Oakland Coliseum City Plagued By Secret Deals, Neophytes, Bad Journalism, and Racism

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Once again, Oakland proves that it’s really good at just one thing when it comes to big projects, keeping secrets, and openly shows why it may lose all three of its sports teams sooner rather than later or never. Well, in the case of Coliseum City, it is really several things beyond keeping secrets that plague Coliseum City. Let’s take them all from the top:

1) Secret Deals: Of all of the stadium development efforts, Oakland Coliseum City is the only one that is plagued by our city’s habit of doing deals in the backroom, only to see them fall apart when they finally reach the light of scrutiny. Look at the other efforts in Carson and Inglewood, not to mention Met Life Stadium, Reliant Stadium, and the vast majority of sports facility projects – all have, or have had, task forces of some kind and stadium financing plans were known to the public and didn’t have to be leaked. As I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, this is not rocket science at all. The only complication comes in the desire of Oakland elected officials to make themselves feel powerful by having something they think you don’t have: information. (And this problem seems to lay in as a byproduct of our civic culture: newly elected councilmembers stuffer from the same problem.) The truth is that in the 21st Century, all of the information you need can be found online, including leaked documents or emails, and stadium financing methods and formulas. Moreover, there’s nothing in any stadium deal that calls for confidentiality, including a proposal to buy a part of the team. Now if there was a task force, then some of what happens in that meeting should be confidential only when lawyers are involved, but what the task force does and what’s talked about should not be. And that leads to point number two…

2) Neophytes: the elected officials involved with Coliseum City are new to sports facilities matters, and spread thin with other civic obligations. On top of that, and perhaps because of that, they’re afraid to act and don’t know the right questions to ask. I told Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, Oakland City Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney (District Three), and Oakland’s At Large City Council Member Rebecca Kaplan that we needed a task force on more than one occasion. While Kaplan says she mentioned this to Mayor Schaaf, nothing has been done to date. Meanwhile the NFL clock is ticking for an August 11th Chicago NFL Owners Meeting deadline. By contrast, the legendary Oakland District Four Councilmember Dick Spees, who raised money and built the Chabot Space and Science Center in the Oakland Hills, would have started a task force. Indeed, in 1996, when I was Economic Advisor To Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, Spees did do just that, and I was on it – we got Cirque Du Soleil to move from San Francisco to Oakland. That kind of leadership is sorely needed today, and it’s not that Libby or Lynette or Rebecca, or Oakland Councilmember Larry Reid for that matter, can’t do it – they just don’t do it. Libby can do better. She knows this, and so do I. She calls me “my brother” as she is my godsister (which means something to us) so Libby this is your brother calling for better performance not just from you, but from all Oakland elected officials. Again, we’re the only city that doesn’t have a task force with respect to this stadium issue. Having a task force could act as a receptacle for not just Floyd Kephart’s team’s proposal, but for any other that may come from the Raiders (like mine) or the Oakland Athletics. A task force would give periodic press updates, and stop the other problem that hampers Coliseum City Oakland…

3) Bad journalism: I’m a blogger not a journalist, and I say that proudly because journalists get off on saying they’re journalists, whereas bloggers openly poke holes in journalist’s hubris. Truth is, there are not a lot of journalists around. A true journalist does research and goes to an expert source regardless of who that person is or how they feel about them. But in the Oakland Coliseum City case, the California, local Bay Area, and Oakland writers (I’ll stop calling them journalists) don’t do any of that. The writers don’t understand stadium finance, so when Carson says they have a “privately financed deal”, these pinheads buy the term hook line and sinker, whereas when I saw that bunch of malarky, my first thought was that it was not and was more than likely a lease revenue bond issue, where a public organization issues bonds that are paid for by the revenues produced by, in this case, the stadium itself – and not some rich person writing a check as the term implies. On that basis, I insisted on social media that such reports of ‘private financing’ were wrong and even as Raiders fans were insisting otherwise based only on what they read. I then had to deal with bad journalism infecting the overall public view when I was on the Buehler’s Day Off radio show on KXPS 1010 Palm Springs: Buehler insisted that it was ‘privately financed’ and also that St. Louis Rams Owner Stan Kronke could just “write a check” for his Inglewood stadium and would do so. The overall talk was a shouting match, and only because Buehler and her co-host insisted on not letting me talk even though I clearly know about each project and how sports arenas are financed. That kind of thinking – that a rich person just writes a check for a stadium – among media people who never came close to being involved in any stadium deal has contaminated reporting on this issue. The folks who make such claims with respect to modern NFL stadium financing never bother to check the Internet to determine if they’re correct – they’re not. The reason is that any investor in a stadium project will want their money back, and that has to come from stadium revenue streams that would normally go to either stadium construction or player and team development expenses. That’s a bad deal.

Then, the writers, all of them white to date (I’m the only African American to consistently report on this story, but then I have my own media company), also don’t bother to ask a person who’s submitting a stadium plan what it’s about. Only Floyd Kephart gets that because he has the contract with the City of Oakland and County of Alameda. But as for me, who was given permission to submit one by Oakland Raiders Owner Mark Davis, not one writer has bothered to ask me about it. And the implication I get seems to be based on something that I’d never thought I’d say, but I’ll say it: racism. If I were white, that would not be the case. Indeed, if you think about it, why aren’t people like former Oakland City Manager Robert Bobb (who built the stadium after the Montreal Expos were brought to Washington D.C.) called to offer their view on stadium finacing with respect to Coliseum City? Or why is it that of all of the writers, only Mike Silver and Jason LaCanfora have bothered to report or tweet that I have a proposal out there? All of this impacts how people think about Coliseum City, and right now, they’re not getting the full story. It reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”, where media tosses out propaganda and mind control: in this case, that the folks who have the answers are all white and blacks aren’t involved nor do they have a good idea. It’s why I started my own media company. It’s no wonder we still have riots. That will end when projects like Oakland Coliseum City are done in such a way as to stop…

4) Racism: there’s no evidence that any black developer or anyone of minority status has been allowed on to the New City Development Team, or that the City of Oakland or County of Alameda asked for a diverse team of people and got it; it did not. I don’t care what you say about California Proposition 209, it can’t supercede Federal equal opportunity laws and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In fact, Prop 209 has never been challenged on that basis, but I digress. It’s really shameful for the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda to allow this to happen. Moreover, as of now, everyone involved in Oakland Coliseum City who is not an elected official is white, and the one black guy who submitted a good proposal is the one they are trying to sweep under the rug but won’t – me. I had one person involved and working for Oakland (who I thought was a friend) say to me “Now Zennie. Mark Davis did not ask you to submit a proposal.” I hit the ceiling, but rather than throw a punch, I calmly explained how it happened once again, and showed proof from my witness, Mike Silver.

If Oakland Coliseum City can overcome those problems, we just may be able to pull this thing out of the shitter. But right now, it doesn’t look good at all. The clock is ticking.

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