OAKLAND — Despite a major setback in plans to move the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas, Mayor Libby Schaaf said that she will not empty the city treasury to keep the team.

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Ronnie Lott’s group continues campaign to keep Raiders in Oakland “I do a lot of tightrope walking and as mayor I want to keep my Raiders in Oakland, but I am not subsidizing stadium construction,” she said to big applause from members of the Piedmont Pines Neighborhood Association Monday night at Skyline High School. “You’re applauding, but the NFL (National Football League) finds it quite offensive.”

Schaaf’s appearance before the association came on the day that billionaire Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson announced he was withdrawing a pledge of $650 million toward construction of a 65,000-seat domed stadium in the Nevada City.

Under a relocation proposal, the remainder of the cost would include $500 million from the Raiders and $750 million in Las Vegas tax revenue.

Officials of the investment bank Goldman Sachs are reportedly interested in financing what would have been Adelson’s share, but the sports network ESPN reported Tuesday that officials are reconsidering the proposal.

Oakland has put forward a proposal to keep the team with financing from an investment group headed by former San Francisco 49ers player Ronnie Lott.

The city has offered to finance $200 million in infrastructure improvements needed for the stadium, Schaaf said.

Money to pay for the work would come from revenue generated by the project. NFL owners will take up the relocation application when they meet in March.

But building any sports facility with public money is likely to be a tough sell to voters who are still paying off a $90 million Coliseum remodeling loan taken out when the Raiders moved back to Oakland from Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

Schaaf is clearly taking a wait-and-see attitude.

“Las Vegas is not off the table, “she said. “We are competing, but we are competing on our terms whether or not the NFL or the Raiders accept that.

“We will know a lot after the March meeting but I am not moving off my very, very strong line in the sand for the city’s participation,” she continued.

Schaaf’s appearance consisted of a positive update on her first two years in the mayor’s chair.

Before her taking office, the city had been through four mayors, seven city administrators and five police chiefs in as many years.

Her main task was to stabilize the organization by hiring good managers, including current City Administrator Sabrina Landreth and a staff that now includes the former city manager of Berkeley and one of Gov. Jerry Brown’s former top aides, Schaaf said.

Schaaf made headlines last year when she fired popular Oakland police Chief Sean Whent amid a department sex scandal involving officers and an underage prostitute.

The new police chief is Anne Kirkpatrick, a veteran of the Spokane, Washington, police force who most recently headed reform efforts in the Chicago Police Department. Schaaf has also chosen Venus Johnson to be director of public safety. Johnson is a former legal adviser to U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris when Harris was the state attorney general.

Despite the upheaval in the department, Schaaf had good news on overall crime rates. Last year was the safest in Oakland since 2005, she said to applause.

She said that: violent crime declined 20 percent over the three-year period; shootings and homicides were down 40 percent; and the number of residential burglaries was cut in half during the same period.

Despite the better numbers, Schaaf said that the city still has work to do to ensure citizen safety.

“I appreciate that applause, but anybody in this room who has experienced crime is probably not clapping,” she said. “The statistics are encouraging. We are going in the right direction, but we have a lot more to do.”

Oakland continues to benefit from the tech boom that has overtaken the immediate Bay Area. More than 2,000 units of housing are under construction in Oakland — more than was built in the past six years combined, Schaaf said.

Last year, 1,900 new businesses moved to the city and demand for local office space was the largest in the world, outpacing other cities, including Stockholm, Dublin and Dubai, the mayor said.

The flip side has been higher rents and an increase in evictions for tenants who cannot afford to live here anymore. That needs to be remedied, according to Schaaf.

“It’s encouraging that the rest of the world has discovered our awesomeness because they are moving in but we have to build more housing or they will displace the people who living here and that is not fair either,” she said.

But all has not been smooth during Schaaf’s tenure. She and Fire Department Chief Teresa Deloach Reed have promised reforms following a December fire that killed 35 people in a Fruitvale warehouse nicknamed the Ghost Ship.

The warehouse had not been inspected and the deaths occurred when an upper floor gave way as patrons of a concert rushed to escape the building.

The mayor and other city officials praised the Piedmont Pines audience for passing bond Measure KK, which will provide up to $350 million to repave the city’s streets.

“We are excited about getting money into your streets because if you had not passed that measure 10 years from now, only 25 percent of the streets in Oakland would be in decent condition,” she said. “Because you had allocated this resource to us, 75 percent of our streets will be in good condition.”

The evening also included presentations by the city’s interim director of transportation and Council member Annie Campbell Washington, who represents District 4, which includes Piedmont Pines and other Oakland hills neighborhoods.