San Diego developer ousted in Oakland

Rancho Santa Fe developer Floyd Kephart is no longer in the running to build a new stadium for the Oakland Raiders in their home town.

Chargers fans were hoping that Kephart would come up with a stadium-construction plan that would keep the team in Oakland and thus break up the supposed joint Chargers/Raiders plan to build in Carson so both teams could occupy the Los Angeles market.

But the Oakland City Council and Alameda County Board of Supervisors have agreed not to renew Kephart's exclusive deal to build a new stadium for the Raiders. Neil deMause of the website FieldofSchemes.com says that Kephart "didn't have any better idea how to pay for one than anyone else did. Not that Oakland has any better ideas either, but at least now they aren't stuck with Kephart's non-ideas, like they have been for the last year."

The underlying problem "is, as in most stadium deals, that Raiders owner Mark Davis wants a new building but doesn't want to pay for it, and there's no way for a city to agree to that without taking a several hundred million dollar loss," says deMause.