National Football League

Monday is big day for Oakland's efforts to keep Raiders

Published Jul. 17, 2015 9:34 a.m. ET

foxsports

By James Arcellana

Monday is the deadline for the City of Oakland and Alameda County to respond in writing to Floyd Kephart’s Coliseum City plan. Kephart will then have 15 days to draft his own response and will have until August 21 to provide a final plan for Coliseum City. Much like Kephart’s original plan, the responses are supposed to be confidential so despite the Monday deadline, there will be no announcement made as to what the response from the city and county says. But, much like with Kephart’s proposal, we all know that something will get leaked not too long after the letter is provided.

We don’t know much about how the city and county will respond, but we do know that throughout the process, the county has been far less interested in getting a stadium built than the City of Oakland has and that’s not changing. Richard Valle, an Alameda County supervisor, said this last week when asked about the plan: “I’m sort of looking and searching for the community benefit side of it; I haven’t seen it.”

One potential option for Oakland to move things along more quickly would be to buy Alameda County’s share of the land that the Coliseum currently sits on in order to remove it from the process. Having one less party involved simplifies things, and since the theme coming from the Alameda County supervisors has been much less supportive than from the Oakland city officials, it would likely remove a potential road block as well.

The city and county officials have been meeting all week with some late nights involved in order to get the written response prepared for the Monday deadline. Whatever their response is, it’s not the end of the story. The purpose behind the plan and response system is for Kephart to get feedback that he can then use to reconfigure his plan in an effort to create something the city and county as well as the Raiders will accept. The problem is, if by August 21 Kephart is not able to produce something that everyone can agree on, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of time left to turn to a plan B.

More from cover32: