Oakland's Loss Of The Oakland A's To Las Vegas Really Started 4 Years Ago - ATLNews

The Oakland Athletics were approved for funding a $1.5 billion ballpark to be built on land currently occupied by The Tropicana Hotel on The Las Vegas Strip. While many have said that Las Vegas did in two years in gaining a stadium funding agreement, Oakland didn't do in a generation. It's easy to forget Portland, and my Aug 27, 2019 vlog reporting that the A's were deep into planning what I called a “Raiders Style exit' from Oakland. Meanwhile, MLB and the A's started also talking to Las Vegas about relocation that same year. A couple of real estate developer friends passed that info to me, and eventually, the A's would visit Portland, giving serious signals that the team wasn't long to be “Rooted In Oakland”. But on May 12, 2021, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman tweeted that she and her team were quietly in talks with the Oakland A's about a possible move since 2019. The Oakland / Las Vegas “parallel paths” term that Kaval started using two years ago, really started almost simultaneously with the planning of Howard Terminal in Oakland in 2019. This version of the Oakland A's, owned first by Lew Wolff, then by John Fisher with Dave Kaval as A's President, finally achived their objective of finding land and public money assistance for a ballpark. Trouble is, after trying in Oakland in 2000 at Laney College, then 2006 next to the Coliseum, then 2012 at Howard Terminal, and then rebuffed againt at Laney College, then not seeing Howard Terminal happen in a timely fashion, Dave Kaval turned to Las Vegas – and earlier than most people think. The emergence of Las Vegas as a competitor city to Oakland for the A's really started in the wake of the Raiders move to Las Vegas after NFL approval on March 26th, 2017. Raiders Owner Mark Davis was encouraged by a 2014 UNLV study that showed how to make sports betting more secure and reliable. Trouble is, Las Vegas was still part of a small number of states that allowed sports gambling; the overall industry's growth was blocked by decades of legislation. But 2018 saw rapid change favorable to Las Vegas and due to the Raiders move and the Supreme Court. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred first mentioned Las Vegas as a candidate for expansion July 17, 2018, when he said “I think Vegas is a viable expansion alternative,” on “The Dan Patrick Show.” “I think it’s big enough.” That would not have happened but for May 14, 2018, and Murphy v. NCAA, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) Monday, and made it legal for states to draft their own regulations for local sports betting. While Major League Baseball's prohibitions on betting made change to accept sports betting slow, MLB was encouraged by a 2018 study that reported that the four major sports leagues will earn a collective $4.2 billion from widely available legal sports betting and of that $1.1 billion for baseball. Since Las Vegas was and has been the run-away leader in the gaming indusry, any sporta team located their gained a tremendous advantage due to easy access to experts in the field, and far more so than most states except New Jersey. But what caused MLB and Oakland to eventually move to the idea of relocating the A's, was what Commissioner Manfred called “the stadium situation” in Oakland and Tampa, plus the fact that California did not, and still does not allow, sports betting. While sports gambling moved to legality in 2018, that same year the Oakland A's signed an agreement with the City of Oakland that allowed the team to pay for City staff-time toward predevelopment work toward eventully securing a development agreement and a funding agreement sparking the groundbreaking for Howard Terminal Ballpark. So, at this point, Las Vegas was in the exploratory stage, as it was seen more as a candidate for expansion. Meanwhile, Portland, hungry to get an MLB team, saw the Oakland A's as nearby and vulnerable, and so aggressively went after the organization. But then, in 2019, the City of Oakland started working with the A's and the California Legislature toward the passage of two bills, SB 293 Skinner (named for California State Senator Nancy Skinner), and AB 734 Bonta, (named for California Assemblyman now Attorney General Rob Bonta). California Governor Gavin Newsom signed both into law October 11th, 2019. And on March 14th, 2019, the City of Oakland hired real estate executive and friend of Oakland Assistant City Administrator Betsy Lake, Molly Maybrun, as the Project Manager for The Howard Terminal Ballpark Project. So, Howard Terminal seemed to be on its way. But 2020 showed a dramatic slow-down, because the City of Oakland never bothered to create a public financing authority to steer stadium development. Stay tuned.
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUfXXl3ukGc