When the Warriors walk away from Oracle Arena in 2019 to move into their new home in San Francisco, Oakland will take a hit to its psyche and, potentially, its pocketbook.

The sparkling cylindrical building will always hold a special place in the hearts of fans — it’s where the Warriors made history last week by breaking the NBA record for wins in a season. Officials from the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority, the public agency that owns the arena, insist that it has a bright future as a concert venue, and that it won’t be a drag on taxpayers. Scott McKibben, the authority’s head, said the Warriors will have to pay the public agency $60 million in renovation debt after they move across the bay.

But the Warriors said their debt obligations will end as soon as their lease expires in 2017, and that anything beyond that is up for negotiation. The question of who is liable for the remaining debt may have to be settled in court.

If the Coliseum Authority doesn’t prevail, it could be stuck paying millions each year for a venue that may sputter in its second life, squeezed by competition from the SAP Center in San Jose and the Warriors’ future luxury home in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood.

That arena, to be named the Chase Center, is scheduled to open in 2019, pending the outcome of a pair of lawsuits by a group opposed to its construction.

“Without the Warriors bringing in revenue several months of the year, they’re going to have to fill that hole,” said Patricia Martel, city manager of Daly City — home of the venerable and deteriorating Cow Palace.

The Cow Palace, which was originally built to house county fairs, is now known for such events as the Golden Gate Kennel Club dog show, the Dickens Christmas Fair and an annual hemp expo. This summer it will also host a giant gun show and the National Convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

According to Martel, it no longer makes enough money to pay for needed maintenance. She predicted that Oracle will age more gracefully.

McKibben is adamant that Oracle will never meet a similarly undesirab McKibben put it bluntly: “Oracle is the Taj Mahal compared to the Cow Palace,” he said, stressing that Oakland’s arena sits on a major transit artery — right at the intersection of BART, several bus lines, Amtrak, the airport connector and the I-880 freeway.

Happy BART rider

That feature wasn’t lost on fans streaming in for a recent Carrie Underwood concert.

“Getting here was a piece of cake,” said Juli Michallyszyn, 30, of Orange County. “I came in on BART. Venues in Southern California aren’t like that.”

Still, facility upgrades and easy transit access might not make up for the loss of a basketball franchise, said Stanford University economist Roger Noll.

“It will not only lose the team, it will also lose some events to the Warriors’ new (Chase Center) in San Francisco,” Noll said. “It’s not going to be the Cow Palace, but it’s not going to be the venue of choice, either.”

In that sense, Oracle could be viewed as the latest casualty of a trend that began in the 1980s, when David Stern took over the NBA and turned it into a global brand. Since then, basketball teams — like their counterparts in football and baseball — have engaged in a sports facility arms race, demanding bigger venues with all kinds of lucrative frills: luxury boxes, premium seating, bars, restaurants, flashy scoreboards and booming sound systems.

“If they can’t get what they need in an existing arena, they ask to leave,” said Rick Eckstein, a sports economist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

It’s happened again and again. North Carolina’s Charlotte Coliseum, which was built in 1988 to house the Hornets and later, the Bobcats, became a dinosaur before it turned 20 and was demolished in 2007. The Izod Center in New Jersey foundered after the Nets left in 2010. After failing to stay afloat as an exhibition and concert venue, it was finally shuttered last year. The Bradley Center in Milwaukee, considered a gem when it opened in 1988, will be replaced in 2018 by a cavernous $500 million arena for the Bucks. The team had threatened for years to leave town unless taxpayers subsidized the new facility.

“We’ve found that the economic lifespans of arenas and stadiums are getting shorter and shorter; they’re becoming obsolete faster and faster,” Eckstein said.

Venue for concerts, sports

Granted, not all of these turnovers were failures. The KeyArena in Seattle — which some economists say is an apt comparison to Oracle — was resurrected as a concert venue in 2008, when the SuperSonics broke their lease and moved to Oklahoma City. Since then it’s mostly been profitable, said Long Island University sports economist Geoffrey Propheter.

McKibben is confident that Oracle faces a similarly prosperous future.

“Our plan as I see it right now is to absolutely continue to operate it,” he said. “It will be a wonderful venue for entertainment and a world-class venue for large sporting events like the NCAA final for March Madness.”

At 50 years old, Oracle is still immense and futuristic: a marooned planet at the edge of a freeway. It got a major face-lift in 1997, when the Coliseum Authority issued $140 million in bonds to redo the entire facility, eviscerating its interior so that only the glass structure remained standing. The authority built a new arena from the ground up, adding luxury suites, escalators, new scoreboards, ample locker rooms and club areas with gourmet food options.

According to McKibben, the cost of that renovation hasn’t fallen on taxpayers: The Warriors pay about $7.5 million each year to defray the debt, in addition to their $1.5 million annual rent. The city and county cover all the operating costs, but get to keep the revenue generated from concessions and parking, as well as a small portion of ticket sales and Oracle naming rights, McKibben said.

For the last few years the venue has turned a small profit for the authority, McKibben said. He attributes the trend at least partly to Warriors owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, who bought the team in 2011 and have been widely hailed for treating it like a startup.

“Is it in the black? Yes,” McKibben said of the arena. “But it hasn’t made a lot of money.”

Collecting more proceeds

He’s optimistic that the arena will reap more money for Oakland and Alameda County once the Warriors leave. Without the team, the Coliseum Authority will collect all the proceeds from luxury suites, signage on the building, sponsorships and ticket sales. And it won’t have to block off 40 to 60 days a year for basketball, he added.

“When we sit down and look at non-Warrior events like Bruce Springsteen and Adele, these are profitable,” McKibben said.

The big challenge, Propheter said, will be steering those headliners away from the Warriors’ new home.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan