A's lease details: new scoreboard, better plumbing New 10-year proposal awaiting vote offers incentives to remain

Recommended Video:

Months of bickering over a long-term lease for the Oakland A's are expected to end Thursday when the board that manages the O.co Coliseum votes on a revised proposal with incentives to keep the team from leaving the city.

The proposal, released Tuesday afternoon, would require the A's to give the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority two years' notice of the team's intent to move to another city and would require the team to continue to make lease payments for the remainder of the 10-year term of the lease - even if the team is no longer playing at O.co.

However, the A's would be let off the hook from making those lease payments if they left the stadium early and moved to another stadium within Oakland, such as the proposed Howard Terminal facility at Jack London Square.

"This is a great start to finding a long-term solution to keeping the A's in Oakland," said Chris Dobbins, a member of the Coliseum board and head of a fan group, Save Oakland Sports. "There's still going to be naysayers, but I think we're on the right track."

If approved Thursday, the lease would then need approvals from the Oakland City Council and Alameda County Board of Supervisors.

Rent drops over time

O.co Coliseum, which was built in 1966, has been the home since 1968 of the A's, whose ownership has been trying to move the team for at least a decade. Now, with the revised 10-year lease proposal, they have incentive to stay. less O.co Coliseum, which was built in 1966, has been the home since 1968 of the A's, whose ownership has been trying to move the team for at least a decade. Now, with the revised 10-year lease proposal, they have ... more Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close A's lease details: new scoreboard, better plumbing 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Under the proposal, the A's annual lease payments would start at $1.75 million - about $250,000 more than the team is currently paying - and drop to $1.25 million over the course of the 10-year term. The decreasing rent amount is intended as an incentive for the team to stay through the full term of the lease, sources at the Coliseum Authority said.

Sewage overflows and blackouts - occasional occurrences at the stadium, which opened in 1966 - are also addressed in the new lease. The Coliseum Authority would pay $1 million a year, with 5 percent annual increases, into a maintenance fund to fix the stadium problems.

The lease would also settle a $5 million dispute between the team and the authority over back rent. Instead of requiring the team to pay $5 million in what the authority argued was back rent, the team would agree to buy a new $10 million scoreboard system.

The new lease would replace the existing lease, which expires in about 18 months.

Sources said the A's have already agreed to the revised lease, which has been the subject of much public speculation and political posturing for the past few months. Last week, the four Oakland representatives on the Coliseum board boycotted the board's scheduled meeting, and the board could not vote without a quorum.

The boycott stemmed from Oakland officials' concerns that the lease did not provide enough protections for the city, or enough incentives for the A's to stay in Oakland. For example, the previous proposal allowed the A's to give only one year's notice if the team wanted to move, sources have said.

The A's have been planning to move from Oakland for at least a decade, saying the Coliseum is outdated and the team should not have to share facilities with the Oakland Raiders. Initially A's owners tried to move to Fremont, but that plan was scuttled due in part to traffic concerns and a lack of public support, and for the past few years it has been attempting to move to San Jose.

A waterfront ballpark?

Major League Baseball still has not ruled on whether the A's can relocate to San Francisco Giants' territory, which would be required for a South Bay move. San Jose sued the league over the matter, and a court decision is expected in October.

Meanwhile, plans for a new ballpark at the Oakland waterfront continue to move forward. The Port of Oakland in March entered into a negotiating contract with a group of 15 East Bay business leaders to consider building a 38,000-seat ballpark, retail shops, restaurants and other amenities at Howard Terminal, a 50-acre site just north of Jack London Square.

The group includes the chief executive of Clorox; the former chief executive of Dreyer's Ice Cream; Oakland business consultant Doug Boxer, son of Sen. Barbara Boxer and a fervent A's fan; and Mike Ghielmetti, head of Signature Development Group, which is building the 3,100-unit Brooklyn Basin project south of Jack London Square.

"Our first priority is seeing the A's stay in Oakland," Ghielmetti said Tuesday. "We don't want to get in the way of anything the city's doing at the Coliseum. But we think the Howard Terminal site could be a beautiful place for a ballpark."

A's co-owner Lew Wolff has said he has no plans to move the team to Howard Terminal.