SAN JOSE -- The San Jose City Council took its first concrete steps Tuesday toward wooing the Oakland Athletics south by voting to spend millions of dollars on making plans and acquiring property for a stadium.

The council voted unanimously to spend more than $6.3 million of Redevelopment Agency funds to purchase an approximately 44,000-square-foot parcel of land at the corner of Montgomery and San Fernando streets and to do an environmental impact report and preliminary design work for a baseball stadium.

Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez said buying the former site of Stephen's Meat is a good move for the city even if a baseball stadium is not built.

"I think this is a really exciting step forward. It's a very, very good investment," Chavez said. " All of the housing sites that we purchased and turned over to the private sector have yielded very, very good profits."

Several members of the public spoke about Tuesday's actions and questioned whether or not the council had the legal authority to spend the money given the city ordinance that prohibits spending tax dollars on a sports stadium without voter approval.

City Attorney Rick Doyle said the council could spend the money because the property could be used for other uses, such as housing, besides a stadium and the design and environmental work was necessary in order to bring a complete stadium proposal to voters.

"Those are preliminary costs that are necessary to get anything on the ballot," Doyle said.

A spokesman for Mayor Ron Gonzales said putting a baseball stadium measure on the ballot as soon as November 2006 is a possibility.

"It's a possibility and maybe something he'd like to do," Gonzales's Communications Director David Vossbrink said.

However, Gonzales has not made any decisions about at ballot measure because putting a proposal together is a very complex process with a lot of factors that are outside the city's control, according to Vossbrink.

"You have to kind of read the tea leaves with those things," Vossbrink said.

The biggest factor outside the city's control is whether the A's even want to move to San Jose and if Major League Baseball would allow the team to move. Currently the San Francisco Giants have the exclusive territorial rights to Santa Clara County.