A protest that organizers expect will include “hundreds of cars” will converge Friday at the Coliseum an hour before the A’s Opening Night game against the Angels.
The East Oakland Stadium Alliance, which includes the Oakland East Bay Democratic Club, announced the protest in a press release Friday morning. The groups oppose the city of Oakland’s anticipated sale of its half of the Coliseum site to the A’s without the stipulation that the team build any new stadium at the Coliseum site, and the groups oppose the team’s proposed waterfront ballpark at Howard Terminal.
“I’ve said this before, but we welcome dialog and engagement from all stakeholders and community groups and anyone who has opinions on our efforts to privately finance a new ballpark on the water,” team president Dave Kaval told The Chronicle on Friday. “That’s positive, that will lead to a better outcome for everybody.”
The groups said in the release that owner John Fisher’s “failure to provide a concrete development plan for the Oakland Coliseum and the sale of the Coliseum property to the billionaire Fisher family without accurate knowledge of its true market value, and at a discounted price, could deprive the City of Oakland of hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, while unjustly enriching a billionaire family at our expense.”