A’s park plan in disarray

Resistance: Team expected a deal, didn’t count on faculty opposition

The Oakland A’s had 6 million reasons to think their stadium deal near Laney College was going forward.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that officials of the Peralta Community College District told the team that $6 million was their price for kick-starting the planning process for putting a 35,000-seat ballpark on district land.

The A’s said OK — and then found out that when it came to the elected Peralta board,

the ones with the real clout were faculty members. And they were loudly opposed to a stadium next door to Laney.

Team officials said they were shocked when the Peralta board declared Wednesday that it didn’t want Chancellor Jowel Laguerre moving forward with ballpark talks. The A’s don’t have a backup plan — the team concluded in the course of a year and a half of considering various sites that the 15-acre parcel owned by Peralta was the only place in Oakland where a privately financed ballpark could work.

With the Warriors heading across the bay and the Raiders across the Nevada state line, there’s pressure on Mayor Libby Schaaf not to let the A’s leave. But although she said Wednesday she was “more determined than ever” to help the A’s find a suitable ballpark site, she’s made it clear she won’t support using public money to do it.

From the get-go, in fact, the Peralta plan got a cool reception from both City Hall and the community college district.

Schaaf preferred that the A’s move to Howard Terminal near Jack London Square, a site the team thinks has numerous accessibility and other problems. She said she was generally supportive of the Laney College site, but that it was up to the A’s to convince Peralta’s leadership and mistrustful community stakeholders that it could work.

The City Council was no more enthusiastic. Some members said the A’s should build a ballpark at the Coliseum site. Others stayed neutral.

Even Peralta’s Laguerre, just two years on the job as chancellor and facing criticism from faculty and staff over his handling of district finances, was skittish from the start. Soon after the A’s approached him over the summer, he told us he was “personally praying” for the team to choose a different site.

“I’m afraid of the aggravation we may create for ourselves and then nothing happens,” Laguerre said.

But over time, he and his board signaled they were open to to pursuing more serious talks. And once the team announced in September that it had settled on the Laney site, the chancellor approved a $25,000 contract for union heavyweight and former Oakland Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu to help the district weigh the pluses and minuses of a stadium land sale.

Two weeks ago, Peralta officials laid out their terms for going ahead — privately demanding that the A’s put up $6 million to cover the college district’s costs to negotiate a potential deal over the next two years. Those expenses included hiring consultants, conducting studies and doing public outreach.

A’s officials, we’re told, were taken aback by the size of the request — but also knew they had little option but to play ball. Just days ago, they responded to Laguerre and the board, agreeing to the $6 million but also laying out conditions for how the money would be spent. They included routine audits and regular meetings with the Peralta board to discuss the progress of talks.

The A’s thought everything was on track for the board’s approval of negotiations at its regular meeting next week. But with just 24 hours’ notice, Laguerre convened a closed-session board meeting Tuesday night to go over the A’s terms. When it broke up, the deal was off.

As board President Julina Bonilla explained Wednesday, a ballpark deal didn’t fit in with the district’s mission, “which is to be completely focused on our educational needs for our students and our community.”

Board member Nicky Gonzalez Yuen gave three reasons: “As a district it was really out of our scope. We didn’t have the capacity to study this carefully. Two, the likelihood of it resulting in anything that would benefit Peralta was very minimal . ... And, three, there were so many outstanding questions about the impacts on the local community.”

But behind it all was the potent opposition that had mobilized against the ballpark from faculty and staff at Laney. There’s little doubt that was on the minds of the seven board members, especially three who are up for re-election next year.

Jennifer Shanoski, president of the Peralta Federation of Teachers Local 1603, said she’s convinced that “the faculty union coming out against the stadium with an overwhelming anti-stadium vote” helped turn the tide with the board.

In the end, what the A’s were dangling in front of the Laney community — revenue from a new housing and commercial space on what is now a college parking lot, possible career opportunities for Laney students — didn’t outweigh faculty concerns about stadium noise and disruption, both during construction and once games were being played.

The faculty also sided with those who feared a new ballpark would set off a gentrification wave. Shanoski foresaw “speculators buying up land and displacing both nearby residents and residents of Chinatown, where rents are already sky-high.”

Laguerre insisted campus opposition had little to do with the decision. But he noted that a Peralta advisory group he cochairs — and which includes the Academic Senate president — gave the college trustees a set of guidelines the other day for considering developments.

We’re told it was heavy on the district’s academic mission — not on the potential for mega-deals with pro sports teams.

“That really forced us to step back, and think whether this (ballpark deal) will serve us well,” Laguerre said.