In fact, the only good thing about the entire proposed development right now, aside from the team itself, is the fact that Raiders Owner Mark Davis has said he has $400 million to contribute to the project.
That’s great, but here are the central problems we have to solve:
1) The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority was created as a political ploy to gain control over the development of the Oakland Coliseum Complex and wrest it away from the private-sector board that ran it for decades, going back to 1968. It was not formed to finance the creation of sports venues in Oakland.
Then-Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente advanced a plan to form the Coliseum Authority around the bond issue that was let to pay for the $196 million in renovations to the stadium to bring back the Raiders from LA to Oakland.
The original document for the Coliseum Joint Powers Authority was to have just two people on it: the Oakland City Manager and the Alameda County Administrator. De La Fuente argued that the Raiders bond were the public’s money, and so a larger body, controlled by elected officials, should have power over the Coliseum. Ignacio’s efforts were resisted by then-Coliseum Board chair George Vukasin, but his work in lobbying Alameda County and the City of Oakland failed. De La Fuente won the power struggle, and the Peerless Coffee boss went out of sight, and was so upset over his treatment by Ignacio and the City of Oakland, that he never wanted anything to do with the city.
I know that because, as head of the effort to bring the Super Bowl to Oakland, I personally tried to recruit Vukasin, several times, in 1999. He was too upset with Oakland to deal with me or our Super Bowl effort, even though he made himself personally available to me.
Now, the Coliseum Authority, with all of its power, is hampered by its original document, which ties it to the Oakland Coliseum, and not to the financing of sports facilities in Oakland.
If the Authority were recast in that way, it could form a master plan for the creation of a baseball, football, basketball, and sports venue construction effort. It would be easy to form what we currently lack: a coordinated plan of sports team retention.
2) Loss of the Oakland A’s makes a new Coliseum stadium harder to pencil-out because of the drop in event days. A Raiders-only stadium, while attractive to the Oakland Raiders, relies on football as the attraction. Thus, and because of the reduction of event numbers, cost-control must be the central concern.
The best way to meet that objective is to ask if we need to replace the entire Oakland Coliseum. My answer is simply this: no. The Oakland Raiders Stadium renovations called for a new East Side. As I told then-Councilmember Nate Miley at the Oakland City Council meeting of 1997 talking about the Oakland A’s stadium problem in light of the return of the Raiders, we didn’t build a state-of-the-art NFL stadium, but one that was only to bring the Silver and Black back to Oakland.
So what we got was half a new-stadium. My work on the Oakland Super Bowl Bid from 1999 to 2001, revealed that the new Coliseum Stadium East Side just needed a $60,000 addition of a center hole for field equipment access for halftime shows. Other than that, it was more than capable of holding Super-Bowl sized crowds and the design was simple and modern and easy to maintain.
The West Side, however, is a mess. It consists of a new central club and luxury suite area that was literally shoe-horned into the existing structure that dates back to the 1960s. The corridors are too small by half, terrible for a Super Bowl, and it lacks for adequate storage areas – and then there’s that much-talked about sewage problem.
(That sewage problem the A’s are dealing with is the child of a punch-list of maintenance obligations that existed as far back as 1997, and still, to this day, remains largely undone. In 1997, I was Economic Advisor to Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, and told him of these problems and met with the Authority about them. Today, in 2014, if you walk into a luxury suite in the area just outside of the West Side Club, and beyond the Raiders suites, and see loose carpet and such things as loose heating ducts, you’re seeing problems that have persisted for years.)
A new stadium there, really, only needs to be built on one side of the existing venue. In other words, a new West Side to match the East Side, but formed to serve as a baseball venue, too.
The result would be the intimate style the Raiders want (the Oakland A’s too), but as lower cost. And as an additional financing scheme we could add in a built-in 200-room hotel facility, providing a good year-round source of revenue.
I must add, here, that the stadium should not be smaller than 70,000 seats and for good reason: a small, 50,000 seat version would stop us from being able to land large events like the Super Bowl, and because of that, we could not market a great naming rights deal. Exploring an innovative and cheap way to cover the stadium gains us the chance to go after the NCAA Final Four, and other iconic happenings. The City and the County must think of this as an opportunity to expand our convention and events handling capacity, not just as a sports issue.
By my back-of the envelop hypothesis, that approach would drop the total price to around $500 million, and well-within the ballpark (excuse the pun) of reality. That would get us to our next issue: the Oakland A’s.
Altering the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum Authority to include sports venues in Oakland would allow more flexible financing that could benefit the A’s stadium effort at the Port of Oakland. It can also open up options for a Warriors Arena – an objective I’m personally not ready to jettison as its a battle of wills and facts.
Here’s a fact: the Warriors owe the Authority rent money. If Golden State skips town for San Francisco, the Authority would be left holding the monetary bag, and the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda would have to pay to make up for that loss. That means, the taxpayers suffer.
(UPDATE: the truth is, the bond documents regarding the Arena reconstruction say that the City of Oakland and The County of Alameda aren’t obligated to pay the JPA; they can pay for other services and put off paying the Authority. Of course, the Authority can make the City and the County look bad in public, saying they don’t pay their bills, and hurt their respective credit ratings, but the fact is the Authority is left holding the bag if the Warriors bolt for San Francisco. The good news is neither party has stiffed the JPA in the past, and won’t do so in the future.)
So, do you see how all of this fits together? A less expensive Raiders stadium plan retains the team, while recasting the Coliseum Authority to be, say, the Oakland Alameda County Sports Commission, and responsible for sports venue construction anywhere in Oakland, which makes the Oakland A’s stadium objective more doable because of the industrial development bond option that would be more readily available to it politically, than to the City of Oakland, alone.
Finally, we can sue the Golden State Warriors and force them to stay at the current arena and until we can form a plan for a new alternative for that organization. One that also is mindful of the need to have other land-use activities to go with it.
A Master Plan For Sports Economic Development In Oakland
In short, what I just described will cause the formation of a master plan for sports economic development in Oakland. Right now, all of the planning and development efforts and separate and piecemeal, lacking in focus and in having a single leader at the top. There’s no sports development czar to pull this all together, and to have that person, we need a proper organizational structure and will to make it.
Oakland’s historic problem has been that its approach to sports has been reactive and political. Personal politics has played too large a role here, and has all but eliminated sound, smart planning.
When the Coliseum was ran by George Vukasin, the president was a man named Bob Quintella. When I paid a visit to Bob’s office in 1995, I was presented with a five-to-ten-year development plan for the Oakland Coliseum, including plans for land acquisition. Now, in the Coliseum Authority years, there’s evidence of such planning, because that behavior was not part of the organization’s charge – it only cared and cares about the relevant legal issues. The day-to-day operations were given to a private firm: first SMG, and now AEG.
The Oakland sports economic development system, such as it exists, is uncoordinated, highly political, and totally ineffective in the objective of sports team retention. The very existence of the Coliseum City idea is borne of our dysfunctional governing body and lack of accountability or effective control over sports team venue planning.
We have to reboot it, and our entire approach. Only then will we gain the chance to have Oakland retain its rightful place as a sports capital in the World.
UPDATE: On the issue of a new Coliseum Authority Executive Director and the current one, Deena McClain.
The Oakland Coliseum Authority has been ran, in one way or another, by Deena McClain since 1996. Deena has not just survived, but arguably fostered the ouster of several people who were running the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority. She, along with some Alameda County Supervisors like Scott Haggerty, have been responsible for the lack of growth of the JPA into a truly successful sports business.
Deena has maintained her power by jealously guarding documents about the JPA that only a handful of people, including me, know about and where they are located. Her attention to details regarding issues with respect to bonds issued, and her interesting way of recalling only certain information, which she then presents to achieve a particular objective, are the fuel of her bureaucratic power.
In other words, if she doesn’t want you to be involved with the JPA in some way, she will start a whisper campaign against you.
Let me show you by way of personal example.
During my effort to bring the Super Bowl to Oakland starting in 1999, I secured the help of Steve McFadden. Mr. McFadden was a skilled event planner and architect who was the third brain in running the Coliseum, serving as Vice President under Bob Quentella. I got to know Steve after he gave me a tour of the Coliseum, during which we formed what became the plan to host the Super Bowl.
When I introduced Steve at the first meeting about our Super Bowl Bid in April of 1999, Deena was there, along with Sally Roach, who then represented SMG, which was the first private sector manager of the Oakland Coliseum.
Aside from Sally’s stupid antics in an effort to derail Oakland’s Super Bowl effort, and my work, and which I’ll get to later, below, there was Deena’s sidebar conversation with Roach.
We were in what is called The Mayor’s Office’s Large Conference Room. It’s a room in Oakland’s City Hall (and on the third floor and part of the Mayor’s Office complex of rooms) that has a certain design such that you can hear the talk of another party if you sit in a certain place – all of that depends on where they’re sitting or standing in the room.
Anyway, Deena was off to the side talking with Sally, while I was sitting next to Steve. And I could hear her say that “Steve stole the drawings for the Oakland Coliseum.” It was something Steve denied, and I did not believe at all. Think about it. The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, a billion-dollar facility (even though it’s not ran like one) would take the risk of telling the Alameda County Fire Marshall it doesn’t have its own drawings?
When then-Oakland City Manager Robert Bobb told me the story Deena told him, but I told Robert I overheard her say, I told Bobb I’d find the drawings. I needed them for Oakland’s Super Bowl Bid Documents, as they were part of the requirements. I was desparate to get them, and I knew they existed, and that Steve did not have them, and that Deena was not telling the truth, or so I believed.
So, I embarked on a days-long effort that involved phone calls, documents reviews, and what Internet searches I could do at the time (it was 1999). And at that time, I was officially a consultant to the City of Oakland, placed their in the Economic Development Office by Robert Bobb – even though I had asked to run the Coliseum after Elihu Harris was leaving office and I’d served as his economic adviser.
Anyway, my efforts led to an HNTB architect I will not name, who then gave me the Sonoma phone number of another HNTB architect I will not name. At any rate, I called the fellow in Sonoma with my inquiry. A day went by, and I was all set to start thinking that this wasn’t going to lead to anything.
Then, two days later on a Thursday, and now this was into August of 1999, I got a call from that Sonoma man. “Zennie, this is (withheld) and I’ve got your drawings.”
I let out a scream that I’m certain reached out of the building and into the street and covered Oakland City Hall Plaza. It was a new day and a sign that our Super Bowl Bid was meant to be.
So I called the man and we talked about how to get the drawings to me.
Then, four hours later, he called me back with a sad tone. “Zennie. Sally Roach said you’ll have to go through her to get the drawings.” I hit the ceiling. Almost without hesitation, I called Robert Bobb and told him the drawings did exist, I found them, that Sally Roach was standing in the way, and if he did not fire her, I’d figure out some way to get rid of her from the project. I wanted her out of the way.
So, Robert called one of his famous “all hands” meetings, and said that “Zennie Abraham is in officially charge of the Oakland Super Bowl Bid.” I got my wish. Further, and Sally’s boss, then, Glenn Mon of SMG, directed her to work under my direction.
Oh, I forgot to explain how Sally was trying to undermine my work. In February of that year of 1999, Robert Bobb gave me the one-sheet list Deena presented to him of NFL specs a region has to meet to host a Super Bowl, and the then-official NFL Super Bowl Bid Specs Document. I wrote a 300-page analysis, which served as the document answering all of the NFL’s questions of how we would form our bid, from seats at the stadium to hotels and concerts. I did it all by myself.
In the process, I also proved we could host a Super Bowl; Deena’s document said that we could not. Bobb wasn’t buying it.
So, in our first meeting on the Super Bowl, the one where Deena started the whisper campaign against Steve McFadden, I presented my tome. One of the answers I wrote to the questions about the Super Bowl: Oakland Host Commitee was that we would need a budget of between $3 million and $5 million because that was standard.
So, once the meeting got underway, Sally called Glenn Mon and put him on the speaker phone. Then she said, and I’ll never forget this, “Glenn, Zennie says that a Super Bowl Host Committee should have a budget of about $3 million to $5 million. Is that true?”
Glenn’s voice through the speaker said “Well, there are variations, but that sounds about right to me.”
Sally tuned three shades of red. Her clumsy, stupid, and ass-backward effort to make me look bad backfired. That moment, and the whole drawings issue, made me lose all respect for her, and for Denna, who was acting as her friend and confidant.
I now feel like I’ve got a book in me here. There’s a lot more to tell. But I’ll end this part by saying that, thanks to yeoman work by Christoher Weills, by September, we had our first bid book. And with the drawings of the Coliseum we needed.
Deena Is A Good Lawyer But…
Look, Deena McClain is an excellent lawyer and bond counsel, but as the Coliseum’s defacto head, she’s been less than good and that’s being kind. Well, OK, I’ll say a disaster. An executive director has to deal with Oakland and Alameda County electeds, sports team execs, brand sponsors, league reps, and the public. But then, there’s Denna, being the gatekeeper of docs and secrets. She’s got to be made to give them up.
Stay tuned. More coming.
Zennie Abraham | Zennie Abraham or “Zennie62” is the founder of Zennie62Media which consists of zennie62blog.com and a multimedia blog news aggregator and video network, and 78-blog network, with social media and content development services and consulting. Zennie is a pioneer video blogger, YouTube Partner, social media practitioner, game developer, and pundit. Note: news aggregator content does not reflect the personal views of Mr. Abraham.