The City of Oakland and the Golden State Warriors basketball team resolved a dispute today after the Warriors agreed to pay $786,998 for their June championship parade.
Warriors’ owner Joe Lacob said during the parade celebrating the team’s 2017 NBA Championship that the team would pick up all the costs of the event, which included hundreds of police and fire staffers as well as workers from the city’s public works department who blocked off streets and cleaned up after the festivities.
Just after the parade, several media outlets reported that the Warriors had paid the city already.
But the team didn’t. Instead, the city submitted a bill in July for over $1 million. This included $815,896 specifically for the 2017 parade costs and another $244,278 for the 2015 parade. The bill for the 2017 parade was more than double the estimate the city originally provided to the Warriors.
The team’s owners contested the bill and asked that it be lowered. The dispute between the city and Warriors, and the fact the team hadn’t actually paid, was only revealed in late August after Oakland responded to a public records request from the Express.
The Warriors, however, still appear to be unhappy with the amount they had to pay.
“We have made this decision despite our disappointment with the process and the large disparity between the two estimates,” representatives of the Warriors wrote in a statement issued today.
The city issued a more positive statement: “The City is grateful for the $786,998 payment, which offsets all taxpayer costs it took to provide Police, Fire, and Public Works personnel to staff such a massive public event.”
In the end, the city only billed the Warriors for the 2017 parade, not the 2015 event also. And Oakland trimmed $54,484 from the 2017 bill.
