It’s time for the search giant and other online platforms to start paying for the journalism they appropriate. In California, it’s time for state lawmakers to insist on it.

Search online for news stories and Google will give you back summaries or AI-generated accounts compiled from our reporting. But the company is not paying us for it. Not a cut of the advertising it is selling nor the profits from the personal data it is gathering from you, all using our material as bait to lure you in.

The theft fattens Google’s bottom line while leading to the financial destruction of desperately needed news outlets. At a time of national disinformation campaigns, as politics trumps truth, reliable news sources are needed more than ever. But we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Over the past two decades, more than 3,200 print newspapers have closed in the United States. And more than 60% of newsroom jobs have been eliminated. California alone has lost over 100 newspapers in the last decade, cutting off a flow of information critical for the survival of local democracy.

Sadly, what we’ve witnessed over the past two years are state legislators and a governor who give lip service to saving journalism but are unwilling to stand up to Google’s $11 million lobbying effort.

The result has been crumbs thrown our way while Google continues pilfering. And, as we’ve seen during the current budget cycle in Sacramento, even tiny past funding promises quickly shrink.

The answer is not a public handout. That’s not what we’re seeking. The answer is to make online platforms pay us for our work product that they use.

Two bills in the Legislature last year sought to do that in different ways:

AB 886, authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, would have required online platforms such as Google and Meta to pay a fee when they sell advertising alongside news content. The money would have gone into a fund for California news outlets based on the number of journalists they employ.

SB 1327, authored by then-Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, would have taxed large tech firms on the user data they collect for advertising purposes and then used the revenues to support tax credits for news publications to hire journalists.

Both would have paid for themselves without burdening the state budget. And the Wicks bill seemed to be gaining traction. But then Gov. Newsom, apparently unwilling to take on Google in the interest of preserving journalism, sent word that he would not support the bills.

Instead, a handshake deal was struck that involved the state and Google contributing roughly matching, but much smaller, amounts to a fund established at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism to support newsrooms.

That was last year. Since then, the governor and state legislators have found themselves confronting a tight budget for the upcoming fiscal year and the journalism school has bowed out.

Newsom’s proposed budget now puts $10 million toward the deal for the 2025-26 fiscal year, one-third of the state share agreed to last year, and oversight would be placed in the hands of the state librarian, who reports to the governor. So much for independent oversight.

And, once the state cut its contribution, so too did Google, highlighting that the search giant won’t make meaningful commitments unless it’s compelled to.

So, in a year, we’ve gone from two thoughtful bills to a meager deal to one laden with conflict that fails to hold Google accountable. It’s time for state lawmakers to step back and start over. And it’s time for the governor to get on board.

For the sake of local journalism, for the sake of the free flow of news in a functioning democracy, California lawmakers must stop Google from ripping off and undermining news organizations.

Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations.

Over the past four years, the Santa Clara City Council has begun to seriously address the city’s budget deficit and extract itself from costly legal battles with the 49ers over Levi’s Stadium.

The question for voters on Nov. 5 is whether they want to continue moving forward or regress to the days, just four years ago, when Mayor Lisa Gillmor controlled the council.

We recommend moving forward. And for that we suggest voters back Harbir Bhatia in District 1 and reelect Kevin Park in District 4 and Suds Jain in District 5. We make no recommendation in the District 6 election, in which Anthony Becker is seeking another term.

Sadly, most, but not all, candidates divide into two camps: Those backed by Gillmor and the Santa Clara Police Officers’ Association, and those underwritten by the 49ers through independent expenditures the candidates cannot direct.

To regain control of the seven-member council, Gillmor and her allies would need to win three of the four races on the ballot. The 49ers, after spending nearly $10 million on the 2020 and 2022 elections combined, are spending millions again this year trying to block a Gillmor resurgence.

The team’s spending not only taints good candidates concerned about the vast sums of money, it also tilts the electoral playing field.

That said, we share the 49ers’ frustration with Gillmor for similar and other reasons. It was Gillmor who resisted a 2018 court order that Santa Clara comply with the California Voting Rights Act by switching from an at-large voting system to elections in six districts. The resulting foolhardy litigation cost city taxpayers more than $3.7 million in legal fees.

Meanwhile, during Gillmor’s first mayoral term, as police officer salaries soared, the city racked up a projected $33 million annual budget deficit. Since Gillmor lost majority control in 2020, the new council, working through the pandemic, has reduced that shortfall to about $8 million annually.

The new council has also approved curfew extensions for five weeknight concerts a year at Levi’s Stadium, bringing the city millions in revenue. And Santa Clara has wisely settled costly litigation with the 49ers over management of Levi’s Stadium and reimbursement for public safety costs.

Voters should continue to support this sort of fiscal stability and rational decision-making.

District 1 – Harbir Bhatia

Harbir Bhatia, the CEO of the Silicon Valley Central Chamber of Commerce, is making her second council bid. Four years ago, she lost to incumbent Kathy Watanabe, Gillmor’s only current ally on the council.

This year, with the seat open because Watanabe is termed out, Bhatia remains the best candidate. In 2020, we called her “one of the most impressive council candidates in Santa Clara in years.” That’s still the case.

She has a master’s degree in engineering management from Santa Clara University and a long resume of community contributions, including former president of the Santa Clara Library Foundation board, former vice chair of the city’s Cultural Commission and former deputy board member of Joint Venture Silicon Valley.

Bhatia has a solid understanding of city issues, noting correctly that Santa Clara is suffering from financial and planning decisions from years past. With better planning, she says, the city can have a sustainable and better future.

The other candidates in the race are Satish Chandra, a business analytics manager and member of the city’s Charter Review Committee, and Albert Gonzalez, a member of the Santa Clara Unified School District board.

Chandra, the Gillmor-backed candidate, is unhappy about the lack of collaboration on the council but then levels misleading claims about his opponents not signing an ethics pledge.

Gonzalez seems to be running a minimal campaign, raising little money on his own and lacking a functional website as of this writing. He’s apparently banking on support from labor groups and independent spending by the 49ers to get him across the goal line.

District 4 – Kevin Park

This is a rematch of the 2020 election when Kevin Park unseated Teresa O’Neill, who had served for eight years and had voted in lockstep with Gillmor.

Park, a mechanical engineer who has worked for a long list of tech companies, ran four years ago with a promise to rein in the city’s spending on needless lawsuits. He has brought a fiscally pragmatic approach, recognizing that the city needs to do a better job of planning for and pre-funding the city’s facilities and infrastructure.

Although the city rules limit council members to two terms, that didn’t begin until 2016. So O’Neill, who served from 2012-20, can seek another term. But her arguments about restoring a better financial order make little sense when one considers that the current council has significantly reduced the annual operating deficit since she left office.

District 5 – Suds Jain

Suds Jain, an MIT-trained engineer, has demonstrated during his first term on the City Council a deep understanding of the financial details of the city.

Santa Clara, he notes, is extremely fortunate to have such a strong job base, with far more workers coming in each day than live in the city. The resulting tax benefit should be a great asset, but the city had been mismanaging its public funds, he explains. That’s what he and his council colleagues have begun to fix.

Jain has proven a thoughtful leader not just on the City Council but also on his regional board assignments, including the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. It helps explain his broad and politically diverse base of support throughout Silicon Valley.

His opponent, David Kertes, a sales and marketing executive, has no public office experience. A Gillmor-camp candidate, he, too, levels misleading claims about his opponents’ not signing an ethics pledge.

District 6 – No recommendation

The criminal trial of incumbent Councilmember Anthony Becker for leaking a confidential civil grand jury report is now scheduled to begin with jury selection on Oct. 28, the week before Election Day. But that hasn’t stopped him from seeking reelection.

The team’s candidate this time is George Guerra, a telecom manager and former Parks and Recreation Commission member. Like Gonzalez in District 1, Guerra seems to be running a minimal campaign and hoping the 49ers’ money will do the job.

The third candidate, Kelly Cox, is an assistant dean at Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering. It’s an administrative, not academic, post. Cox also served a term on the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission.

The Gillmor-backed candidate in the race, Cox struggled to answer a question about how property taxes work and made incorrect claims about the city’s proposed infrastructure bond on the Nov. 5 ballot.

For different reasons, none of the three candidates merits a recommendation.

In exchange, the city and county received the team’s training facility near the Oakland Airport, assessed at $24.6 million and worth, by one account, perhaps twice that amount.

The lopsided swap raises questions about the state and federal tax treatment of the forgiven debt and the negligence of public officials who signed off on a deal that was a gross and inexcusable expenditure of public funds — questions for which local, state and federal investigations are needed.

The complex details and history of the agreements between the Raiders and the Oakland Coliseum Authority were revealed in reporter Jason Cole’s investigation published by this news organization earlier this month.

They highlight yet another example of politicians using public money to kowtow to wealthy team owners rather than devoting the funds to needed government services. Sports teams do not pay their way. They may enhance civic pride, but public subsidies are not financially justified. Not for the Raiders then — and not for the Oakland A’s now.

In the Raiders’ case, the new details add insult to the financial injury residents already suffered from the team’s departure. It has been well known that when the team most recently left the Bay Area city and county, taxpayers were stuck with a $55 million debt to finish paying off bonds floated for stadium improvements to lure the team back from Los Angeles 25 years earlier.

Now it turns out that public officials also let the team escape repayment on two loans to those same taxpayers. The loans, originally totaling $64 million, were to cover costs associated with relocating the team to the Bay Area and for building the training facilities. By the time the team left town again after the 2019 season, the debt, with interest, had grown to the $189 million.

Under a key 2005 amendment to the deal, the team was allowed to walk away from both loans in exchange for turning over the training facility. A source close to the negotiations told Cole that the amendment was structured to free the Raiders from state and federal tax obligations for loan forgiveness. However, a tax law expert tells us that the Raiders should still be on the hook for those taxes.

Thus, the first key question is whether the Raiders should have paid taxes on the loan forgiveness. The second question is whether they did. Raiders officials refused to speak to Cole. Federal and state tax and law enforcement authorities, including California Attorney General Rob Bonta, should investigate.

Equally concerning is the refusal to talk or claims of ignorance by elected officials who sat on the Coliseum Authority Board — including Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, former Supervisor Scott Haggerty, former Oakland City Councilman Ignacio de la Fuente and businessman Ed DeSilva — and the stonewalling by key officials familiar with the deal, including City Attorney Barbara Parker and former attorney and executive director Deena McLain.

The Alameda County Civil Grand Jury should call them in and require their sworn testimony — and then report to Bay Area residents on how this shady deal happened. And District Attorney Nancy O’Malley should launch a probe to determine whether laws designed to prevent misuse of public funds were broken.

The public is owed an explanation. And anyone who abused their authority should be held accountable.

A good number of $1,400 stimulus checks arrived by direct deposit in the accounts of citizens all over the nation the past couple of days. While the topic of “Was this too much and is enough actually going to help people instead of your typical pork products” is open for debate, one thing is not debatable — the amount of funds suddenly in the hands of people across most wage brackets in our country is staggering.

The IRS said Wednesday it has already distributed 90 million stimulus checks. Assuming each were for $1,400 (and the average figure is probably just a bit less), that’s $126 billion sitting in bank accounts that wasn’t there three days earlier. And more is on the way; on Monday, President Biden said “By the time all the money is distributed, 85 percent of American households will have gotten $1,400 rescue checks.”

In Monterey County alone, given nearly 126,000 total households broken down by the various IRS filing categories and income levels, that comes out to a whopping $337 million.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime, completely unprecedented dump of money into the hands of millions of consumers. In a majority of the cases, this is going to end up as discretionary spending. And it comes just as so many of our local businesses — the ones who have struggled to stay afloat during the past year of shut-down — are emerging from months of “purple tier” and hoping to see more customers again.

Monterey County moved from the purple tier into red within the past week.

Has there ever been a better time to support local businesses?

One of the countless frustrations for many small business owners the past year was the way government regulations basically picked and chose who was going to prosper in the era of COVID. Some nationwide big-box chains were practically bursting at the seams with customers most days, and many ended up with record-setting revenues in the process.

Meanwhile, down the street, mom-and-pop businesses were empty, often with their doors closed — doors that in too many cases, never opened again.

We’ve encouraged people in the past year to support these businesses however possible once they re-opened. In many cases, that meant buying gift cards, or ordering more food to-go. As always, our community stepped up in every way they could.

Now, in a manner of speaking, the gloves (if not the masks) are off. Here’s the best, most worthwhile opportunity you may ever have to get our local economy roaring again.

Visit that local store you’ve stayed away from for months. Think about the local proprietors who have always been there for the community; after all, they are the ones who sponsor youth sports teams and are always the first to back charitable organizations.

More than a third of Californians have received at least one COVID-19 vaccination shot. Case numbers are plummeting and, slowly but surely, we see signs every day of an actual light at the end of the tunnel.

These stimulus funds are designed to help us get there more quickly. Let’s use them wisely, and make the ultimate investment in all of our futures by supporting our hard-hit local business communities.

Even in more-normal times, newspapers are essential to a well-functioning democracy, ensuring government is accountable to the people.

While COVID-19 has exacerbated the advertising declines newspapers have suffered in recent years, publishers have responded by shifting the business model of local news to focus on subscriptions.

Now, however, a new threat looms, and the future of California newspapers hinges on passage of Assembly Bill 323, which would allow newspaper carriers to continue operating as independent contractors until Jan. 1, 2023.

A new law passed last year, AB 5, would classify carriers as employees of a single publication, which would significantly increase the cost of newspaper delivery. A recent analysis estimated the average monthly increase for California newspapers could rise 60% to 85% under the new law. The newspaper industry was granted a one-year reprieve that expires at the end of 2020. AB 323, in recognition of COVID-19’s disruptive blow to the industry’s restructuring efforts, affords the industry an additional extension to get compliant with AB 5.

If AB 323 does not pass by Monday, newspapers will be forced to severely reduce print delivery, especially in harder-to-reach areas that do not have easy access to local news providers, and other readers likely would face increased subscription costs. Local coverage also could be severely impacted as further cuts would probably be needed

While AB 5, the original law, was intended to benefit other independent contractors, it likely would have the opposite effect on newspaper carriers, who play a crucial role in newspaper distribution. Today’s carriers are not youngsters on bicycles. They are adults who often deliver for more than one newspaper company. Many would see their opportunities limited and could lose their jobs altogether.

Without the AB 323 extension, the viability of the hundreds of community and ethnic newspapers that serve California readers also would be threatened. These are the newspapers that traditionally keep underserved communities informed and provide important perspectives on social justice issues. Today’s environment demands that readers have ready access to a variety of reliable, trustworthy news sources. Newspapers have been closing in recent years at an alarming rate. More than a dozen community newspapers in California have closed since the onset of the pandemic.

AB 323, the Save Local Journalism Act introduced by Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park, passed the state Senate Appropriations Committee last week with a unanimous vote. AB 323 is expected to advance for a Senate floor vote on Thursday. If it passes, as expected, it will go to the Assembly for consideration. Monday is the deadline for final legislative approval of bills this year.

AB 323 will help ensure the public’s access to credible, objective news in communities throughout California. The Legislature should support the hundreds of newspapers in California that play a major role in protecting our residents by passing AB 323.

For more on how you can help, please go to www.savelocalpress.com.

At the time, it brought a brief moment of hope to gig workers all over the state whose livelihoods had been hamstrung by her bill.

Instead, it didn’t go far enough — and worse, it’s still languishing in the hallways of Sacramento, just one more piece of legislation that may or may not ever actually happen.

Time is running out, and once again, we are asking for your help. The future of your local newspaper depends on it.

The subject is AB1850, a bill Gonzalez said would undo some of the damage caused by last year’s AB5.

Last year, in a last-minute deal that created AB170, newspapers were granted a one-year exemption for delivery drivers. Without the exception, under AB5 those drivers would have needed to be reclassified as employees, a move that would have forced many newspapers to cease publication.

Besides, as Gonzalez should know, the days when delivery drivers “worked for a newspaper” are long gone. Most deliver copies of several different publications on their route; the independent contractors who deliver this newspaper are no exception, so classifying them as an “employee” of any one newspaper is simply impractical.

We were hopeful this incredible oversight would be corrected in one of the numerous “repeal/repair/replace” bills that have been authored this year (and 35 had been introduced by Feb. 28 alone). Instead, it looks like we’re left with AB1850, and delivery drivers are not addressed.

That means, come Jan. 1, they’d become employees, and the timing could not possibly be worse. With the coronavirus absolutely decimating newspapers’ advertising base, newspapers like us would have no choice but to either go out of business, or at the very least stop traditional home delivery.

It’s just one more problem with a bill that didn’t make much sense in the first place, and cast far too wide of a net, causing incalculable damage to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians.

The coronavirus should have been a wakeup call to the bill’s supporters. After all, there have been a lot of people sitting at home since March who would love the opportunity to pick up some independent work — but can’t because of AB5.
How much sense does that make?

And since the pandemic hit, 18 newspapers in California have gone out of business — and dozens of others are on the ropes, fighting for their survival. Staffing has been cut and reporting staffs are stretched to the limit like never before.

Normally, this is when we’d turn to freelancers for additional help. But we can’t, not with AB5 still limiting them to 35 submissions for this calendar year (a ridiculous figure that even Gonzalez has admitted was completely arbitrary.)

What’s that leave our citizens for news coverage for local issues? Blogs and Facebook memes?

The most frustrating part is, absolutely none of this was necessary.

“For many industries, AB 5 was a solution in search of a problem,” Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) said Thursday. “This is true in the newspaper business. If we continue down this path of arbitrary regulation with AB5, we’ll lose access to trusted local news sources we far too often take for granted.”

Last year, we asked you — our readers — to help us in this fight, and you made all the difference in the world. We’re asking for your help again. As you can see from the quote above, Gallagher is firmly in our corner and has made his points clear to Gonzalez, but he can use all the evidence he can get to convince others in the assembly to do the same.

Please contact your state representatives in both the Senate and Assembly and ask that they press to include a three-year extension or make the exemption permanent for newspaper carriers in AB1850 . Reach out to friends, relatives, anyone you know in other districts and ask them to do the same.

It’s your best chance to help us keep community journalism alive.

No joke.

In a rare, welcome display of bipartisanship, Congress is poised to approve the most important conservation law passed in the United States in 40 years.

The legislation, known as the Great American Outdoors Act, would provide $9.5 billion over the next five years to repair America’s national parks. It also would provide $900 million a year in perpetuity from offshore oil drilling royalties to the Land and Water Conservation Fund to pay for maintenance, repairs and expansion of national parks, state parks and city parks across the nation.

The bill passed the Senate 73-25 in June. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., both voted in favor. So did Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.

The House should approve the legislation when it votes on the issue in the next two weeks. President Trump has said he will sign it into law.

Chalk the compromise up to the kind of election year politics that was once commonplace in Washington, D.C.

Democrats, working in tandem with environmentalists, have tried for years to lock in a guaranteed source of funding to deal with the national parks’ $12 billion maintenance backlog. The deal came about because Republicans are trying to save the Senate seats held by Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Steve Daines, R-Mont. Voters in those states have largely opposed efforts by Trump and Republicans to roll back environmental protections.

Congress approved the $900 million annual Land and Water Conservation Fund in 1964 as a way to expand the parks system as the nation’s population grew. But Congress and past presidents have too often shifted more than half of the funding to other purposes. Trump’s budget this year, for example, allotted only $15 million for parks and public lands.

The legislation would guarantee that the money would be used exclusively to maintain parks and buy new park land. The bill allocates 70% of the money to national parks. The remainder would be split between the U.S. Forest Service (15%), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (5%), Bureau of Land Management (5%) and Bureau of Indian Education schools (5%).

The funding is urgently needed to improve aging roads, bridges, trails, camping facilities and lodging in national parks.

The National Park Service reported in 2018 that California’s nine beloved national parks need more than $1 billion in essential repairs, including Yosemite ($645.6 million), Sequoia and Kings Canyon ($169.9 million), Death Valley ($128.8 million), Joshua Tree ($65.9 million) Lassen ($33 million), Redwood ($23 million), Channel Islands ($11.2 million) and  Pinnacles ($10 million).

State and local parks would also benefit. The Bay Area News Group’s Paul Rogers reported that in the past the money has funded state grants to build 40,000 swimming pools, soccer fields, baseball diamonds, playgrounds, fishing piers, jogging trails and other projects at local parks nationwide.

It was John Muir who said, “Everybody needs beauty … places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.”

The Great American Outdoors Act is a great way for us to preserve what Wallace Stegner famously called America’s best idea.

— Bay Area News Group

It’s the height of irresponsibility for MLB, NBA, WNBA, NHL, NFL, MLS and NWSL teams to resume play while COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise. And that goes double for California colleges and high school programs that are moving forward with plans to play games this fall.

The competition endangers the players; accelerates the general spread of the virus; risks the players’ exposing their parents, grandparents and other highly vulnerable friends and family members to the deadly virus; and sends the entirely wrong message to fans around the world that sports competition can be safely resumed. It can’t. Not yet.

Yet Major League Baseball officials announced Tuesday that teams will start play July 23 or 24. National Basketball Association teams have approved a plan to restart the season at Disney World with 22 teams on July 31. The National Women’s Basketball Association has said it will launch the 2020 season in July in Bradenton, Fla. The National Hockey League will begin the Stanley Cup playoffs on July 30 in two hub cities, one of which will be Las Vegas.

The National Football League is planning to kick off its season Sept. 10, presumably with a full slate of games to follow. Major League Soccer plans to resume with a tournament in Orlando, Fla., on July 8. And the National Women’s Soccer League opens its Challenge Cup tournament in Utah this weekend.

The highest risk of being infected is by close contact. Officials of those leagues are kidding themselves if they believe they can create a safe environment for players, coaches, referees, umpires and their families. Not unless they come up with a set of new rules ensuring social distancing while the ball or puck is in play. Stephen Curry and Jimmy Garoppolo may like the idea, but their opponents? Not so much.

The health issues are especially worrisome in Florida, where NBA, WNBA and MLS teams plan to play their games. Perhaps they should first look at the COVID-19 box score for the state: The seven-day average for deaths, which never got below about 30, is once again rising. New cases there have spiked in June to triple the number at the peak in April and five times the number at the start of June.

And, of people tested, the portion who have positive results indicating they have the virus has soared from about 4% at the start of the month to 13% this week. All of which suggests the situation in Florida is getting worse and helps explain the rise in hospitalizations for the virus.

The notion of professional football and baseball teams traveling across their regions or traversing the country is similarly disturbing. The nation is witnessing an upsurge in daily cases, approaching the records seen in April.

Even tennis players are vulnerable to infection during matches. The world’s No. 1 player, Novak Djokovic, who flouted the pandemic by organizing a series of exhibition matches in Croatia, announced this week that he, his wife and four players had tested positive for COVID-19 following their participation in the Adria Tour.

The NFL Network reported last week that a San Francisco 49ers player who was working out with teammates in Nashville tested positive for the coronavirus. Multiple players on the Houston Texans and Dallas Cowboys reportedly have also contracted the virus, including star running back Ezekiel Elliott. And that’s presumably during non-contact drills.

Some players, including women’s soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe and U.S. World Cup teammates Tobin Heath and Christen Press, have wisely opted out of playing games during this weekend’s tournament. Five WNBA players also have said they plan to sit out the entire season.

League officials shouldn’t put the players in a position where they must choose between their health and their financial interests. The responsible course of action is to shut down all games until scientists have developed a vaccine or the threat of infection is greatly reduced. We’re not there yet in the United States. We’re not even close.

That’s how much is still owed to retire bonds the city of Oakland and county of Alameda issued back in 1996 to finance renovations the team wanted as a condition of staying at the Coliseum Arena.

The bonds were to be repaid over 30 years. The team has tried to claim that, when it left town, it could also walk away from the debt. An arbitrator has said no. A San Francisco Superior Court judge has said no. Now the team is taking the case to the state Court of Appeal.

So much for the team’s promotion of its efforts over the years to give back to the community. In the end, for the team owners, venture capitalist Joe Lacob and film producer and UC Regent Peter Guber, it’s apparently all about the dollar — even when it’s not rightly theirs.

The team’s dispute with the city and county comes down to the terms of a 1996 agreement that requires the team to cover the debt, after other arena profits, even if it “terminates” its agreement to remain in the Coliseum — as it now has.

The Warriors claim that they didn’t actually terminate the deal; they merely failed to exercise their option to renew it. But an arbitrator and a judge have both rejected that hair-splitting argument, saying the team’s action was a form of termination.

Moreover, the jurists said, the history of the deal, which of course was reviewed in great detail at the costly arbitration, showed that public officials were explicit when the deal was struck about their intent that taxpayers not be stuck with the tab.

Back then, the team was owned by Chris Cohan, who clearly understood the agreement’s terms and the intent. When he sold the Warriors to Lacob and Guber, he fully disclosed the obligation. Yet now they’re trying to weasel out of the debt on a twice-rejected legal ploy.

The team is now worth an estimated $3.5 billion, nearly eight times the $450 million sale price nine years ago. To be sure, Lacob and Guber deserve credit for building a winning team. But trying to stick it to the very communities, fans and taxpayers who backed the Warriors all those years is reprehensible.

Every dollar the team withholds is money that could be used to provide public services, like street repairs, help for the homeless and social services for the poor. On top of the disputed debt, the city and county have had to spend over $800,000 on legal costs trying to protect the taxpayers, for which the Warriors are now legally on the hook.

It’s time for the Warriors to do the honorable thing. Show respect for the community they left behind and pay the debt. Demonstrate to the Bay Area that in court, as well as on the court, they can lose with dignity.

Four months ago, the county reached a non-binding agreement to sell its 50% interest in the sports facility to the baseball team. But the A’s aren’t interested in building a ballpark there; they have their sights set on the waterfront near Jack London Square. They want the Coliseum property, which the Golden State Warriors and Oakland Raiders are also abandoning, to make millions on development.

The tentative agreement between the county and the A’s, as reported here when it was first announced, would be a sweetheart deal for the A’s at county taxpayer expense. It would give the team half-ownership without having to competitively bid for it.

It would also undermine the city of Oakland, which owns the other half-interest in the Coliseum property. The city would be unable to determine the best use of the property for the benefit of residents and taxpayers because it would need the cooperation of a team with self-serving interests.

Oakland and Alameda County had been negotiating for four years when the county instead suddenly announced the tentative deal with the A’s. The good news is that the county is not locked into the agreement. An exchange of letters the city initiated with the county last week indicates there might still be room for a deal between the two public entities.

County officials say they want out of the sport business and to pay off their $67 million share of the debt for improvements to the Coliseum. That’s understandable. However, the county is a public entity that has invested millions of public dollars in the Coliseum. If officials now want to walk away, they have an obligation to put the public interest first.

For starters, that means the county should not be selling its half-interest in the property to a private entity at a below-market price. Yet, that’s clearly what they would be doing with the tentative A’s agreement.

Under the proposed deal, the county would sell its half-share to the A’s for $85 million. But that price is based on an old appraisal that was conducted as the city and county were trying to keep the Raiders from moving to Las Vegas. It assumed the football team would use nearly half the site for a new stadium.

The Coliseum property is likely worth far more now that it’s all available for development. If the county were to sell the land to a private party, it would have a responsibility to ensure it was getting market value.

Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley has claimed the discounted price to the A’s is justified because it would be offset by the benefits of keeping the team in town. He’s wrong. First, the A’s say they’re not interested in the Coliseum site for their new ballpark. Second, contrary to urban legend sports franchises like to perpetuate, subsidies to pro teams are financial losers for communities.

If, however, the county insists on giving away its half-interest in the Coliseum for a song, the city should have first dibs. The public’s interest should be put ahead of a private party’s.