To Answer Rick Gray: Oakland A's Are Las Vegas-Bound, The City Of Oakland Blew It's Chance In 2021 - ATLNews

To Answer Rick Gray: Oakland A's Are Las Vegas-Bound, The City Of Oakland Blew It's Chance In 2021 A regular friend of the Zennie62 Channel Rick Gray asked this question: Zennie, I could care less about who said what and what was said. I just want the A's to stay in Oakland. Do you see any way that the plan Oakland has with the grants from the federal government would work? Could the A's and the City still work something out? My answer was this: I will vlog the total answer but the preliminary response is simply no. Again, the time for Oakland A’s fans to raise their concerns was when I noted the City of Oakland didn’t do the promised tax increment financing zone, which would have led to a large bond issue which would pay for the sea level rise infrastructure improvements, affordable housing and community benefits, and off-site infrastructure improvements. Instead, because the City admitted to me that it did not understand how to do tax increment financing, the lifeblood of redevelopment. Prior to that, which was on July 20, 2021, the Oakland A’s never got construction drawings to the City of Oakland, and you can’t do a development agreement without them! The City of Oakland never made a public issue of this beyond Betsy Lake’s April 21st Memo. I did. But no one picked up on it. That was the time fans should have been paying attention , but they were not. The City then started to think it could use grants in place of the bond issue! $350 million or $400 million in grants will not pay for on-site, off-site, and community benefits costs. That price tag is $375 million plus $450 million , plus $100 million, or $925 million. Now, to pay for that, you would need a plan to build $4 billion in development, of which $2 billion is the ballpark. That would yield a $3.2 billion tax increment revenue and half of that would be bondable at $1.6 billion. Of that, the A’s would pay back the $375 million. Now, you can remove the community benefits part, but that would include affordable housing, or as I told Dave Kaval, pledge $85 million. That would have gotten them out of trouble. But grants instead of bonds was and is a terrible idea. Remember the plan was to build the ballpark first, and Dave Kaval told me the A’s needed a development partner. The City did nothing. And then a kid who calls himself @rainbowmade1880 I agree with you about just trying to figure out how to keep the A’s here and not looking for who’s to blame etc. Unfortunately this person on this channel is spending all of his time getting revenge on the the city of by posting I told you so videos and telling how he should have been put in charge or we wouldn’t be here now. Notice how he didn’t respond to your question.. He is the happiest person is the world to see the A’s leave so he can keep complaining about how he wasn’t hired for this position or that position by the city. Enough already. I checked the YouTube account and while it dates to 2013, it has a website with a URL that was bought in 2022, and just a few months before the Oakland Mayoral Election. This person ALSO SUBSCRIBES TO ALL OF THE MEDIA ON YOU TUBE COMMENTING ON HOWARD TERMINAL AND FITS THE SAME PATTERN AS ANOTHER YOUTUBE CHANNEL WITH THE SAME MESSAGE THAT THEY'RE UPSET THAT I SAY I SHOULD HAVE BEEN HIRED. I now am 100 percent certain the Mayor of Oakland's aide is behind this crap. Wow, weak sauce. They should focus on building a sports events and conventions economy in Oakland. Instead, they waste the taxpayer's money that way. Stay tuned.
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te38syYWVR4