A's ball-park `village' would bring sprawl, traffic to Fremont

The Oakland Athletics' plan to move to Fremont would be damaging to the city and to the adjacent Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The ball club's presentations to the Fremont City Council, though without a full development proposal, have made it clear that the project would be another massive and heavily auto-oriented sprawl development on the edge of the city. Given the project's size, the potential impacts could be enormous.

Traffic

One major problem would be transportation. The public transit proposed would be woefully inadequate. The Warm Springs BART station, even if it is built in time for the 32,000-seat stadium, would be a mile and a half away. A fleet of buses would be needed to shuttle riders between the station and the ballpark. A new station might be built near the site, on the existing Amtrak/ACE line, but the line doesn't have enough trains to service the game-day demand. With such inadequate transit, auto usage would undoubtedly be very high.

The Athletics also want to develop over 3,000 homes - generating about 30,000 car trips on a typical weekday. With no existing transit corridors, the majority of these trips would be on I-880.

The Athletics call their project a `village', but it would also include one half million square feet of retail - clearly intended as a regional draw. There are no plans for a grocery store, however; every resident of this `village' would need to get in the car and cross the freeway to get a few groceries.

One of the project's main political appeals is that the retail would bring sales-tax revenues to the city. A big side effect, however, would be diverting business from other parts of Fremont. Not only would this shift not increase tax revenues, but it would threaten the survival of other existing retail areas. This trend of ditching old retail centers in favor of the latest trendy shopping area wastes resources on the largest scale.

The project has been touted as another Santana Row - another regional shopping area in the South Bay with very little transit usage. The idea of a self-sustaining `village' is laughable when it includes one half million square feet of retail and a 32,000-seat facility.

The developers use catch phrases such as `smart growth' and `sustainable', and have even had the nerve to call the development `infill'. One of their slides even showed a wind turbine. Make no mistake, though, this would be a colossal auto-oriented suburban development bringing us more smog, traffic jams, and greenhouse gases.

The refuge

The Athletics' development shares a boundary with the Warm Springs site of the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The Warm Springs site is the only spot next to San Francisco Bay with "vernal pools", seasonal wetlands that provide aquatic habitat to tiger salamanders, vernal-pool shrimp, and waterfowl in the rainy season, but then dry out in April to erupt in concentric rings of blooms that include some of the rarest flora in the Bay Area.

The ballpark village would eliminate all buffer zones for the refuge, reducing it to a non-viable postage-stamp-sized habitat for the waterfowl, shorebirds, salamanders, and wildflowers that depend on the Warm Springs wetlands.

Trespass and litter would inevitably spill over from the ballpark to the refuge. Increased plastic litter, vehicular traffic, and garbage-following predators would all pose serious threats to Warm Springs.

WhatYouCanDo

So far there has been little public opposition to the idea of such a massive project. Fremont residents and others need to speak out against such a project and help notify others of its potential impacts.

To work with the Sierra Club Southern Alameda Group on these concerns, contact Chapter conservation organizer or call (510) 848-0800, ext. 306.

To learn more about vernal pools (though focused on the Central Valley), go to www.vernalpools.org and see the January 2000 issue of Fremontia, a publication of the California Native Plant Society

To find out more about Warm Springs, call the refuge at (510) 792-0222.

Vin Bacon and Janet Gawthrop