2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdOvBiiJBFs

Oakland News Now Presents:

Clearing Oakland A’s Las Vegas Ballpark Fake News & Misunderstandings For May 14, 2023

.

As happens with a complicated large-scale public-private stadium or ballpark in America, there are always some information released that falls under either misunderstandings, or just plain fake news. That’s certainly the case for the Oakland A’s Las Vegas Ballpark. So, in an effort to clear out the flotsam, here’s a list of some of the more obvious items of fake news and misunderstandings surrounding the A’s new ballpark effort in Las Vegas.

First Item: That the A’s left Oakland in pursuit of a larger public subsidy. The fact is, the real, true, correct tax increment revenue estimate for Howard Terminal starts with a targeted $2 billion base year assessed value, 4 percent annual rate of growth in assessed value, stopping at year 45, to yield approximately $1.6 billion in TIF revenue. That’s against $2 billion base year, 3 percent annual rate of growth in assessed value, stopping at year 30, to yield approximately $1.3 billion in TIF revenue for Las Vegas. (With 3 percent an automatic increase that’s the most reliable inflation estimate for Las Vegas right now.) So, both have advantages and disadvantages that basically cancel each other out, so, not a factor. It’s Fake News.

Second Item: That the A’s walked away from the negotiating table with the City of Oakland without warning. While the A’s and Major League Baseball had said they were working parallel paths, anyone with any experience in these matters could see the A’s had moved farther, faster than in Oakland. Why? Because Oakland paid an inordinate level of attention to political touchpoint items like affordable housing, and none to actually forming a “stadium authority” process to streamline approvals and guarantee what my friend Phil Tagami used to call “credibility, certainty, and capacity” in it’s ability to lay a path toward groundbreaking. Oakland Mayor Thao claimed the parties were “almost there”, but the fact was there was no establishment of a public authority, even though SB293 Skinner, the designed Howard Terminal law, called for one.

The problem here, from the start, has been that the City of Oakland approached the tasks to be done in a piecemeal way, as if “time on task” was never a consideration (four years and a still not created TIF Zone that really takes 6 months at best), whereas in Las Vegas, because of an approach that is more processed based, projects can get off the ground faster, hampered only by issues of financing more than anything else. Overall, it’s a misunderstanding, but one the A’s could have handled by being completely direct with the City of Oakland, and saying “We’re buying land and see a better path toward a ballpark here in Las Vegas, so let’s forget it.”

Third Item: That the A’s will not pay property tax. That idea was blurted out by Jeremy Arguelo of Applied Analytics, who’s a consultant to the A’s, and yet worked for Mark Davis and the Raiders, after serving as staff to the Las Vegas Stadium Authority and the Southern Nevada Tourism and Infrastructure Committee before that. I know for a fact that, at the time, Jeremy wasn’t instructed that the A’s would be paying a posessory interest tax in liu of a property tax, and so said the error that upset some involved with the project.

See, a normal tax increment financing legal mechanism calls for the private land and property owner to pay the property tax, because they own the property. But in the Las Vegas Ballpark for the A’s case, the facility is to be owned by the Las Vegas Stadium Authority, so the A’s are to pay what is called a “possessory interest tax” which take the place of the property tax, and uses the same rate as the property tax would, if the situation were normal. But withhout those payments, the tax increment financing money collection formula can’t work. This is another misunderstanding.

In closing, there are going to be more items of fake news and misunderstandings as we go. If you have a question on what’s what, send it to me as a comment or at [email protected].

Stay tuned.

via IFTTT

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.