The number of professional football teams in the Bay Area will soon be just one. The National Football league announced Monday that the Oakland Raiders will be allowed to take Las Vegas up on its offer to house the team in a new, $1.9 billion stadium.
The team has been trying to find someone to build it a new stadium for years.
NFL owners voted 31 to 1 in favor of the move to Vegas and against a proposal to keep the team in Oakland. The team has complained for decades that its current home is insufficient.
The City of Oakland, former NFL players Ronnie Lott and Rodney Peete and Fortress Investment Group did submit a $1.3 billion proposal for a new stadium in the Bay Area.
Roger Goodell, commissioner for the NFL, said the proposal was not viable.
"I think even our friends in Oakland agree that it needed to be resolved for the long-term issue of the team and, frankly, the community and this has been an issue for well over a decade," he said.
It's been an issue for Mark Davis, and for his father Al, now deceased, for longer than that.
The Oakland Alameda County Coliseum was built for the Raiders in 1966.
But the team bolted for Los Angeles just 16 years later.
Los Angeles renovated its coliseum in 1993, but the Raiders would leave just three years after to return to a renovated coliseum in Oakland.
The Raiders tried to leave again for Carson, California last year, but NFL owners voted against that plan, and instead chose to allow San Diego and St. Louis to move to a different southern California location, Inglewood.
Goodell said the NFL tries to avoid franchise locations and that it made a good-faith effort to keep the team in the Bay Area.
"The owners put an additional $100 million unprecedented, $300 million total to try to find that solution in Oakland," he said.
The Las Vegas stadium proposal had stalled until Bank of America agreed to loan the project $650 million.
The State of Nevada is contributing about $750 million.
The Raiders will likely stay in Oakland for the next two seasons and will begin playing in southern Nevada in 2019.
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