https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp7qsv-tHOk
Oakland News Now – Dave Kaval Oakland A’s President Gives Howard Terminal & Las Vegas Update For Sept 2 2021 – video made by the YouTube channel with the logo in the video’s upper left hand corner. OaklandNewsNow.com is the original blog post for this type of video-blog content.
Zennie Abraham and Zennie62Media proudly welcome Oakland A’s President Dave Kaval as he gives an update on progress at Jack London Square Howard Terminal and Las Vegas Ballpark parallel efforts for Sept 2 2021. The interview is set for 2:30 PM PST / 5:30 PM EST at Zennie62 YouTube Channel, and OaklandNewsNow.com
More added here after the interview.
The interview just concluded at 5:47 PM EST. The A’s President revealed that the organization is working with Convention, Sports, and Leisure, Inc. (the famed sports development research organization founded by Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones), and the firm’s president Bill Rhoda, to conduct market surveys of the Las Vegas Region. Kaval said that what they’ve learned is the population of 2 million people really supports local sports, as evidenced by the success of the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the former Oakland, now Las Vegas, Raiders.
“Well one thing we found from the local focus groups and customer surveys is really the strength of the local market you know with two and a half million people in Southern Nevada, with the success of the Golden Knights and obviously with the success of the Raiders, there a lot of local people have the discretionary income and the propensity to actually invest in and really lean into professional sports – and i think that’s something that kind of surprised us, ” Kaval said.
Dave also revealed that the A’s are working with Legends Entertainment on sponsorship marketing. Legends, also founded by Jerry Jones, has assembled some of the largest naming rights deals in history, most recently the $400 million agreement with Allegiant Airlines and the Las Vegas Raiders that led to the Las Vegas Stadium’s new name Allegiant Stadium, and the Sofi-Stadium naming rights deal, said to be $625 million. And Mr. Kaval also said the Athletics are working Greg Carey, the Managing Director of Goldman Sachs. Mr. Carey was (with Hobbs Ong Associates) behind the $645 million Clark County bond issue that produced the record $750 million subsidy used to help pay for the construction of the $2 billion Allegiant Stadium.
“We are we’re working with those folks as well. Chad Estes, who i’ve known for years he also grew up in Northeast Ohio, like i did, and we’re working with them they were involved in the sales campaign for the Raiders Stadium, Allegiance Stadium. And so you know we’re leveraging the experience of groups that were involved in another stadium development in Las Vegas, and ones across the country, to actually kind of turbo charge the process, and to try to get to decisions as quick as possible, because, you know, we are running out of time,” Kaval explained.
So, for anyone who thinks the A’s are playing around in Las Vegas, jettison the idea. You don’t waste the time of these organizations. And Major League Baseball itself is helping out because, as Dave said, “We want to see a resolution to this” (getting a new ballpark built).
City Of Oakland Still Not Providing Sources And Uses Spreadsheet For Howard Terminal Financing
Mr. Kaval also shared that he had not received a document that shows revenues from various sources, especially tax increment financing, and what that money would be used for. And this is not the first time I’ve had that talk with the President of the Oakland Athletics. In total, it has been almost two years of time since SB 293 Skinner (the legislation creating the right for the City of Oakland to form a tax increment financing district around Howard Terminal) passed (October 11th, 2019), and still to this day the City of Oakland has not produced a simple Howard Terminal financing revenue sources and uses document. Heck, the City of Oakland could have used my Howard Terminal Spreadsheet as a basis.
That’s beyond horrible.
Kaval Comments On The Lawsuit And State Investigation Of Alameda County’s Coliseum Land Sale To The A’s
Our conversation turned to the lawsuit filed by Communities For A Better Environment. On that, I wrote the following:
State Investigation Of Alameda County On Coliseum Land Sale To Oakland A’s Is Wrong
The argument advanced by the Communities For A Better Environment goes like this:
July 20, 2021 – Alameda County is facing a lawsuit from the community around the Coliseum, which the County committed to sell to the Fisher-owned Oakland Athletics without first offering the land for affordable housing. After months of threatening to leave Oakland, Athletics’s President Dave Kaval today said the vote for the City’s term sheet does not work for the A’s. If the A’s leave Oakland, they have only 180 days to complete their purchase of the County’s share of the Coliseum land. In a convoluted deal struck between the County and the A’s just before Christmas 2019, the County committed to sell its half share of the Coliseum to the A’s by 2026. As the A’s have said repeatedly, they do not intend to build a new ballpark home for the team at Coliseum, as many in Oakland urge. Instead, they plan to develop the Coliseum land for profit.
The problem is that the City of Oakland first issued the same claim regarding the deal in late 2019 and wound up dropping it after the Oakland A’s convinced the City and a Judge that affordable housing would be part of the development focus.
It’s basically double-jeopardy to charge an entry for the same crime twice. The City of Oakland was happy with the County of Alameda’s Oakland A’s land sale process and intentions, so why can’t the Communities For A Better Environment be happy too?
This is what Kaval had to say during our talk:
Kaval: We’re still trying to make heads or tails out of that letter that was sent and there’s a lawsuit by The Communities For A Better Environment on that transaction, and we’re just trying to sort out what it means and what it means to our transaction with the county and you know a lot of those are legal matters that i can’t really speak to publicly but you know obviously you see a very active state in this area and you know obviously we want to ensure that that is a project that we can move forward with at a future date. I mean i think that’s been our challenge on this project from the beginning, Zennie, is that there just are so many layers of approvals and things in hoops you have to jump through. And it just means these like i said the process becomes the product. You know we want to get to building the stadium. We want to have the stadium open. We want to have games there. We want to win a world series there. But, you know, we need everyone’s help to streamline these things and make them happen in a timeline to make sense.”
What Is The Sign That The A’s Stay Or Go?
Kaval says that the affirmative vote by the City and County is what’s needed to determine if the A’s stay in Oakland. My personal belief is that it’s getting to the point where it may be too late for that if the vote hangs around and is not done until next year. Las Vegas is hungry to build a sports betting economy, and the A’s look like meat to a region with a Killer Shark-sized appetite.
I Asked Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf For A Response To The Kaval Interview
I reached out to Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for a response to my interview with Dave Kaval, and have not received a response to this point. I would like for the Mayor to make herself available for an interview to address not just Kaval’s comments, but why Oakland is, once again, in the position of losing another professional sports team?
Stay tuned. This will continue to be updated.
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Note from Zennie62Media and OaklandNewsNow.com : this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a YouTube channel. When the video is “liked” by Zennie62 YouTube, then it is automatically uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective here, on top of our is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours – is the use of the existing YouTube social graph on any subject in the World. Now, news is reported with a smartphone and also by promoting current content on YouTube: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, or having a camera crew to shoot what is already on YouTube. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.