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A's ponder park in own back yard
COLISEUM PARKING LOT DEEMED BEST SITE
By Barry Witt
The San Jose Mercury News

Having scoured the East Bay for a new place to call home, the A's have decided to focus efforts on constructing a new baseball-only ballpark within 500 feet of their current dugout.

Lew Wolff, the Los Angeles developer who has been granted rights to buy into the team if he can find it a new ballpark, has told East Bay officials in recent weeks that the best location would be Network Associates Coliseum's north parking lot. And he says the A's would be willing to put up in the neighborhood of $100 million of what could be a $400 million project.

``The A's are comfortable in contributing 25 percent. If it costs less, great,'' Wolff said Friday.

Wolff said he concluded the Coliseum site -- outlined in a 2001 feasibility study prepared for the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority -- is the one location where a deal might work, in part because the land already is in public ownership. Other East Bay locations are politically or economically impossible.

The feasibility study assumed in its $400 million cost estimate that three structured parking garages would be built to provide 3,600 replacement spaces.

Wolff declined to discuss the possibility of moving to the South Bay if the Oakland efforts fail. San Jose leaders have predicted efforts to build in Oakland won't succeed and the A's will have to turn their attention southward at a later date, despite the fact Santa Clara County remains off limits because of territorial rights held by the Giants.

Turning the A's preference into a reality will be a difficult task in a community where taxpayers are still fuming over steep annual subsidies needed to pay off debt and operating costs of the Coliseum since it was renovated for the Raiders in 1996.

Oakland voters will be asked to raise taxes this fall to pay for more police officers, and Alameda County officials say they are in no position to further subsidize the sports complex.

In addition, a ballpark at the Coliseum would run contrary to the existing trend of putting baseball parks in downtown settings, allowing cities to justify subsidies in exchange for the perceived boost in commercial activity.

Wolff's conclusion, however, at least allows the public agencies and team to resume talks and focus on a proposal. That has been lacking in recent years while the A's owners spoke repeatedly about the need for a baseball-only ballpark to generate more money.

A new ballpark, they hope, would attract greater attendance and, more important, fans willing to pay high premiums for luxury boxes and club seats, Major League Baseball's current model.

How much of those premiums, if any, the A's would be willing to share with the public agencies in return for a public contribution will be the subject of future talks.

But it's clear the A's won't want to give up much.

``The idea of using the operations of the club to build a venue, then all of a sudden you end up not in a position to compete for players,'' Wolff said. ``We don't want to build a venue by stripping out all the revenues a venue can generate for a ballclub.''

East Bay officials were happy to now have something to talk about with the A's.

``It's the first kind of break we've had,'' said Alameda County Supervisor Gail Steele, who met with Wolff and Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente earlier this month. ``Conceptually, people are excited about it, but we have a long way to go.''

De La Fuente praised Wolff for committing the A's to a financial contribution for the first time. He said he still thinks locations in Oakland, in addition to the Coliseum, remain a possibility, particularly some that could generate a bigger economic impact.