The Oakland City Council voted Tuesday to approve an agreement to extend a lease agreement that will keep the Oakland Raiders at the O.co Coliseum, and more importantly Oakland for at least one more year, according to San Jose Mercury News.
The agreement also includes two additional one-year extensions that could keep the Raiders in Oakland for the 2017 and 2018 football seasons, as well. The extensions will be contingent upon what happens in San Diego, being that the Chargers will have the option to move to Los Angeles after the 2016 season if they are not able to come to an agreement for a new stadium with San Diego.
The contract calls for more than tripling the amount of rent the Raiders will pay to the city of Oakland and Alameda county for using the Coliseum and their publicly-owned training facility in Alameda, from $925,000 to $3.5 million. The rent for the Alameda training facility will remain the same at $525,000 a year but the rent for the stadium will increase from $400,000 to $2,975,000 annually. That price increase is intended to cover the costs the city and county incur on the days of football games.
Raiders owner Mark Davis has explored the possibility of moving the team to other cities such as Los Angeles, San Antonio and Las Vegas but when the tentative lease extension was announced in February he said it would give the team the chance to work out a deal with the city and county to build a new stadium that would keep his team in Oakland for the long term.