It is the holiday season, and that means December. For many, this means food, parties, and gifts. For Oakland Raiders fans, and fans of Oakland sports, it means a new stadium plan. While Oakland, and Mayor Libby Schaaf, have always known the NFL gave them the end of 2015 to come up with a plan, the date now is December 3rd and still there has been only talk and no action. Now, we need to have not just a true, doable plan, but we need a developer who can deliver on this.
We need Kofi Bonner, the head of Lennar in the SF Bay Area, and one who’s development expertise nearly kept the 49ers in San Franciscco, built much of Emeryville and got Pixar Animation to come there, then worked as economic development director in San Francisco and in Oakland, where he was also Interim City Manager– and then he was hired by Carmen Policy (of the same Carson NFL project) to run the Cleveland Browns and build their new stadium, before returning to the Bay Area. But before I introduce Kofi (my friend going back to the Berkeley Planning School in 1985) let me explain and share my own personal hell that I have experienced in just trying to move Oakland to a place where it can build a stadium for the Raiders and for the A’s.
And without a public subsidy.
The Plan, The Process, The Heaven, The Hell
As many of you know, I created a fiscal plan for new stadiums for the Oakland A’s and the Oakland Raiders, and at the behest of Oakland Raiders Owner Mark Davis on May 18th of this year at the NFL Owners Meeting At The Ritz Carlton in San Francisco and in the witness of Mike Silver, my long-time friend of the NFL Network, who confirmed the encounter on Twitter.
The $1.9 billion plan calls for the use of a series of Industrial Development Lease Revenue Bonds (and because that arrangement does not place financial burden on the government or the taxpayer), and it consists of two stadiums: the 68,000 seat, 300 luxury box plan for the Raiders, and the 35,000 seat, 150 suite plan for the As, and with a 1,010-room hotel and a 300,000 square foot retail complex as its anchor. You can see it at my website here: http://zennie62.wix.com/coliseumreboot#!
On top of that, I reached out to get an investment banker capable of doing the deal. In May, I sent an email to my friend and business partner Dan Rascher – on May 20th, Dan sent me the contact information for a man named Mitchell Ziets. But (and this is no offense to Mitchell Ziets), I wanted a large firm, not one person, and so with that, and after research on the firm that would be able to deliver on a sports stadium financing plan, I cold-called Diane Paauwe, the managing director of municipal finance with Piper Jaffrey Investment Bankers. mmmmmmmAfter a 45-minute conversation, Ms Paauwe put me in touch with Peter Phillippi, who heads their hospitality group, on May 28th. I sent both a copy of my large spreadsheet plan. Then, on June 1st, I put Peter and Diane in touch with Mayor Schaaf.
On that same June 1st day, I received an email from Bradley Langner. Mr. Langner is an investment banker with Piper Jaffrey, and he wrote “Thank you for the information on the Oakland project. Do you have any time available this week when you can walk us through your model, project assumptions, etc.?” And so we set a conference call that was done the very next day and included Brad Langner, Hy L, and Zach Kiefer representing Piper, and myself. It went well, and all the group wanted to see was what is called a “bond amortization schedule”, so I said I would make one and did. Langner did ask me if the City and the County would agree to be a backstop for the bonds, and I told them there was not the stomach for that – we could do it as an IDB. *
Now, I informed the Mayor of this as well as Oakland Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney (District 3) and Oakland Councilmember Larry Reid (District 7) as well as Oakland At-Large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, Annie Campbell Washington (District 4), Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, and Oakland Coliseum Executive Director Scott McKibben, as well as Oakland Raiders President Marc Badain. Of the group, only Kaplan and McKibben carved out time to meet with me and go over the spreadsheet over coffee at Bocanova, and Nate Miley was good enough to talk to me about it, and then say he would leave it to McKibben to meet with me. Done.
While Mayor Schaaf and I talked privately, she was stuck in that process of dealing with New City Development LLC, and this, even as the exclusive negotiating agreement allowed the Raiders to work with “business partners” and of which Mark Davis made me by his request and was also written in such a way as to give Mayor Schaaf an out she did not take. She couple have dumped New City LLC long ago. Indeed, on June 18th, at a community meeting held by the Montclair Greater Oakland Democratic Club, Floyd Kephart, the head of New City Development LLC, blurted out that the Raiders called him and said “We have Zennie’s plan. I told them to use it as a backup and dress it as if it came from them.”
Thanks, Floyd.
While this was going on, the media was ignoring my efforts – well, I should candidly say, the white media: a problem that ended when PR guy Jim Zalenzsky got involved thanks to Save Oakland Sports. Black media organizations were not ignoring me, and that’s a really sad statement on our society. Here I am with all of the background, blessing from Mark Davis, and yet what I got reminded me of why I started my own media company in the first place. I’m not going to go off on a tangent, but I will say that Noam Chomsky is right: media has nothing to do with the truth, and everything to do with manufacturing consent – getting you to think a certain way.
For example, one local publication would have you believe that public money has to be used for stadiums, and so rather than do homework or talk to me, craft crappy articles to advance that idea. Sports radio media folks tell you that St. Louis Rams Owner Stan Kroenke can just write a check for an NFL stadium because he’s a billionaire – this flies in the face of the fact that no one has ever done that, anywhere. And in the case of the Golden State Warriors and its planned San Francisco Arena, that will be a private placement lease revenue bond – so the stadium winds up paying for itself. That’s the hope.
Ugh! Then, sports fans wind up quoting this crap and social media gets littered with it.
Some told me I needed to have a pretty picture to advance the idea. And what’s so funny, folks, is that I’m not seeking to be a developer (that is Kofi’s role) – I have and am just trying to move my city to have the will and the initiative to complete big projects.
To that end, I reached out to one Oakland architect who I interviewed about his idea for a stadium plan – full video. Plus, he’s African American, and so I was only too happy to promote him. But even though he partnered with his own developer, when it came to him working with me, he wanted me to pay him a level of cash I did not have and I said so. That really got to me. He was willing to work as a team with another man, a very nice white guy who wan’t paying him, but when it came to me, even with my contacts and NFL ties, and on top of promoting him, he wanted to be paid by me. Got that? Forget the earthquake that would have come if we worked together and just by the buzz generated. So, I said to myself, screw it, and I’ll draw my own sketch, and just to emphasize the point that this is a doable plan and not a beauty contest. So I did.
Even as I tried to get many involved, and did score the help of Chris Dobbins and Save Oakland Sports, and the PR maven Jim Zalenski, overcoming the views of those who could not get over that it was me with the idea has been the dumbest aspect of this entire affair. People in Oakland like to talk, but they don’t like to work and hate it when you do really do something – especially if you’re black.
Libby could have eased all of this by forming a task force or publically saying “Zennie has done a lot of work, and so we are going to give his plan a hard look,” but she did none of that. She told me to reach out to her project point person and Assistant City Administrator Claudia Cappio, and I did, but that did not bear any fruit at all.
This points to a bit of a managerial problem Libby, my godsister, has: she’s too tight and closed-circled in her approach. A task force of Oaklanders, much like what San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer has put together, would have helped to evaluate my idea and others, and we would have had a plan by now. Instead, Libby counted on Cappio and to a lesser degree, Alameda County consultant Pat Cashman. Pat. who is a good guy. told me that “your hotel idea” would not work, and because no one built a 1,000 room hotel in California in some time – Pat forgot two things: one, that hotel construction demand in San Francisco alone is about 16,000 rooms, and second, that its development costs and regulations that have blocked hotel construction from catching up to SF Bay Area demand. Something that the Coliseum City project would not be hampered by!
Ugh!
After the New City LLC effort faded and the deadline of September 21st past, you would think the attention would turn to what I had done, but it had not. Then, the NFL turned up the heat, first with a series of public town hall meetings, and then a New York meeting where Mayor Schaaf made a presentation of Oakland that was well received, but without the stadium plan the league wanted to see.
So, Oakland’s back, and has not done anything other than Mayor Schaaf hiring and meeting with the same man I passed on in favor of Piper Jaffrey: Mitchell Ziets. So he’s coming up with a plan, but I have already made one. We should all be in one room. Working.
Crazy, Man.
All I have said is that we need some kind of plan and developer. Kofi Bonner is that person and not because of anything to do with my plan but candidly because I called him to catch up and in the middle of talking to him, realized he was the person who could do the job.
But the point is, we need Kofi now, and Mayor Schaaf has to bite the bullet. The NFL was nice to her but the point, the truth is that Oakland has not done anything and could do a lot. Bringing Kofi to the Oakland stadium table would send shockwaves through the NFL. It would make Carmen Policy say nice things about Oakland. NFL Owners who know Kofi not only would take notice, but just might move that deadline a tad. Not much, but a little, out of respect for the fact that he gets things done.
Libby is on her way back from Paris, and while her speech on climate change was great, the bottom line is mayors are judged not by senate-level presentations to world leaders, but by completing big job-creating projects at home. And not just jobs for the white and upper class tech set that some want to move to Oakland, but jobs for every current Oaklander.
TIME TO WORK LIBBY. TIME TO BREAK THE EMERGENCY GLASS AND CALL KOFI BONNER.
NOW!