OAKLAND — As Alameda County irons out an agreement with the Oakland Athletics to sell its ownership share of the Coliseum complex to the team, Oakland City Council members, in a letter sent this week, called on the county to reconsider selling its share to the city instead.

In a response, Alameda County Board of Supervisors President Richard Valle said supervisors are open to the idea, and reiterated that “it has always been the county’s desire” to sell its 50 percent share of the Coliseum to the city, which owns the other 50 percent. Valle also noted it was Oakland that broke off talks with the county months ago.

Meanwhile, the county will continue its negotiations with the A’s, he indicated.

Oakland council members Rebecca Kaplan and Larry Reid, in their Monday letter to Valle, expressed concern over the potential sale to the A’s, “not for the purpose of a ballpark development, and without clarity of what the development would include or what community benefits would be involved.”

The A’s intend to build a 35,000-seat ballpark at the 50-acre Howard Terminal site along the estuary near Jack London Square, and to simultaneously convert the current Coliseum site in East Oakland into a mixed-use development including housing, office and retail space, a park with sports facilities, restaurants and possibly a tech campus.

Oakland had been in talks with the county since 2015 to buy its share of the ownership, but those talks broke off in February, Reid said in an interview. Reid would prefer if the A’s were to build a new stadium at the current site, “with all the transportation infrastructure in place,” than to build a new one at Howard Terminal, he said.

However, Reid also has publicly said that he would support the team’s decision to build at Howard Terminal if it means keeping them in Oakland, and that the proposed mixed-use development at the Coliseum site could benefit the neighborhood.

Reid said it makes better sense for the city to be the ones negotiating with the A’s, since the county has no “economic jurisdiction” over the site. He said it was important to get it “in writing” that the county was still open to selling its ownership share to the city.

Valle, in his letter, said the ball is in the city’s court. The county presented a term sheet to Oakland city staff in February that would guide the sale of the ownership from the county to the city, but the city never responded to it, he wrote.

That’s why the county went ahead and entered into a non-binding agreement with the A’s in April to sell its share of the ownership to them, Valle said, so that the county could “exit the sports business altogether and concentrate on our core mission.”

“If the city is still interested in discussing the disposition of the county’s 50 percent share of the Coliseum property, we look forward to a response to the February 25, 2019, term sheet and a formal request to resume discussions,” Valle said.