OAKLAND — The Oakland A’s, who for five decades built an iconic legacy of baseball and community at the vast concrete Coliseum it called home, have agreed to buy land in Las Vegas and build a new stadium there, team officials confirmed Wednesday.
The team, in a statement, said it had “signed a binding agreement” that could all but end its long and storied tenure in Oakland, which now stands to lose its last major professional sports franchise after departures in recent years by the Raiders and Warriors.
Fans of the A’s — who are mired in one of the worst starts in team history — had been anxious to hear if the team and Oakland city officials were making progress to reach a deal for a massive ballpark and housing development at the city’s waterfront.
But those hopes appeared to be dashed after the Nevada Independent first reported on Wednesday that the team was in advanced talks to construct a $1 billion stadium in Las Vegas, where the A’s had long threatened to move if a deal weren’t reached in Oakland.
The clock had long been ticking for the the city and team to finalize a deal, but news of the binding purchase agreement on a 49-acre site near the Las Vegas Strip appears to show that time has finally run out.
And shortly after the news broke, Mayor Sheng Thao confirmed that negotiations for a deal at Howard Terminal were dead.
In a statement, the mayor said she was “deeply disappointed that the A’s have chosen not to negotiate with the City of Oakland as a true partner, in a way that respects the long relationship between the fans, the City and the team.
“The City has gone above and beyond in our attempts to arrive at mutually beneficial terms to keep the A’s in Oakland,” Thao said in a statement. “In the last three months, we’ve made significant strides to close the deal.”
“Yet, it is clear to me that the A’s have no intention of staying in Oakland and have simply been using this process to try to extract a better…
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