I don’t want to make too big a deal about this trend of elected officials taking their time before voting on sports subsidy deals — looking stadium and arena demands in the mouth is literally doing their minimum job — but add Portland, Oregon to Tampa and the state of Illinois as local governments doing their minimum job this legislative season:
City and county lawmakers are pumping the brakes, saying it’s better to take the time to get it right than to sign away huge sums of public money under pressure from Portland’s professional basketball franchise, which has called the Rose City home since 1970.
“We’re not going to be held hostage, we’re not going to sign a bad deal,” Portland Council President Jamie Dunphy told The Oregonian/OregonLive, echoing a position expressed by many of his colleagues. “We’re not going to be a blank check for an out-of town billionaire. We are going to support our team and our local economy in the way that needs to get done. But we’re not doing it at all costs.”
Trail Blazers owner/big bad Tom Dundon has already won approval of $365 million in state funding for upgrades to his 31-year-old arena, but is seeking another $235 million in city and county money to make it an even $600 million. A Multnomah County spokesperson said that county commissioners will spend “the next several months” negotiating their part in any arena deal, while city council president Dunphy said “the City Council is going to take as much time as it needs because getting this right matters.”
Right now, reports the Oregonian, local officials appear to be debating less whether to send Dundon the nine-figure check he desires and more which account to charge it to: Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s proposal to use a city clean energy fund to pay for basketball arena zhuzhing has been especially contentious. But the council is also seeking a more taxpayer-friendly lease, possibly including the city getting a cut of arena naming rights, which in the unlikely case Dundon agreed to it would help defray the public’s costs.
Blazers execs, meanwhile, have continued their saber-rattling about moving the team if arena funding isn’t approved ASAP, though still without saying the words “move the team” out loud. (Team president Dewayne Hankins, in a tour de force of non-threat threat verbiage, declared, “The Trail Blazers have been deeply connected to Portland for more than 50 years and remain committed to this community. The fact remains: if city and county leaders can’t get a deal done, the Blazers’ lease at Moda Center will expire in 2030.”) And while city councilor Angelita Morillo called this “a massive bluff, and I think that we need to call them on that bluff,” Oregonian sports columnist Bill Oram, who had written in February that Dundon would move the Blazers without a deal, wrote essentially the same column again on Sunday, declaring:
The only thing that matters for the Trail Blazers this summer — really, truly, actually matters — is whether Portland’s politicians figure out that losing this team, be it to Nashville, Austin or Kalamazoo, is not some hollow threat by a greedy billionaire.
Kalamazoo, you’ve been mentioned on the telly! (Sorry, Greensboro, your time will come.)
Oram liked this point so much that wrote pretty much the same column yet again yesterday, this time listing Nashville, Austin, Kansas City, San Diego, Vancouver, Mexico City, and Raleigh as potential relocation targets. He also insisted that economic studies showing that public sports subsidies are a waste of money are irrelevant because what Portland is facing is “completely without precedent,” then snapped back at economist J.C. Bradbury for pointing out that Oram is literally doing the title of Bradbury upcoming stadium book “This One Will Be Different.”
Is any of this going to end with Portland forcing Dundon to provide a significantly better deal for taxpayers? Probably not — officials are also seeking concessions like promises to use union labor and a community benefits agreement, which are more likely to pass because they wouldn’t cost Blazers ownership much money. But this is where we are with sports subsidies, 40 years in from when they first became an essential part of the sports business model: Even being allowed to ask for the public to get anything in return for their gift of tax money to a billionaire owner is seen in some circles as tantamount to running your team out of town on a rail. All this is continuing to take longer than we thought.
I bet Oram can’t even find Brockway, Ogdenville, or North Haverbrook on a map.
Take it from people who live outside of PDX Tri-County…we don’t care if the Blazers move to Poughkepsie. No taxpayer dollars to fund the season ticket holders in Portland. You want pro basketball, Portland? Pay for it yourself.
It’s so funny that the columnist said what Portland is facing is “completely without precedent,” as though the NBA, of all leagues, isn’t full of one-horse sports towns just like Portland that have bent over backwards to keep their teams in the past.
If these sports scribes were honest, they would just come out and say, “It’s worth it for the residents and taxpayers to take a bath on arena and billionaire subsidies if we get to keep our teams.” I feel like I’d respect that a lot more at this point, as opposed to the usual lies about how their city has unique qualities specific to them that will somehow make them the exception to the overwhelming, long-standing rule.
This is all completely true.
Sports columnists thrive on emotion (usually negative) and either being extremely pro-local-team or anti-local team.
Even though presumably they are taxpayers, they are so deluded by having something to cover (even though their jobs and their industry are so precarious that there’s no guarantee they’ll be covering anything) that they ignore 50 years of data and then have the gall to go after someone who actually studies said data.
I lived this in Orlando when the deVos family was demanding a new arena for the Magic. Basically the only thing Mike Bianchi and the Sentinel didn’t do during that whole stretch was to literally show up to O-Rena in cheerleader attire (sorry for the visual, everyone).
For them, it was a matter of self-preservation: the sports section didn’t want a future where a D1 college football team that wasn’t (and arguably still isn’t) the most popular one in its own city was the only thing they could write about and opine on throughout the year, and so it put its proverbial capes on for a ghoulish billionaire family who could have covered the costs of the new arena many times over but willingly declined to do so.
That also helps to explain why no real one-horse sports town has lost its only team since a trio of hockey teams moved out some 30 years ago (and one of them eventually got another… via relocation, of course).
Uhh the NBA isn’t full of one horse towns.
Portland and Sacramento are by far the smallest metros with an NBA team. Memphis and Milwaukee might be close seconds. The others cover large geographical areas that give them a bigger base even with their smaller metros due to a lack of local competition, such as New Orleans.
The threat of the NBA leaving Sacramento was very much a real threat, and the threat of it leaving Portland probably is as well. Unlike the MLB and NFL though, the current NBA really hates to leave legacy markets it’s been in for a long time.
If they do expand, Seattle and Vegas will leave their rotation of cities used as leverage but there’s still others. I think Vancouver will eventually get added to the list, as they have the added factor of being done wrong by the NBA the first time around.
The idea of Portland politicians doing anything “the right way” is almost as hilarious as the idea of them being fiscally responsible.
They’re one of the worst run and most spend happy cities in the entire country.
The concept of the Blazers leaving Portland was unfathomable less than a decade ago but Portland has been run into the ground. Businesses are leaving their downtown and city entirely due to the way it’s being run, and their solution to every problem is either insist it doesn’t exist or throw money at it. It’s basically a bunch of children running a lemonade stand at this point.
They rail about billionaires but ask them where they live sometime, how much money their parents made, or what their own net worth is. They’re all pretty well off, and many of them are gentrifiers. Just like “socialist” mayor Katie Wilson in Seattle.
Most cities probably don’t need to worry about their team leaving or what that would mean but Portland absolutely does. Its entire modern existence is based upon trendy left leaning fads, and a lot of those people will move out in the future with less people to replace them once the fads leading their non stop protests die out. They have no actual economy at this point. It’s built almost entirely around fads, with the exception of Nike.
Also, when did Bill Oram leave the OC Register? It seems like he was there for a long time.