Visions of an A’s ballpark that celebrates the best of Oakland

Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Visions of an A’s ballpark that celebrates the best of Oakland 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

The president of the Oakland A’s said he envisions a ballpark that would open to Lake Merritt, the Tribune Tower and the Oakland hills — a picture-perfect postcard of the city’s best features.

In a meeting with The Chronicle’s editorial board Thursday, A’s President Dave Kaval exuberantly shared his visions for what a new ballpark could bring to the city.

The proposed ballpark near Lake Merritt, which will cost upward of $500 million in private financing arranged by team ownership, would seat fewer people — 34,000 — and be more “porous” in its connections to the surrounding neighborhood and local businesses than San Francisco’s AT&T Park, Kaval said.

“In this day and age, especially with television, people want to be closer,” Kaval said. “The notion that you need 50,000 seats is 50 years old.”

The ballpark could have an urban feel similar to that of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, and none of the nosebleed seats of the San Francisco Giants’ home facility, said Kaval, who once wrote a book about his travels to every baseball stadium in the country.

Designs for the ballpark haven’t been done — and Kaval said years of work are ahead before any groundbreaking could take place, perhaps in 2021. He spoke about what he thinks the ballpark could be.

A group that includes officials from the city, BART and AC Transit is working to make the facility “transit-first,” Kaval said. That means 65 percent of the fans would take public transportation to games, compared with just 20 percent who rely on public transit for games at the current Coliseum site. The vision could involve creating a “river walk” at the nearby estuary, according to Kaval.

Since the A’s unveiled their preferred ballpark site last month, proposed on land owned by the Peralta Community College District next to Interstate 880, a growing list of community leaders and faculty of nearby Laney College has lined up in opposition, saying the team should stay in its East Oakland place and build a new facility next to the 50-year-old Coliseum.

Opponents of the proposal have cited concerns about gentrification, noise, environmental impacts and traffic.

The Golden Gate Audubon Society said the ballpark would be disastrous for nearly 200 species of ducks, herons, songbirds, nesting cormorants and fish that make their homes at Lake Merritt, the nation’s oldest wildlife refuge.

But Kaval said all of those matters and more will be dealt with one by one over the next several years as the team works to develop a community benefits plan that is likely to include the construction of affordable housing and workforce development opportunities for community college students.

“We’ve heard them loud and clear,” Kaval said of the conservation group. The A’s will make sure the area’s “ecological frontierism” is respected and preserved, he said,

The team’s new president, who came to the Oakland job after leading the San Jose Earthquakes through the construction of Avaya Stadium, said that he appreciates just how vocally critical community groups have been in meetings over the past several months.

“People wanted to be involved because they realized it’ll set the table for the future of Oakland,” he said. And though the ballpark is likely to transform downtown, motivating more people to live and work there, Kaval said he wants to “preserve the flavor and excitement of Oakland.”

In addition to striking a land deal with the college district — Kaval didn’t say whether the team wanted to buy or lease the acreage — the A’s will need to go through a regulatory process that includes California Environmental Quality Act and environmental impact reviews. Kaval said he’d be open to state lawmakers speeding up the CEQA process, as they’ve done in the past for stadium projects, but he isn’t counting on it.

In the meantime, Kaval said the Coliseum is serving as a prototypical “canvas” on which to try new attractions and features that could be modeled at the new ballpark down the road. The new Championship Plaza between the Coliseum and Oracle Arena that features food trucks, children’s games and other entertainment is the sort of project the team wants to replicate, Kaval said.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov