If Nevada voters get a say, it’s not looking good for Oakland A’s owner John Fisher.
An Emerson College poll conducted last week revealed that 52% of Las Vegas voters oppose public money going towards the A’s ballpark, while only 32% support and 17% remain undecided.
But the issue might not make it to the voters, depending on a ruling by the Nevada Supreme Court.
Judges in Carson City, Nevada, heard oral arguments on Tuesday, when lobbyists for the Oakland A’s sided against Schools Over Stadiums, a political action group formed by school teachers who have been trying to start a petition to get a referendum on the ballot in November.
The issue: the petition didn’t include the entirety of Senate Bill 1, the bill signed last year that will give the A’s $380 million in tax credits and bonds to build their new ballpark.
The teachers are willing to amend the petition, but are awaiting a ruling from the court.
“Hopefully we’ll hear a decision in a week,” said Schools Over Stadiums spokesperson Alex Marks.
Lobbyists for the A’s first sued the teachers last November. A district judge ruled in favor of the A’s, but the teachers appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court. They had to wait almost six months for a court date. Waiting much longer could be a costly blow in their attempt to collect more than 100,000 signatures by June 26.
If the judges rule in favor of the teachers, they can begin collecting signatures immediately.
However, the judges could throw out the petition altogether. And if they take too long to make a ruling, it’d make it difficult for the teachers to collect the signatures in time.
“It shouldn’t be this hard” to get a petition on the ballot, Marks said. “The hard part should be gathering the signatures. But this is the mechanism we’re seeing now, ‘We’ll just sue you until the deadline is done.’”
If the referendum doesn’t get on the ballot in November, it’s possible it could get there in 2026, Marks said.
Just last week, more than 58% of voters in Jackson County, Missouri, voted down a sales tax measure that would’ve helped fund a new ballpark for the Kansas City Royals and provide upgrades to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium.
“Billionaires know if this stuff actually gets vetted, if voters hear it, if the courts get it, it’s going down,” Marks said.
The teachers are also pursuing another avenue to stop the public funding from getting to the A’s with a lawsuit arguing that Senate Bill 1 is unconstitutional because it was passed by Nevada lawmakers without a supermajority.
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The lawsuit was filed against the lawmakers, not the A’s, but the team’s lawyers are now trying to get involved, Marks said.
“They don’t need to be in this lawsuit,” he said. “Their game plan is the same thing as it is with the referendum: spend our money in court.”
Meanwhile, A’s fan group Last Dive Bar has helped Schools Over Stadiums raise thousands of dollars to help fund the operation.
The fan group, which also helped organize last year’s reverse boycott, February’s Fans Fest in Jack London Square and the Opening Day boycott in the Coliseum parking lot, sold enough Last Dive Bar bracelets to donate $10,000 to Schools Over Stadiums this week.
The teachers had already raised $45,000 at the Opening Day boycott, while all that money was matched by an anonymous Bay Area donor.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has been paying attention to the teacher’s efforts. He said in October that if anything were to happen with regards to the referendum, that’d be a “significant development” in the A’s move to Las Vegas.
The A’s expect to begin building their new ballpark next April. Last week, they agreed to move the team to Sacramento, where they’ll play in a minor league ballpark until their new stadium is ready.
