The Commissioner of Baseball on Monday announced a new committee devoted to determining the viability of baseball in the East Bay. In his statements Commissioner Bud Selig said that the A's owners have exhausted their efforts in Oakland.
But really, they have not.
Here's an example in this plan for a new Coliseum baseball stadium on the parking lot land of the facility.
The plan, created by architect Frank Dobson and Retail Leasing expert Bob Leste with Oaklander Steve Lowe was first introduced in 2004 and while it was presented to the then-new ownership group and A's Managing Partner Lew Wolff, it went largely ignored by them. Wolff was known to be in love with a concept called a baseball village and needed a lot of land to make that work, hence the Fremont land chase.
But the idea called for hundreds of acres of land, more than the A's organization could afford given the economy and so needing public money turned to Fremont, which turned a deaf ear to their request.
Wolff has not wanted to be in Oakland, but the Mayor's Sports and Entertainment Task Force wants to maintain the A's here in Oakland. To that end, it supports the plan you're about to see in this video.
The plan needs to be upgraded for 2009 and a financing plan developed. It also lacks an economic impact analysis and a job development report. But just eyeballing the plan I can say it can generate about 10,000 construction jobs and 4,000 permanent jobs. It calls for a new stadium, a parking structure, and a retail structure at the Coliseum as well as an enlarged BART bridge. The total cost is about $440 million but we at the task force understand that was a 2004 estimate.
The video shows much of Bob Leste's presentation to the task force last Thursday and the discussion as well as the plan itself.
