Oakland Athletics Stadium At Howard Terminal Bad Idea

Oakland Athletics Stadium At Howard Terminal A Bad Idea This to anyone still considering Howard Terminal at The Port Of Oakland as a site for the Oakland Athletics: don't. There are several reasons for this. First, a 2001 study by HOK revealed that while Howard Terminal was the second-best ranked site for an Oakland A's stadium, it was also $100 million more costly to build than at the Oakland Coliseum. In the study, Howard Terminal required $38 million in traffic improvement expenditures and another $75 million in parking-related costs versus $6 million and $43 million (which points to two parking structures that aren't really needed given nearby land that could be used) at the Oakland Coliseum. And if there's not that, how about the February 25th 2014 letter from a group of concerned citizens and written by Eric Sauer of The California Trucking Association to then-Oakland Mayor Jean Quan? That letter offered a blistering set of environmental concerns which taken as a whole point to one thing: a lawsuit. And how about the comments of legendary Oakland architect Vivian Khan of Kahn Mortimer Associates, who came out as a powerful objector to the proposed project? The point is, there's too much extra cost and too much opposition to a plan that doesn't even have the backing of Oakland Athletics Owner Lew Wolff. He's not jazzed about the plan, either. I've told Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for the past six months that we need a sports task force of Oaklanders who bring institutional memory to the effort of smartly retaining our sports teams – we still don't have one. Oakland needs to become a city that knows how to complete big projects. We can't do that with another group of politicians just playing personal wish list, rather than determining how we can pay for a stadium project, and then implementing a plan to do so. The reason why Oakland's in its current situation of being on the cusp of losing all of its sports teams, is because of the over-politicized environment we insist on maintaining. Please stop this: enough is enough.

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