While the Raiders’ extending of their lease in Oakland for another year might have been a short-term relief, Mark Davis still has a long-term problem with his co-tenant in O.co Coliseum.
The Raiders owner took aim at the Oakland A’s as an impediment in his quest for a new stadium in Oakland.
The baseball team signed a 10-year lease on the old place in 2014, and Davis said until they declare their intentions for the future, it’s hard to move forward.
“There’s an elephant in the room, and that’s the Oakland A’s. “They have to make a commitment to what they want to do,” Davis said, via Scott Bair of CSNBayArea.com. “That’s the problem. They signed a 10-year lease while we were negotiating with Oakland officials, and it kind of put somebody right in the middle of things. There isn’t much you can do. They’ve tied our hands behind our back.
“Now it’s up to the A’s to make a declaration of what they want to do. If they don’t do that, I don’t see how we can make a deal.”
Davis said his long-term plan is for each team to have a new building on the current site. But he also doesn’t want to compromise parking and tailgating possibilities during construction, hoping to tear down the decrepit hulk of a stadium and come back to a new one rather than work piecemeal.
“What I do not want to do,” Davis said, “is build a football stadium in a corner of a parking lot while the Oakland Coliseum is still standing and, once we have a brand new venue, we begin to tear down the old stadium and build a new ballpark, disrupting the ingress, egress, parking and tailgating experience for Raiders fans on game day.”
Of course, all that takes money, and that’s the problem. Local officials have insisted they won’t spend public funds on the project, and it’ll take more than the $100 million the league is offering them to stay put to make a new stadium magically appear.