In San Diego, Mayor Kevin Faulconer has declared his strong support for keeping the Chargers in place and urged the NFL to not let the team leave for a proposed stadium in Carson that owner Dean Spanos hopes to jointly build and operate with Raiders owner Mark Davis. Even as Faulconer faces withering criticism from team stadium point man Mark Fabiani, the first-term Republican says he’s ready to ask voters if they support contributing hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds toward a billion-dollar-plus stadium.

In St. Louis, both Mayor Francis Slay and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon have offered strong support for a new stadium, mostly paid for with taxpayer dollars, to either keep the Rams or to attract a new NFL team in case team owner Stan Kroenke succeeds with his bid to relocate the Rams to Inglewood.

But in Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf has not only strongly opposed the use of public funds for a stadium, she’s called the team stadium saga a “distraction.” Schaaf also hasn’t borrowed from the playbook of previous mayors who tried to keep their pro sports teams by using what might be called the guilt-trip approach — telling NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and other team owners of what an assault on decency it would be to allow the Raiders to leave, given their ardent and devoted fan base. Unlike Missouri and San Diego officials, who have met repeatedly with Goodell and a handful of influential team owners, Oakland’s elected leaders have done almost no direct lobbying of key NFL players.

Touting team’s ‘die-hard regional fan base’

Next week, however, that’s going to change. This is from the Bay Area News Group’s report in the Contra-Costa Times:

OAKLAND — City officials working to keep the Raiders in Oakland will travel to New York next week to give a presentation to the NFL about their funding plan for a new stadium.

 

Officials from cities in St. Louis and San Diego, the other two cities with professional football franchises threatening to leave for Southern California, will also be making their pitch to the NFL.

 

Mayor Libby Schaaf confirmed she will attend Wednesday’s meeting with the NFL’s Los Angeles stadium and finance committee. …

 

“We’ll show how everything from Oakland’s growing economic momentum and urban vitality to the team’s die-hard regional fan base make it clear that there is no better time for a major league team to be located in, or associated with Oakland,” Schaaf said in a statement.

A serious effort or a PR ploy?

But given that Schaaf hasn’t budged on her stand against public financing and continues to call Oakland’s crime rate and weak economy far bigger issues, her trip to New York is seen by many Raiders fans as a public-relations gambit, not a serious bid to urge the NFL to remain a presence in Oakland.

This view was underscored by ESPN’s John Clayton, one of the best-connected NFL reporters, who wrote Tuesday that the league didn’t take Oakland seriously:

As for Oakland, there is no there, there. The area doesn’t have a stadium offer on the table, and time is running out.

 

“We’ve said one thing consistently to any of the markets that have been engaged in trying to put forth a proposal, and it really rests on a couple of pillars,” said Eric Grubman, who is coordinating the league’s Los Angeles project. “One of them is that a proposal has to be specific. The second is that it has to be attractive to a team. The third is it has to be actionable. And so what actionable means is it can’t just be an idea to the extent that there is enabling legislation or enabling financing activities or there are litigation threats or anything of that nature — anything that needs to be assembled in a time frame where a club can act on it.

 

“Thus far, those sorts of tests have not been made in Oakland, so as of yet, there is no proposal for the Raiders to consider.”

But when it comes to Oakland — home of the third team that’s been subject to years of intense speculation about a possible move — Mayor Libby Schaaf has handed negotiations with the Raiders and the NFL over a new stadium to an assistant city administrator, a low-level official more accustomed to helping neighborhoods get better trash collection or to settling disputes over zoning infractions.

Given that the Raiders have a loyal fan base, an international following and a rich history, how is it that local elected officials could be so blase about losing the team?

The most obvious reason is the city’s weak finances and how they relate to the most pressing local issue. Oakland has had persistent budget gaps and has not benefited from the tech boom remotely as much as San Francisco, Santa Clara or many smaller communities in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

Fighting crime the priority, not keeping Raiders

Meanwhile, crime has grown steadily in recent years, to the point where Forbes declared Oakland to be America’s third-most dangerous city. Public safety is Mayor Schaaf’s priority, as this April story about her proposed budget in the San Francisco Business Times story makes clear:

The $2.4 billion two-year budget would increase the Oakland Police Department from 722 to 762 officers in the next year and a half, with a long-term goal of 800 officers by 2018.

 

“Oakland will not grow unless people are confident it is getting safer,” Schaaf wrote in a letter earlier this month to the City Council.

That letter identified three priorities beyond public safety, but never mentioned the Raiders or the NFL and their desire for an upgrade from the battered Oakland-Alameda County Stadium.

From the national media perspective, this indifference is being interpreted as a sign the team’s departure for L.A. is inevitable. The NFL executive overseeing Los Angeles relocation issues this week said no “viable” plan had ever emerged from either the city or the team, and a league committee declined to even talk with a Bay Area real estate developer who wants to build a stadium as a centerpiece to a larger, $4.2 billion mixed-use development, believing the plan to be far-fetched.

“As for Oakland, there is no there, there. The area doesn’t have a stadium offer on the table, and time is running out,” ESPN’s John Clayton wrote on Tuesday.

But that presumes the Raiders’ and Chargers’ proposal to jointly build and then share a $1.75 billion stadium project in Carson — where they already have land and regulatory approvals —  is likely to get the league’s go-ahead.

St. Louis and San Antonio may be team’s future

San Diego officials don’t believe that’s close to inevitable. It’s why their stadium proposal announced this week is actually tougher in its financing terms than a proposal that a task force recommended this spring, as CalWatchdog reported Tuesday. The thinking appears to be that the NFL is far more likely to approve the Rams’ move back to Los Angeles, where its stadium plan is considerably closer to fruition than the Raiders/Chargers proposal. There is believed to be no NFL interest in having three teams in Los Angeles.

Oakland’s mayor and City Council may have a similar take. But unlike San Diego officials, they’re not offering a financing plan, one perceived as “tough” or otherwise, to the Raiders. They appear resigned to having the Raiders eventually leave for a city with a much more lucrative, modern NFL stadium with luxury boxes and more seats.

If the Rams leave town, St. Louis is an obvious option for Raiders owner Marc Davis. This week, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon expressed confidence that the St. Louis riverfront stadium project that’s now being planned would have an NFL team as a tenant even if the Rams departed for Inglewood.

And the most populous U.S. city to not have an NFL franchise — San Antonio, America’s seventh-largest city, with 1.5 million residents — is also likely to be in the mix. City officials are eager to get a team for football-crazy South Texas. And the Raiders have already had talks with city officials, dating back years.

San Antonio believed it had proven itself as an NFL-ready city in 2005 when the New Orleans Saints got a warm reception after temporarily relocating that season because Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Superdome. But so far it has been unable to attract a team.