The city and Costco have executed an Exclusive Negotiation Agreement for a store and gas station at 2008 Wake Avenue — the 22-acre North Gateway parcel at the former Oakland Army Base — giving both sides two to three years to work out a ground lease, development agreement, and entitlements. Council committee discussed the ENA Monday; full council vote is next.

The 22-acre North Gateway parcel at 2008 Wake Avenue — a patch of former Oakland Army Base ground that has spent most of the past quarter-century waiting for something — moved one formal step closer to that something on Monday. Oakland's community and economic development committee took up a newly executed Exclusive Negotiation Agreement between the city, Costco Wholesale, and San Francisco–based Deca Companies; the full council is expected to vote on it in the coming days.

The ENA is not a deal. What it does is set a two-to-three-year clock for the parties to negotiate the pieces a real deal requires: a ground lease, a development agreement, zoning entitlements, and building permits. Any executed development agreement would come back to council for a second vote. But it represents the most formal step the city has taken toward placing a full-service grocer in a neighborhood that hasn't had one in decades.

West Oakland lost its last full-service grocery stores in the 1970s. Community Foods Market, a co-op that opened on 34th Street in 2019, closed in 2022 after less than three years. What remains in the neighborhood, according to figures cited in Oakland city council discussions: 53 liquor stores and 14 mini-markets. Residents spend roughly $58 million per year on groceries, approximately 70 percent of it outside the neighborhood, per data cited by council members. The nearest Costco is in San Leandro, about ten miles south.

The site itself carries its own complicated record. The Oakland Army Base, which employed roughly 7,000 people at its peak, decommissioned September 30, 1999. The federal government transferred the North Gateway parcel to the city in 2003 — the same year Costco first expressed interest in it, making this at minimum a 22-year courtship. The parcel sat tied up for years by a lease to California Waste Solutions, a recycling company whose situation grew entangled in the federal bribery investigation that ended former Mayor Sheng Thao's tenure; the city terminated that lease May 28, 2025 after the company missed funding deadlines, clearing the way for the current talks.

Contamination is the unsettled variable. Soil and groundwater on the site contain arsenic, lead, chromium, benzene, and PCBs — the residue of military use. Remediation has to be sequenced and funded before construction can begin; the California Department of Toxic Substances Control holds oversight authority over any change of use on the parcel.

The ENA negotiation window runs two to three years. Nothing about the store's square footage, the gas station footprint, or the ground lease terms has been publicly disclosed — those are what the negotiation is supposed to produce. If the council approves the ENA and both sides reach agreement, a full development plan would follow. Whether that produces a Costco at 2008 Wake Avenue before the site marks its third decade of waiting is a different question.