Elaine Brown Latest Oakland Black Developer To Join Mayor Schaaf & Oakland A’s Coliseum Puppet Show
– vlog by Zennie62 YouTube. OaklandNewsNow.com is the original blog post for this content.
Elaine Brown Latest Oakland Black Developer To Join Mayor Schaaf & Oakland A’s Coliseum Puppet Show
Welcome former Black Panther Elaine Brown into the once-competition for the right to buy the City of Oakland’s portion of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. As I understand Ms. Brown’s proposal, she wants to build movie studios on the Coliseum property. More about that, later.
What’s news is that it been almost two years since the African American Sports and Entertainment Group was first formed by Oakland Raiders Fan Ray Bobbitt, and even with the addition of a number of black heavy-hitters like Loop Capital, former Oakland City Manager Robert Bobb, NBA Agent Bill Duffy, and local Oakland businesswoman Shawna Scott, as well as a tremendous community outreach effort, overall, the City of Oakland’s reaction and treatment toward the group has been, at best, luke-warm.
Consider that it City of Oakland staff (going to leave that project manager’s name out of it) has remarked that Bobbitt helped “market” the Coliseum site, as calls about it were coming in. Given the way Oakland added would-be developers, it looks like Ray’s efforts were being used against his own objective of bringing NFL Football back to Oakland with a black ownership group. That’s what it looks like to me.
Then, Oakland A’s legend Dave Stewart entered the arena of competition for the site, as did Oakland Coliseum City blasts-from-the-past Floyd Kephart and Rick Tripp. Why the City of Oakland would take a step back to a time where the need to build a stadium for the Raiders brought in developers who were not capable of delivering on their proposal promises is beyond me. And, as I have said before, Rick Tripp has no real track-record of having built anything, and a weirdly singular interest in the Coliseum.
(I want to get this out of the way: Rick Tripp is a very nice person. But we need to upgrade and develop the Coliseum and Mr. Tripp has not shown he has the financial access and development acumen to be the person to do this. I believe to this day there are people who have been involved in this who were more looking for pay-to-play evidence to hold over the heads of Oakland elected officials, than any real interest in developing the Coliseum property. That written, the City of Oakland has an “opportunity fee” that it charges would-be developers just to get the chance to negotiate with staff, and yet is not listed in the official fee record. The “opportunity fee” itself, just by its name, implies that the City of Oakland is some kind of gangster collecting money from any interested developer, and then doing who-knows-what with the payments. It’s a dirty look, in my opinion.)
It would seem the Oakland A’s still have control of development at both Howard Terminal and the Oakland Coliseum, even with the involvement of the African American Sports and Entertainment Group. Consider that the AASEG is the only organization that wants to bring NFL Football back to Oakland, whereas Oakland Athletics President Dave Kaval is against the idea because, he told me, of the parking requirements for an NFL Stadium.
Check the 13 minute and 8 second mark here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1RSMzUUFaU&t=801s
Not buying it. I think it’s all a show to keep the Bay Area for Major League Baseball and have one NFL team, the 49ers. And it seems as the Mayor of Oakland Libby Schaaf’s playing a starring role in making sure that happens. Note, in my interview, she said that who gets to own the City’s part of the Coliseum land is up to the A’s, in her mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl6tIs8zwb4
Of the development groups and people: Ray Bobbitt / AASEG, Dave Stewart, Floyd Kephart, Rick Tripp, and now Elaine Brown, Tripp and Kephart are said to be out of it for now, leaving three black developer groups. One would think Libby would make them team up. When I put that question to her on Tuesday, about why she did not pair them, she did not answer it.
What else is one left to believe but what Libby tells us: she wants to see a competition – between black groups, it seems. Not a team up.
And in that regard, it also seems that any future land use concerns have been tossed out of the window for what the Oakland A’s want to see. So, for all of these years since 2019, the issue of control of both Howard Terminal and the Coliseum site still rests with the A’s – contrary to what At-Large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan thinks.
What this looks like is what it is: blacks folks pitted against each other in a kind of puppet show directed by white producers paid by the City of Oakland in the form of the Mayor of Oakland and the City of Oakland staff. It just looks horrible. It’s bad not only that the City has the appearance of doing this, thanks to Mayor Schaaf, but that some of the African Americans involved seem to have zero-problem with looking like they have strings attached to them that literally pull them away from joining together. It reminds me of the fear some of us as black Americans express over being seen grouped together, as if that’s a bad thing. And from the perspective of the black Americans who share that view, it is a bad thing to some white Americans. That sad dynamic of black fear of joining together seems to be at play here. I’m happy to be very wrong, but I’ve seen nothing to make me think I am. Again, Mayor Schaaf can fix that, but, sadder still, she doesn’t want to.
On Elaine Brown’s Idea For Movie Studios In Oakland
First, I love the idea of building movie studios in Oakland, because it would provide the low-skilled jobs we currently lack. I think Ms. Brown is right on here, there’s just a few problems. I’m not going to go into detail here but as I write this, I am 15 minutes away by drive from the place where all of the MARVEL Avengers movies were made (still have my place at Lake Merritt in Oakland). Trilith Studios (website here), once called Pinewood Studios, has played a key role in an amazing transformation of Northern Georgia. To put it simply, Hollywood is here, now – at least on the production side. Here’s an early vlog I made about it, on site, eight years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQHheKkdRtc
For Ms. Brown’s idea to work, it takes far more than just a plan to build buildings. It takes a level of planning I am not convinced the City of Oakland currently has the desire, let alone intellectual horsepower, to do. That boldly and sincerely said, I think Ms. Brown’s idea deserves serious consideration as a segment of a total development approach for the Coliseum Area, including the Oakland Airport Business Park. The land really called for to make her idea work would crowd-put other types of development on the Coliseum site and that’s why the Oakland Airport Business Park is a better option, or some other land around there.
But all of that should not be done before the problem of sea-level-rise in East Oakland is tackled, and to this day, the Mayor of Oakland has been asleep at the wheel on the problem, while San Leandro has moved forward to fix it for its shoreline.
Stay tuned.
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