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Oakland Athletics President Dave Kaval was standing somewhere near the south side of the Las Vegas Strip on Wednesday morning, with the Cosmopolitan and Planet Hollywood within sight. Kaval will be there alongside his architect over the next two days, he said, attending a series of meetings and analyzing where a potential new stadium could one day reside. Meanwhile, negotiations with the City of Oakland over a 35,000-seat waterside baseball stadium at the Howard Terminal site are in what Kaval has described as “the bottom of the ninth inning.”
Oakland City Council officials voted Tuesday in favor of a non-binding conditions sheet for the stadium and its surrounding development, a project that will cost up to $ 12 billion. But Kaval pushed back because City voted in favor of a different list of conditions than the A’s proposed three months earlier and including amendments the team were seeing for the first time. Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred followed with a statement expressing disappointment with the outcome and promising “to immediately start conversations with the As to chart the course for the club.”
What does this mean exactly?
“I think we have to unpack what has been passed and what it means,” Kaval said in a telephone interview with ESPN. “The fact that the city did not vote on our proposal – I mean it’s unusual to have this positioning. We appreciate some of the concessions that were made. I think the party had negotiated in good faith for trying to come up with a mutually acceptable solution. Obviously we didn’t get there until the vote. So we have to balance this progress with some of the harsh realities of: “How to get this project to an implementation phase.” work? ”We can’t let the process be the product.”
The A’s made a public proposal in April stating that they would privately fund the stadium, which will cost around $ 1 billion, while also providing $ 450 million in community benefits and organizing an additional private investment of $ 11 billion. dollars to eventually build the surrounding neighborhood with 3,000 residential units, up to 1.5 million square feet of retail space, 270,000 square feet for retail, a 3,500-seat indoor performance center, 400 rooms hotel and up to 18 acres available for public parks.
The city responded with a plan that includes three key differences: a new financial structure that depends on a single district for infrastructure funding, preventing A’s from creating an additional one in Jack London Square; an increase in the demand for affordable housing to 35% of residential units; and an additional community benefits fund that does not focus solely on capital investments.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and other community leaders held a press conference near the Howard Terminal site on Wednesday morning, in which they touted the city’s proposal and urged the A’s to continue negotiating . Schaaf said she noticed an “openness” on the A’s part, adding that the city “had provided the main things that they had requested, that they had said they had to continue this process.”
“I respect that they’re trying to keep the heat out,” Schaaf said, “and what better place to go than Vegas for the heat.”
Kaval, on the other hand, described the trips to Vegas as due diligence to cover a project that might not materialize and provide a parallel path for a team playing at an outdated facility. Kaval said he wanted more details on how A’s would be reimbursed for a $ 352 million infrastructure payment and more details on when environmental clearances will be granted and when a final binding vote may have. take place, ideally by the end of the current baseball season.
Oakland city officials see their counter-proposal on Friday and the amendments introduced on Tuesday as the natural evolution of a negotiation.
Essentially, A’s officials see it as an entirely new deal.
“We need to know what was passed, how it relates to our original proposal,” Kaval said. “We have to understand the timeline to get the final vote. And we have to work closely with the league because they have a strong point of view on it. They want to make sure the A’s have a place to call home. We’re really running out of time. We’re under a lot of pressure because our current facility is past its 10-year useful life. Let’s not forget that going sideways is really no longer an option. “
The A’s have spent most of the past two decades hoping for a new stadium in the Bay Area, a chase that has taken them through San Jose, Fremont and several venues in Oakland, most notably around Laney College. Renovations to the current Colosseum site, where the A’s have played since 1968, were deemed unsustainable in large part because of the team’s stated desire for a downtown location.
Manfred said ahead of last week’s All-Star Game that it would be a “mistake” to call the Las Vegas option a bluff, calling it a “viable alternative for a major league club.” Other relocation options – including Portland, Oregon; Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Montreal – could come to fruition if the team’s deal with the city fails.
This is not necessarily the case at the moment.
“We are focusing on the two parallel paths – Oakland and southern Nevada,” Kaval said. “It’s through league management, and that will remain our focus until they give us some further direction.”
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