The former Port Commissioner says, ‘The A’s should adopt fair and equitable benefits to Oakland or stop lying and saying (they’re) doing community benefits.’

By Ken Epstein

Until recently, West Oakland community leader and environmental advocate Margaret Gordon had been on board with billionaire John Fisher’s massive real estate and stadium development project at Howard Terminal, which is public land at the Port of Oakland.

She has now withdrawn her support and is actively opposed to the development. In an interview with the Oakland Post this week, she said she was involved since the beginning several years ago, working with others to produce a community benefits agreement with the A’s, which the A’s were expected to pay for.

But the A’s have gone back on their promises, she said.

“We, as a community, should hold everybody to task around the issue of equity,” Gordon said. “The A’s started off talking about equity and ended up putting [all the costs] back on the city. That’s not equity. Unmitigated environmental issues — that’s not equity. I don’t believe they are going to [build affordable] housing — that’s not equity.”

Gordon, co-founder of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP), has served on the Port Commission and has struggled for decades to reduce the impact of industrial pollutants that cause respiratory illnesses and improve the overall air quality in her community.

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She said her goal in working with the A’s development was to design social justice and environmental justice projects to support West Oakland, Chinatown, Jack London Square area and Old Oakland, four areas that would be most impacted by the massive project.

“We agreed with the City to sit down and do a community benefits agreement, which included education, environmental improvements, housing, jobs, business development,” she said. “We met for almost two years trying to develop our own agreement with the City and the A’s. We finalized our draft, telling them that this is what we want.”

But then the A’s shifted their position. “All of sudden, the A’s stopped the process. We wanted more conversations as part of negotiations. But there never were negotiations to finalize the community benefits agreement,” she said.

“There were no sit-downs with the A’s or city staff. Never.”

Gordon said she was not encouraged by the role of the mayor and city staff in the process. “I don’t see who is going to hold the A’s feet to the fire to enforce community benefits,” not the mayor, the city administrator nor city staff, she said.

She said city leaders are “so hungry for money and development, as long as it’s not in [their] neighborhood, [they] don’t care,” she said, adding that the A’s and the City should adopt benefits to Oakland that are “fair and equitable, or stop lying and saying you’re doing community benefits.”

She said poor people, African Americans, Latinos and others are not going to benefit from this project. “I don’t see them building affordable housing next to the million-dollar townhouses. I just don’t see it.”

People took tours of the Howard Terminal area in December, and it dawned on them that the plans were to create a “whole new city within Oakland,” an exclusive gated new city for rich people

“They decided to release the Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) during the holidays, minimizing public input,” she said. “The staff, the City of Oakland, they obviously don’t care [about community benefits], otherwise they wouldn’t have written the EIR the way they did,” said Gordon.

“They keep talking about equity, but they’re not practicing equity. This [Environmental Impact Report] is evidence of that. This is all problematic.”

Many of the needed mitigations have not been addressed, Gordon continued. The stadium would be built where thousands of huge semi-trucks are parked now at Howard Terminal, but the City and the A’s still haven’t said where said where the truck parking will be moved, meaning they may be going back onto city streets, polluting residential neighborhoods.

Nor have the officials offered solutions to the large traffic jams that will be produced by the development.

Not only will Oakland residents not get community benefits, they will also end up footing the bill for a lot of the project, Gordon continued.

“We the public are going to end up paying for the infrastructure,” she said. “This is going to use public money.” Over $800 million in public funds will be used on the project.

“The A’s should be paying for this. The rich people who are going to be moving over there should be paying for this,” said Gordon.

“I am not surprised to hear that the A’s have reneged on promises made to the community,“ said Paul Cobb, publisher of the Oakland Post. “The A’s want hundreds of millions of taxpayer money, but they don’t want to pay for community benefits like every other developer does.

“They renege on affordable housing and then turn around and bully our elected leaders by saying if they don’t get what they want, they will leave. Our elected leaders should end this drama now. They need to focus on jobs, homelessness, public safety and real issues affecting Oakland residents, not the ongoing give-and-take sham game played by the A’s.”

Ken Epstein

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