Will Lawsuit Slow A's Progress Toward a Howard Terminal Home?

Waterfront business groups file a lawsuit designed to reject the Athletics' preferred site for a new stadium and have it built at the Coliseum complex instead.

On the one hand, the A’s don’t know when they will play again in the Oakland Coliseum.

They can blame the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic on that one.

On the other hand, they A’s don’t know when they will play in someplace other than the Oakland Coliseum.

They can blame a coalition of Oakland and East Bay businesses on that one.

Having finally settled on the Howard Terminal area just north of Oakland’s Jack London Square, the A’s had been hoping to push forward quickly with planning, permitting and environmental review before getting the project fully ramped up in time for playing the 2023 season in a new facility on the edge of San Francisco Bay.

But Howard Terminal is in the middle of an area dedicated to shipping and warehousing, and this week a group of shipping, trucking and steel companies joined forces and filed a lawsuit aiming to tap the brakes, if not slam them.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Alameda Superior Court, presented opposition to the A’s submission to California’s Office of Planning and research last week seeking Assembly Bill 734 to receiving fast-track certification of the site’s environmental review.

The bill, authored by assemblyman Rob Bonta and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown during the final stages of his last term in 2018, was designed to streamline the process for reviewing environmental lawsuits filed against the Howard Terminal project.

The lawsuit said that the state’s legal authority to continue with expedited reviews ended on Jan. 1, but Gov. Gavin Newsom continued to receive supplemental data after that time. The suit seeks a ruling that Newsom has no power to certify the Howard Terminal project under AB 734.

The A’s see the Howard Terminal site as their last best hope for a new facility as the almost 55-year-old Coliseum’s infrastructure is straining. The club released a statement slamming the lawsuit.

“At a time when our community is coming together in the midst of a global public health crisis,” the statement read, ‘the decision to file a lawsuit to halt the environmental review process for the new A’s ballpark reeks of cynicism and desperation.

“The new ballpark will be critical to the environmental, transportation and housing future of Oakland. It’s a once-in-a-generation project.”

The groups that filed the suit, which names Newsom and the City of Oakland as defendants and names the A’s as a party of interest, said that over the past year they have advocated for preserving Oakland’s working waterfront by growing a coalition dedicated to keeping the A’s at the Coliseum and building a new stadium complex there.

The A’s, who have been looking to find a new home for more than a decade and a half, have at times toyed with moving to suburban Fremont or to San Jose. In the last six years the push has been to stay in Oakland. They settled on a site near Laney College and Lake Merritt as their first choice, but those tentative plans were halted in 2017 by Laney’s student and faculty opposition.

The organization then settled on Howard Terminal, hiring a design team to move the team into the 21 century.