Oakland A’s Waterfront Stadium Threatened by Lawsuits, Team Says

(Bloomberg) -- A $12 billion plan by the Oakland Athletics to build a stadium, luxury condominiums, office and retail space on the city's waterfront is threatened by lawsuits months before the team expects to win final approvals to move forward.

Groups representing truckers, ocean carriers, terminal operators, longshore workers and other port-related businesses, many of them union-organized, argue in one of the suits that the city shouldn't have approved the environmental impact report for the Oakland Waterfront Ballpark District Project. 

They are asking a California state court in to rescind the city's approval of the project last month.

Read More: Oakland to Athletics: Agree to Stay If You Want a New Ballpark

The report didn't “adequately disclose, analyze, or mitigate all of the significant adverse impacts this massive and disruptive redevelopment on the working waterfront will cause,” Mike Jacob, a spokesman for East Oakland Stadium Alliance, said in an emailed statement.

A's President Dave Kaval said in an interview that the suit and two others like it “add a lot of risk and uncertainty around our project,” and that the litigation “could mean that the A's end up in another state -- in Nevada.”

The A's want a new ballpark to replace the aging RingCentral Coliseum, a 1960s-era stadium. Multiple attempts to get a project off the ground have stalled, and last year Major League Baseball gave the team the green light to look at relocating out of the city it has called home for 54 years.

Oakland officials have said the A's should commit to staying in the city for at least four decades in exchange for public financing to help build infrastructure for the new stadium.

The suit names the Oakland Athletics Investment Group, LLC as a defendant, saying it applied to the city for approval of the project.

The development “will cause major disruptions and impacts to both the surrounding community and the operations of the port,” including by eliminating the port's Howard Terminal, according to Monday's complaint.

Kaval said the A's have taken a “thoughtful approach” for five years in collaboration with the Oakland Planning Commission. The companies and organizations suing the A's are entrenched polluters afraid of the scrutiny and environmental regulation the team's project will impose, he said.

The A's are hoping for two final pieces to fall into place by this summer, Kaval said: an economic development agreement with Oakland and regulatory approval from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. But the new litigation “throws the timing and eventual success of the project into doubt,” he said.

The city of Oakland didn't respond outside regular business hours to an email message seeking comment.

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