Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

The East Oakland Sports Center has been a goal of Councilmember Larry Reid for a decade. Now, it's going to be a reality. This is the Oakland Tribune's account : OAKLAND — Plans for a 25-meter East Oakland swimming pool and athletics center, in the works for decades as planners struggled to raise the cash to pay for it, finally broke ground Monday. The ceremony marked the beginning of construction for the East Oakland Sports Center, a $24 million project at 9175 Edes Ave., at Brookfield Village Park. "It's the community that dreamed of this place, and that dream, those people are responsible for why we're finally building it," said Councilmember Larry Reid (Elmhurst-East Oakland), whose work many credited as responsible for the project's long-awaited arrival. Community members began pushing for the project in 1976, when a neighborhood pool closed and children began swimming in a nearby estuary, community representative Jacquee Castain said. ...

There's an interesting but not reported on item -- ignored by the Oakland Tribune -- coming up on the Oakland City Council agenda, and it's called the "East Oakland Sports Complex Development." The resolution "on the table" will transfer $2 million from the Oakland Redevelopment Agency to the City of Oakland to fund the construction of this proposed project. There's nothing that's online about it that's immediately obvious to the lay person. which is terrible. But that written, and before I discuss the ELS website information, this is a project I know about and that Councilmember Larry Reid has spent years -- years -- trying to get moving. It started in 1996 with an idea Councilmember Reid had with then-Otis Spunkmier founder and CEO Ken Rawlings.  Both wanted to change the fact that while East Oakland had a population of familes with kids and teenagers, there was very little for them to do, if anything. To the end of changing that st...