City leaders expressed enthusiasm about the idea of bringing a Costco to the old Army base at the western edge of Oakland, taking an initial step at a City Council committee meeting Tuesday toward kicking off a years-long development process.
But it’s far from certain that Costco will build one of its popular warehouses in Oakland, officials stressed at the meeting.
“It is not a binding agreement,” said Councilmember Carroll Fife, who brought the proposal. “This opens doors to discussions.”
Fife’s legislation — approved by the committee Tuesday and heading to the full council next week — would authorize the city administrator to hash out the terms for an exclusive negotiating agreement with Costco and San Francisco–based developer Deca Companies.
If the proposal passes, the city will assess whether it’s a good idea to give Costco and Deca exclusive rights to negotiate a deal to build on the Oakland Army Base, said Brendan Moriarty, the city’s real estate director. If the administration reaches that conclusion, the City Council would still need to approve the exclusive negotiating agreement early next year.
Even this early in the process, elected officials and members of the public expressed strong interest in bringing the bulk goods store to the long-vacant army base parcel — along with sharp concerns about its environmental impacts.
“I personally believe this is in the best interest of my district and the city of Oakland,” said Fife, who represents West Oakland, home to the decommissioned Army base.
She spoke about meeting with McClymonds High School upperclassmen recently and discovering how “depressed” they are about graduation.
“But they came alive when I talked about opportunities for employment,” Fife said. “This would make a difference for kids who are out here robbing and bipping. There are not enough opportunities for them in Oakland.”
A Costco would not only bring good jobs to the city — Costco pays an average of $26 an hour, far higher than most retailers — but also much-needed tax revenue, she said. She noted that the store would also offer new grocery options for a neighborhood that’s considered a food desert by the federal government.
Some West Oakland residents countered that the business would bring pollution to an already impacted area, thanks to a frequent flow of trucks bringing goods into and out of the site and heavy traffic from customers.
Competing plans for Army base land
Others were more concerned that offering the site to Costo would undercut a longtime community campaign to use the site for metal recycling.
For decades, the city had agreements with two major recyclers, California Waste Solutions and CASS, to relocate their plants out of West Oakland residential neighborhoods and onto the North Gateway Parcel of the Army base, the section where a Costco could go. Residents have fiercely advocated for these moves, as a way to ease West Oakland’s disproportionately high rates of air pollution and respiratory disease.
Earlier this year, Oakland squashed its deal with California Waste Solutions — the city’s curbside recycler and a key player in the FBI’s corruption case involving former Mayor Sheng Thao — saying the company had repeatedly blown deadlines. The negotiation process with CASS was further behind and is now off the table, according to Fife’s report.
Leaving CASS’s recycling plant at its Peralta Street site “would be a situation of environmental injustice,” said Ray Kidd, a West Oakland community advocate. “If Costco prevents them from moving there, we’ll be living with that pollution forever.”
Jean Walsh, a spokesperson for the city, told us that talks with CASS “did not culminate in a deal.” Neither she nor CASS has yet offered more information in response to queries.
A representative from Deca spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, telling councilmembers that the company specializes in working with communities on solutions to thorny development projects.
“This is exactly what we do,” said Travis Duncan, asking for a chance to “see if we can craft a project that has broad-based community support.”
Some speakers cheered on the proposal. Cristina Tostado, an Oakland library commissioner and former City Council candidate, said her long career at Costco has brought her security and success. Now a supervisor at the company’s Livermore warehouse, she started working there part-time while still a college student. She rattled off the benefits the company provides its employees, from a 401(k) plan and bonuses to financial literacy education, which Tostado credited with enabling her to buy a house.
“This is economic stability,” Tostado said. “Every family in Oakland deserves the same chance.”
Onto the full council
Fife will host a community meeting at City Hall on Dec. 18, two days after the full council votes on her proposal. She pushed back on any suggestion that West Oakland residents were being left out of this discussion.
“There is no elected official in the city of Oakland that has done the kind of work and community outreach I have done, so to even entertain that I might not have any community engagement, I want to put that to bed,” she said. “I’m going to continue being Carroll ‘Fire.’”
In years past, Fife pushed hard to bring homeless housing to the long-the vacant Army base parcel. She was rebuffed by city leaders at the time, who said residential uses were prohibited when the federal government gave Oakland the land after it was decommissioned in 1999. Oakland could seek a waiver from the feds, but it would require extensive environmental mitigation, city officials said.
At Tuesday’s meeting, City Administrator Jestin Johnson made a rare, forceful comment from the dais in support of the Costco proposal.
“We consistently talk about the need to be aggressive with economic development,” he said. “We look at competitive communities around us that we aspire to — quite frankly, this is what they do.”
The Costco locations closest to Oakland are in San Leandro and Richmond.
Committee members Fife, Zac Unger, Rowena Brown, and Janani Ramachandran voted unanimously to forward the proposal to the full council Dec. 16.
“*” indicates required fields