Not really. This is a saga that's gone on for two decades. The main sticking point has been cash. Oakland can't afford to be throwing money around, but that's what the A's seemed to want. Instead there were offers to contribute real estate, capital improvements, and other benefits. In return, Oakland wanted support for various programs. Back when we had a city manager, there was an effort for a downtown stadium. The city manager of the time, Robert Bobb, who was extremely competent, labored on this issue, but the A's wanted actual cash from the city. Then Jerry Brown was elected mayor. He made some efforts in this regard, but his higher priority was general economic development, particularly for downtown Oakland. Bobb left, and a charter amendment converted the city manager into a city administrator accountable only to the mayor. At that point, it became up to elected officials to carry any program forward.
The "strong mayor" form of city government worked with someone of Jerry Brown's competence in the office. Unfortunately, his successors have mostly been less than competent. Ron Dellums had promise, and a great track record in Congress. But he was unable to translate that to Frank Ogawa Plaza. Next was Jean Quan, who was no one's first or second choice, but thanks to our easily manipulated system of ranked-choice voting, she got in on third-place votes. She was feckless and, really, not qualified to run or do much of anything. Then there was Libby Schaaf, well-intentioned but a bit over her head at times. She tried to assemble a package, first focusing on housing development by the Coliseum, and then back to downtown and the Howard Terminal proposal.
None of this is to excuse John Fisher's obvious role in running the team down, but to get anything done in Oakland, you have to line up multiple constituencies, including public-employee unions (who really run the city), other unions, city council members (some of whom are competent and others who seem to be from another planet), numerous advocacy groups - many of which are outright grifting - and other governmental bodies. For the Howard Terminal proposal, the Port of Oakland authority had to be brought on board as well as the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. Alameda County had been burned by the Raiders (twice) and was wary of any new deals. The Port was concerned about effects on its operations. As a consequence, a complex package was put together, including various forms of capital improvements and support. There would also have been transfers of land that the A's could sell...as long as housing was built on that land. There would have been no direct cash outlay to the A's, however, which is what they clearly wanted. The general feeling in Oakland at this point seems to be that the A's strung Oakland along until they could see what kind of deal Nevada would give them.
The current mayor, Sheng Thao, to be fair to her, inherited all of this when she took office in January. She was another third-place choice who worked the ranked-choice voting system. But her first month in office, she was handed a poop sandwich in the form of another scandal in the Oakland Police Department, resulting in the firing of yet another police chief. So an A's deal was not in focus for a while. By the time it was, the Nevada deal had advanced, though until this spring, the A's continued with what appeared to be negotiations. When the A's announced their deal for Las Vegas, Thao's initial reaction was to drop the whole thing, which, in my opinion, was the right reaction. The A's clearly had not been serious about Oakland for sometime. This is a city that has many more pressing problems than a stupid baseball team, and resources should be going toward those problems and not toward a privately-owned team.
Thao seems to have changed her mind a bit, however, though it appears that the A's train is leaving the station. My own theory is that the A's feel overshadowed by the San Francisco Giants, and do not want to be relegated to a secondary role in this area (a good example is the challenge the A's have had in the past getting radio play-by-play coverage ... including the year when that PBP was on the University of California's student radio station). John Fisher is someone who inherited his money and has no sense for what's politically possible in Oakland or Alameda County, and is looking for money with few(er) strings attached, using the poor state of the A's stadium as an excuse to go chasing money in Las Vegas. My feeling is, let him go. Sports teams are not that important, and contribute far less to the economic development of their host cities than team owners claim when they're looking for handouts.
