforts to acquire the Diridon South properties. To do this they are going around the city’s charter, which requires a public vote before any money is spent on a sports facility. They’re able to do it by saying that the land could be developed any number of ways, a stadium only being one. While this is certainly true on the surface (previously published planning docs indicate the city’s desire to developing housing on the site), most everyone around the new City Hall knows that it’s definitely a stadium site they are trying to secure. The latest update:

The RDA is ordering up appraisals, and on Aug. 9, the City Council tentatively approved the sale of 9.22 acres on Julian Street to provide the agency with about $14 million to help pay for the land, which includes the old KNTV studios, a PG&E power substation and Stephen’s Meat Products.

Ever the cheerleader for San Jose effort, Santa Clara County Assessor and Baseball San Jose board member Larry Stone got in a few digs at Oakland over the plan when he was interviewed by KTVU-2 on Friday. Regarding the Diridon South site:

The San Jose Redevelopment Agency should have land secured for a possible ballpark on the western edge of Downtown San Jose, near the Diridon train station, within the next 30 to 60 days — when Wolff’s Oakland proposal collapses, San Jose will be waiting, Stone said.

After today’s game, I drove around the 90-acre site and took pictures of the various buildings in the area, the roads and railroad tracks. I’ll put them into a Photo Overview soon enough. (And no, I was not accosted at any point.)

In the meantime, there’s a new report from the CBS-5 (KPIX) with video of the area and feedback from local businesses.