Activism

Open Letter to the City Council: Tell the A’s to Stop Abusing Oakland

Stop this madness now! Tell the A’s to pay their fair share or get out of town! Give them no public money for a ballpark. None! If Howard Terminal is so much a better deal than the Coliseum, where a ballpark could be built for little or no public money, let the A’s billionaire owner pay for it. If the A’s don’t like that deal, let them leave.

Published

4 years ago

December 12, 2021

Oakland Post

The A’s have been pitting cities against each other to leverage more public money for a ballpark.

By Post Staff

The City of Oakland is in an abusive relationship with the Oakland A’s.

The A’s tell the city, “Give me what I want, and I will stop hitting you.” The city bends and the A’s demand more and hit the city harder. We, the voters must come to the aid of their elected leaders. Please intervene and tell our elected leaders to stop allowing the A’s to bully them. Just say “NO” and walk away.

After all the city of Oakland has done to demonstrate their desire to keep the A’s in Oakland, including offering over $500 million of public funds for development of the Howard Terminal ballpark, the so-called ‘rooted in Oakland’ A’s have made an offer on a Las Vegas ballpark site at the Tropicana Casino. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/sports/nevius-as-should-just-skip-oakland-charade-head-for-vegas/

Clearly, the A’s have been pitting cities against each other to leverage more public money for a ballpark.

Who needs a team that is so uncaring that they arrogantly demand diversion of public funds to them, or they will leave?

Taxpaying residents of Oakland have suffered long and hard with homelessness and crime. They need public funds devoted to those problems, not a baseball park. At a point where the city has empaneled a blue-ribbon commission to actively consider increasing business taxes for every business in town to pay for revenue shortages, it is outrageous to consider giving the A’s public money and tax breaks to build a baseball stadium.

This is especially galling when there is perfectly good property at the Coliseum that could be the site of a new ballpark without the need for all the public money the A’s are demanding for Howard Terminal.

“Our job is to feed people,” said Keith Carson, president of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, at a recent hearing on whether Alameda County should contribute public funds to the Howard Terminal project. Carson is absolutely right. The City and the County have great needs that should take priority over giving public money for a ballpark.

But the arrogant and hostile ways the A’s treat the public does not stop with city taxpayers. The A’s recently increased their season ticket prices and eliminated discounts previously offered to their fans. But the fans did the appropriate thing. They stopped buying tickets. During a recent playoff run, the A’s had fewer than 5,000 fans at their games. According to public reports they ranked 29^th out of 30 teams in fan attendance.

Our elected officials should follow fan responses to the greed and arrogance of the A’s. The A’s must pay their own way. Do not spend public dollars on baseball parks. Do not let them bully and abuse our elected officials.

If they choose to leave, “let the door hit them where the dog should have bit them.”