One fact completely not presented by the media in the City of Oakland’s very questionable and losing legal fight against California Capital Investment Group and its managing director Phillip Tagami in the matter of the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal vs City of Oakland court battles is the overall cost to Oakland taxpayers. Zennie62Media estimates that the price tag for outside counsel, alone, is up to $7 Million since 2016.
That estimate is based on available copies of the Oakland City Attorney’s Annual Reports from 2016 to 2022 (here’s 2018-2019), and does not include estimated costs for City Attorney Barbara Parker’s own lawyers to work on the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal case. Given conversations this author has had about the OBOT case since 2015, it’s fair to report that the total estimate is north of $15 million.
That estimate is roughly $2 million more than the $13.4 million City of Oakland spent on outside law firms for the tragic Ghost Ship Warehouse Fire’s civil lawsuit. The difference is that the Ghost Ship Warehouse Fire was an event caused by an accident – flammable materials in a structure that should not have been inhabited in the first place. The Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal case is and has been avoidable.
Oakland First Must Admit Its Role In Bringing Up The Idea Of Coal For The Bulk Terminal
The first problem is that Oakland’s entire approach against CCIG / Phil Tagami is based on a complete lie: that Oakland was not aware that coal would be a commodity handled in a through-put , just-in-time way by the bulk terminal. The City of Oakland, and its elected officials, spent a lot of time trying to fashion the idea that it wasn’t aware of the planned use of coal until 2015, when the City itself commissioned the study that identified coal as a target commodity in 2011.
But, as reported here at ZennieReport.com and at Oakland News Now Blog (both Zennie62Media online websites), City Of Oakland / Oakland Redevelopment Agency / Oakland Redevelopment Agency Successor Agency Project Manager Pat Cashman hired The Tioga Group to primarily assess the market for the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal, but also evaluate CCIG as the organization that was to develop the new facility.
The Tioga Group report put down CCIG’s perceived ability to make a success of the project. So, one has to ask why would Pat Cashman add in the The Tioga Group’s scope of services a request to evaluate CCIG unless the City had some clandestine plan to push Phil out of a project idea he came up with, the bulk terminal?
Still, Phil read The Tioga Report and adjusted his corporate approach by firing Kinder Morgan and partnering with Insight Terminal Solutions and it’s CEO John Siegel (ITS was a Zennie62Media client from 2019 to 2021, and for the purpose of producing content to present to the public long-hidden project court documents the City of Oakland did not want anyone to see.)
Phil Tagami Didn’t Come Up With Coal As A Focus Of The Bulk Terminal, Oakland Did
Phil Tagami didn’t come up with the idea of focusing on coal – indeed, there was no specific commodity focus at the time (2009 to 2011). The need for a bulk terminal was long one of the priorities of the Port of Oakland’s plans for future development and going back to 1986. Then, the Bay Seaport Plan specifically called for the Port of Oakland to build the bulk terminal.
After that, attendees at the giant event produced by Oakland Sharing The Vision in 1991 (including this author), selected the bulk terminal as the first and highest economic development objective within the entire range of project needs for the city. And that happened before the closure of the West Oakland Army Base.
One of the main directives of the Federal Government and the U.S. Military was the replacement of the West Oakland Army Base jobs with employment opportunities that offered equal or better pay and the same type of “low-skill, well-paying” positions that were at the Army Base. Of all of the proposals for the redevelopment of the giant West Oakland Army Base (which reportedly moved 8.5 million tons of cargo during World War II, and 7.2 million tons of cargo during the Korean War), only CCIG’s directly addressed the jobs objective by identifying the not-officially-planned bulk terminal as a development objective.
The City of Oakland’s RFP committee picked CCIG / Phil and not just because of Tagami’s idea, but the team and financial backing he assembled, and his history in rebuilding the Oakland Rotunda and The Fox Theater to realize their past glory, all over again. The Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal would be his crowning achievement in an overall effort to do what so many have played a role in trying to do: make Oakland better. Yet, Oakland has tried to take the project away from him.
The Coal Ban was completely unnecessary. If the City of Oakland wanted to keep that commodity from being handled by OBOT, it could have subsidized the project to make up at least some of the revenue-loss difference. But even then, Phil Tagami insisted that OBOT be designed with the objective of achieving zero-emmissions, including the use of covered rail cars. The point is, the City of Oakland could have acted like a good government project partner and helped shape the development of the bulk terminal, rather than sway with the political winds. And that points to Tom Steyer.
Tom Steyer’s Money Is Behind Much Of The Opposition To OBOT
Look behind the names of groups like “No Coal In Oakland” and you find money that was given either by once billionaire coal investor Tom Steyer, his wife Kathryn Ann Taylor, their Oakland, California-based community development bank Beneficial State Bank, or nonprofit funders they fund like The Sunflower Foundation or Nextgen, a political organization founded by Tom Steyer, himself.
Tom Steyer’s known as the “progressive answer to the Koch brothers”, and he gained that tag by financing, or causing the fiscal support of, a number of Oakland-based Democratic political candidates, from Stephanie Domiquez Walton (who challenged Dan Kalb for his Oakland City Council District One Seat in 2020) to now former Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.
Mr. Steyer’s spending has been behind the seemingly sudden opposition to the CCIG bulk terminal. How else to explain why the City of Oakland could present a 2014 development agreement that reported coal as one of the commodities to be hauled, and yet the City Council approved it?
And one of those 2014 Oakland City Council Members was then-Oakland District Four Councilmember Libby Schaaf (she later won the 2014 Oakland Mayoral Election but would not officially take office until 2015). The same Libby Schaaf who recently told the court that she never thought that shipping coal was required to make the project “financially viable” – even though “coal” was clearly written on the 2014 development agreement.
None of this is free. The ultimate payer of this cost is the Oakland taxpayer. That said, the City Attorney will explain that some of that expense was paid for by monies set aside for the project. Still, the ultimate source of those dollars is either government grants or the Oakland general fund itself. And even if it’s based on collected tax increment financing monies left over from the West Oakland Redevelopment Project Area’s existence to 2011, it’s still Oakland taxpayer money.
Oakland could have taken a more supportive approach in its dealings with CCIG / Phil Tagami, and the City has mounted constant losses against him in court, so one has to wonder if it would have taken such actions if Tom Steyer’s money wasn’t part of the equation?