The Oakland City Council should quickly approve a lease deal that could keep the A's in the O.co Coliseum for up to 10 years, Mayor Jean Quan said Wednesday.

Quan's comments came after nearly two weeks of public squabbling over the deal that has left Oakland with a diminished ability to wring better terms from the A's. Members of the City Council have walked out of closed-session meetings in frustration, others were ordered by their colleagues to boycott votes, and city leaders suggested the A's might flee to Canada or Texas if Oakland didn't approve the deal.

The City Council has said it wants the A's to pay $21 million over the 10-year term of the lease instead of the $15.5 million under the proposed deal, and it wants the A's to commit to playing in the Coliseum through at least 2019 instead of 2017.

Quan hadn't taken a public stance until Wednesday on the lease, which the A's reached last week with the Coliseum Authority.

"We need the City Council to approve it as quickly as possible so we can start talking seriously about a new stadium in the city," she said at a news conference Wednesday.

The mayor said she has dispatched interim City Administrator Henry Gardner to negotiate a few "clarifications" with A's co-owner Lew Wolff before the deal is approved. Quan did not elaborate.

But Wolff said that after spending 14 months working out a deal with the Coliseum Authority, he was not interested in making substantive changes.

"After 14 months, we are done. We've given them a great deal in there," Wolff said.

He said he had no plans to leave the Bay Area if the A's can't reach a Coliseum deal.

City Councilman Larry Reid said earlier this week that he feared the team would move to Montreal or San Antonio if the city did not ratify the new lease. Reid said that was the word he'd gotten from negotiators for the Coliseum Authority.

But Wolff said he hadn't spent any time thinking about those two cities and wasn't even sure Montreal has a stadium that would fit the team's needs.

"I have not done one thing relative to that," Wolff said. "We'd rather stay in the Bay Area than move to Timbuktu."

Wolff said the only step the A's have taken to look for a new home is investigating whether they could play temporarily at an under-construction soccer stadium in San Jose. The 18,000-seat stadium is being built for the San Jose Earthquakes, which Wolff co-owns.

The Montreal Expos played in 66,000-seat Olympic Stadium before leaving for Washington, D.C., following the 2004 season. Without elaborating, Wolff said he didn't think it would meet the team's needs.

San Antonio is home to the Alamodome, a 65,000-seat domed stadium used mainly for football. It has hosted exhibition baseball games, but with a right-field fence that is a mere 280 feet from home plate - closer than any outfield fence in the major leagues.

Wolff also expressed doubt that the NFL's Oakland Raiders would be ready to tear down the Coliseum next year and build a new, football-only stadium by 2018. A memo sent to Quan by planners for a city-backed sports-retail complex called Coliseum City said they hope to have a stadium deal by the end of the summer that would require demolishing the Coliseum next year.

"I think for someone to say that next year that they are tearing down the Coliseum" isn't realistic, Wolff said. "That isn't something that is done in a year."

Quan said she was confident both teams could be accommodated.

"There is absolutely no reason we can't keep both teams," Quan said. "We believe that the lease extension for the A's is not in conflict with the Raiders."

Wolff said he was willing to consider keeping the team in Oakland at the Coliseum site or moving to San Jose, something the San Francisco Giants oppose and Major League Baseball has blocked. But he reiterated that he had no interest in a city plan to build a ballpark at Howard Terminal near Jack London Square.

Building on the site would be too expensive, Wolff said, adding, "It is worse than a nonstarter."