In Pre-Christmas Surprise, Oakland Mayor, City Staff Quietly Release 3,500 Page Report on Port Stadium Project

By Kitty Kelly Epstein

Six days before Christmas, Oakland City staff issued a 3,500-page document on billionaire John Fisher’s luxury housing project at Howard Terminal and scheduled a vote on it by the Planning Commission three weeks after Christmas.

Obviously, few of us can read 3,500 pages in that amount of time. So, the mayor and city staff who work for her have made it pretty clear that they don’t care whether the public has meaningful input.

I’m one of the people who can’t read 3,500 pages in a couple of days. So, in this column I simply point out a very few of the issues raised by 400 Oakland residents who critiqued Fisher’s real estate development on Port land and that are still not solved. Read the report here: www.oaklandca.gov/documents/response-to-comments-final-eir-for-the-oakland-as-waterfront-ballpark-district-project-chapters-and-appendices. Oaklanders said they did not want to have thousands of people running across busy Southern Pacific railroad tracks every time a ball game is played at the proposed stadium, because people already die crossing those tracks, and the numbers would likely increase. There are no realistic new solutions to this problem proposed. One overcrossing is proposed, which is completely insufficient (p. 4-8 and 7-3).

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Oaklanders said they did not want this development to be built at the Port because the Port is Oakland’s biggest economic asset, and Port businesses will be harmed by having luxury residences adjacent to a 24/7 working seaport. The city staff report essentially says this will not be figured out in environmental impact. Both Port businesses and the most affected union workers say they will be harmed. And, while there have been some conversations between Port representatives and Port businesses, the issues raised have not been resolved (p. 4-9 and 4-13).

Oaklanders said the project would create massive traffic and parking problems, particularly for the residents of West Oakland. The document essentially agrees that these problems are real but says that the city has fulfilled its responsibility under the law by acknowledging the problems (4-184). And I can find nowhere else in the report that the tiny number of parking spaces provided by the project has in any way been realistically mitigated in its effect on West Oakland parking and traffic given the thousands of new residents, workers, and game attendees involved.

Most important of all, perhaps, is the fact that Oaklanders do not want to pay for the project with public funds. The city says it is paying $350 million of infrastructure with state, federal, and regional transportation dollars.

Those are tax dollars, and nobody in Oakland decided that’s how we would want $350 million in transportation funds to be spent. Most of our residents (and the planet) need for us to have expanded, excellent, cheap, fast public transportation more than we need to help a billionaire with infrastructure funding for his private project.

There is an additional proposed financing plan for this project that also involves public funding. While not addressed in the Environmental Impact Report (EIR), it certainly has an ‘environmental’ impact on those of us who are not rich and whose quality of life is impacted by the ways that our public property and funding is used.

And there is a lot of research on the impact of stadiums on the local economy. One, by Stanford economist Roger Null, for example, says that “sports stadiums do not generate significant economic growth” (https://news.stanford.edu/2015/07/30/stadium-economics-noll-073015/). And he isn’t even discussing a project like Oakland’s which will actually harm the local economy by hurting Port business.

So why is this project still being discussed at all? It will harm current residents in a dozen different ways. Essentially, this deal creates an exclusive enclave, a new Piedmont, in the center of Oakland on our publicly owned Port property that we will pay for decades. Although no one has asked Oakland residents directly what we think, my impression is that a majority of residents would not support it, given the public costs, the damage to the Port, and the displacement caused to current residents.

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