Oakland (Special to ZennieReport.com) – As the Oakland A’s Las Vegas Ballpark moves toward the pivotal December 5th Las Vegas Stadium Authority Meeting (website here and agenda here) and its eventual 2025 groundbreaking, Zennie62Media finds more evidence of fake news posts by some media outlets.
The overall gist of these truth-bending fake news takes is that the cost of the ballpark went up but not the revenue needed to pay the price. But a read of the documents shows that’s just not true.
Media Outlets Like Field Of Schemes Don’t Read The Pro-Forma Documents
The December 5th Las Vegas Stadium Authority Meeting is just a day and a half away from now, and yet we have news from various outlets that has reports like this one from “Field of Schemes”:
(John) Fisher is now set to be on the hook for $1.37B in construction costs. He’ll get about $220m of that back via property tax and ticket tax breaks, but it’s still a hefty price to pay for what would be MLB’s stadium in the league’s smallest media market.
Or this one from OutKick:
“If you build it, they will come…”
But what happens when it doesn’t even get built in the first place?
That’s what some baseball fans are wondering, as the Las Vegas ballpark that is supposed to host the Oakland Athletics at the start of the 2028 season has already skyrocketed in price by a quarter of a billion dollars. The estimated total cost right now stands at $1.75 billion.
… And they haven’t even started construction yet.
And the author, a Mike Gunzelman, goes on for about 4,000 words or so of worthless drivel repeating Las Vegas Review Journal sentences about the reason for cost increases without mentioning a single word about the fact that revenue to pay the costs was identified and is in a balance sheet posted at the website of the Las Vegas Stadium Authority in a file called
Which states:
Project Cash Budget [1] Amount (millions)
Public Sources [2]
County Bond Proceeds and Pay-Go Tax Proceeds $ 145
Transferrable Tax Credits $ 180
County Credit $ 25
Private Sources
StadCo Credit Facility $ 300
Equity Commitment $ 1,100
Total Stadium Development Sources $ 1,750
Uses
Hard Costs $ 1,450
Financing Costs $ 52
Soft Costs & Other $ 248
Total Stadium Development Uses $ 1,750
In the budget above, “sources” are the identified revenues, and “uses” are the costs. So, Total Stadium Development Sources $ 1,750 are balanced by Total Stadium Development Uses $ 1,750, presenting a paid for A’s Ballpark. Note that in the erroneous media reports, like that from OutKick, only the “uses” are mentioned, but accompanied by words like “A’s May Have Nowhere To Go”, then “the massive price increase”.
Some Media Outlets Mask Reality: Oakland A’s Are Building A Ballpark Of The Future In Las Vegas
On December 5th, 2025, by the end of the Las Vegas Stadium Authority Meeting, it will become clear that the A’s are on a path similar to that of the Oakland Raiders in 2017 that will realize the completion of their new ballpark home on the Las Vegas Strip.
After the meeting, and in the years that follow, those media organizations that bent over backwards to tell lies will pale into insignificance. But there’s also another lesson that some just do not want to accept.
The Government of The City of Oakland lost the Oakland A’s. It wasn’t primary team owner John Fisher’s fault, but the City of Oakland constantly working on its own timetable, playing political games, and not working on the ballpark project from a “time on task” perspective.
That’s a vastly different Oakland from the one that brought the Raiders back from Los Angeles in 1995. That Oakland was in a hurry to get the NFL Team back. Indeed, then, it was a community effort involving Oaklanders from different fields and backgrounds, but all with one common concern: how to restore what they once had.
Today, that hunger in Oakland is gone. It can come back, but the circumstances are not right. Later, we will explore what the right conditions look like.
Stay tuned.