AC Picture Gets Muddled

With the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee set to vote today on whatever iteration of the Host City Agreement survives the final number crunching, the message from BMW Oracle Racing was disturbing to Cup fans who want to see the Cup come to the Bay. The team’s COO Stephen Barclay, was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle this weekend as saying, "If you want a headline, it’s ‘San Francisco snatched defeat from the jaws of victory’. San Francisco had it in their hands, and they have progressively let it go."

With the clock ticking against BMW Oracle Racing’s self-imposed deadline of December 31 for a venue announcement, the City’s revised plan to relocate much of the America’s Cup infrastructure away from the South Beach area to the northern waterfront has been met with resistance from the team, with Barclay claiming that Larry Ellison’s team had never agreed to the new plan, that its advent had come as a complete surprise, and that, even if approved by the Board, it will not be accepted by the team. In the Chronicle’s story, reporter John Coté writes that emails and interviews disputed Barclay’s claim that the new option came as a surprise, and that Barclay had in fact met with Mayor Newsom and his team before the northern option was presented to the Budget and Finance Committee last Monday.

It’s tough to tell where the truth begins and the gamesmanship ends in this situation, but one thing is for certain, since budget analyst Harvey Rose identified that there didn’t appear to be any competing venue, the City has been working hard to hash out a more favorable agreement. It would appear that BMW Oracle Racing is responding in kind by creating a Friday deadline for the City to come up with an HCA agreeable to the team. With the Budget and Finance Committee voting on the HCA today, the tenor of the comments and the their timing, leave little room for backpedaling. Conspicuous too is the presence of Barclay — someone who has hitherto been completely absent from the public realm of this effort — as the messenger. What are your thoughts on the way this has progressed?