If the A’s leave town and abandon their quest for a new taxpayer-subsidized waterfront development at the Port of Oakland’s Howard Terminal, they will still hold veto power over the Coliseum site six miles away where they currently play.

Lost in the righteous outrage over the team’s ridiculous take-it-or-leave-it demands for its new project adjacent to Jack London Square is the control it already acquired, in another taxpayer-subsidized deal, over one of the Bay Area’s prime transit-friendly parcels.

That control could hamstring prospects for thoughtful residential development next to BART’s Coliseum station that could house workers employed along the transit system’s lines from San Jose to San Francisco and Concord. And it could undermine hopes of the region recruiting another professional sports team in the future.

The A’s have veto control over that 120-acre parcel because the gullible Alameda County Board of Supervisors sold the county’s half-interest in the Coliseum site to the A’s in 2019. It was a sweetheart $85 million deal for which the county never sought competitive bids. The deal had no requirement that the A’s stay in Oakland.

Supervisors were suckered by the promises of A’s President Dave Kaval that he would keep the team in Oakland. But, as we’ve now seen clearly, this is all about business for the A’s and grabbing as much public money as possible.

There is no loyalty to the Bay Area. After Kaval and Major League Baseball failed in their recent efforts to strongarm the city to immediately accept the team’s terms for its waterfront development, the A’s announced this week that they will go shopping for a new location, starting with Las Vegas.

The A’s were never “Rooted in Oakland.” The advertising campaign the team launched in 2017 was a sham. As the team has now demonstrated, it has no intention of negotiating in good faith to build a new ballpark.

It threw down a one-sided offer on April 23, and when city officials didn’t rush for it, the team started looking elsewhere. To their credit, at least some members of the City Council — Nikki Fortunato Bas, Rebecca Kaplan and Carroll Fife — are starting to understand how duplicitous Kaval has been and are questioning the team’s current demands.

They should examine them very carefully. And they should heed the lesson of the county’s fiasco two years ago.

County officials kept complaining that they didn’t want to continue owning a sports venue, and the city, which owns the other half, lacked the funds to buy them out. So, county officials sold out the taxpayers and the interest of their constituents. Now Oakland can’t develop the site without the A’s consent — and vice versa.

County officials have championed efforts for affordable housing. But when it came to a prime property for residential and commercial development in one of the county’s poorest neighborhoods, they rushed to unload their interest.

“Voting on this today moves forward on being able to keep the last major sports team in the city,” Supervisor Wilma Chan said as the board approved the term sheet for the eventual deal.

Supervisor Nate Miley, whose district includes the Coliseum site, was a leading proponent of its sale to the A’s. Miley acknowledged at the time that the Coliseum site could have been worth $200 million to $300 million. That would have made the value of the county’s half-share $100 million to $150 million, far more than the $85 million the county agreed to.

But Miley also saw the sale as a way to keep the A’s. Indeed, despite Kaval’s claims today that the Coliseum sale was unrelated to the Howard Terminal development, he told the supervisors just the opposite back then.

“We want to privately finance a new ballpark here in Oakland, and this action will go a long way in making that happen,” Kaval said as he urged approval of the sale.

Miley also told me then that he saw the sale as a way to provide the A’s a fallback site if the Howard Terminal project fell through. “I think Howard Terminal is going to be a real reach for them to try to achieve,” he said. “If they don’t pull it off, they need to have a landing place.”

But now the A’s and Major League Baseball, for reasons they have yet to explain, say that the Coliseum is not a viable alternative.

The fact is that no site will be good enough for the A’s if it doesn’t come with heavy taxpayer subsidies. That should have been a non-starter for the county. And it should now be a deal-breaker for the city.