Oakland News: Oakland Baseball Stadium Cost Is $600 Million

Oakland News goes baseball. The Oakland Planning Commission unveiled it's the City of Oakland's plan for a new baseball stadium at a location called "Victory Court." (And replacing the "baseball-use" part of the Oakland Coliseum - in photo.)

 But the plan, with 39,000 seats, 700 units of housing, and 186,000 square feet of retail, comes out to around $600 million to build according to my Oakland Baseball Simworld runs.

The Oakland Baseball Simworld is a simulation i originally created for the purpose of evaluating the fiscal behavior of the Oakland A's after then-Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris dispatched me to find buyer teams for the organization in 1997. After I left the City of Oakland, I turned what was a 47-equation model into one with 2,600 variables in 956 equation sets.

The Oakland Baseball Simworld is currently used in five colleges nationwide.

The problem for the City of Oakland is in how to finance the ballpark. In the sim, the most effective solution involves the baseball team contributing $150 million. The problem for the team is such a contribution cuts into its ability to land star players, but the San Francisco Giants' World Series success proves it's still possible to build a champion with such financial constraints.

The other problem is that the City must use redevelopment money to build the stadium, but the stadium itself must be 51 percent owned by the private sector. Otherwise, the deal will not work; the City Council will not go for it. The housing units, alone, add a large cost to the development. 400 units is more affordable that 700 units.

So, you may ask, why did the City of Oakland know about this? Hubris. This effort to build a new stadium is led by Senator Barbara Boxer's son Doug Boxer, who's on the Oakland Planning Commission. The problem with Doug is, and I state this publicly, one of ego. His less-than-desirable behavior in not bringing all of the parties together when we had four different groups meeting about the A's issue at once, including Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums sports task force, that I was on, and Dellums lack of interest in solving the problem, is the reason why Oakland's taken so long to get to this point.

Oakland, the City of Oakland, is personality-driven, and lacking an organization that the public can identify that is out there leading the charge to get a stadium built. Like a sports commission, for example. Instead, what we get are people who think they know what they're doing, refusing to listen to those who do because of experience, and making a ton of mistakes along the way.

That's why Oakland's government fails. And unless this Oakland stadium issue stops being a one - person show, it will fail too. I can tell you from personal experience, one - person - shows don't work in Oakland unless it becomes a real team of people open to the public.