Category: Portland Trail Blazers

After months of public debate, the Portland city council voted 8-4 yesterday to approve spending $120 million toward renovations to the Trail Blazers arena, plus $275 million for upgrades over the next 20 years. But the term sheet it approved included several major new conditions — most prominently, that the team start paying rent, starting at $3.1 million a year and rising by up to 3% a year, as well as payments in lieu of property taxes on the tax-exempt land around the arena, starting at $3 million a year and rising by 5% a year. The team must also agree to cover any cost overruns.

None of those provisions in the final term sheet were in the original one, and they could end up being pretty significant. With the rent and PILOT payments set to increase over time, they should be worth about $110 million in present value to the city, roughly $50 million from the rent and $60 million from the PILOTs because of the different escalation percentages. And while it’s hard to exactly credit these as a windfall for city taxpayers — paying rent on the building you’re a tenant in and property taxes on the land you’re using are usually just what’s expected of everybody — they are additions to the term sheet that would mostly cover the city’s debt payments on its $120 million in arena construction costs. And as for the $275 million in upgrades, that would mostly be covered by ticket taxes, which as we’ve explained here previously largely end up coming out of team owners’ pockets because microeconomics.

This doesn’t make the Blazers plan a good deal for Portland, but it would make it a far better deal. Councilor Angelita Morillo, one of the four no votes, called the revised plan “still the worst deal in the country,” which is almost certainly wrong given some other recent examples, and added “the public is getting fleeced,” which is absolutely correct, especially given that state and county taxpayers would still be on the hook for another $480 million. And it could still get worse in upcoming talks with the team: Yes vote Steve Novick said yesterday, “I’ve already signaled that I’d be willing to accept something that’s arguably less,” which is really not the way you want to start off negotiations.

Still, the Portland council did something all too rare: Presented with a plan that would have poured tax money into the local sports billionaire’s pockets under threat of the team leaving town, they decided to use their leverage as the team’s best option to play in to demand that the billionaire cough up at least some money toward the project, no matter how much he said he wasn’t gonna. And Blazers execs didn’t immediately shoot it down, with team president of business operations Dewayne Hankins issuing a fairly conciliatory (for him) statement that said, in part, “We look forward to continuing to work with the City’s negotiating team in good faith, addressing the issues that remain and finding a resolution that allows all of us to move forward together.” That’s not an acceptance of the city’s rent and PILOT demands, but it’s not “Tom Dundon’s way or the highway” either. One thumb up to the council for at least trying to get something significant for taxpayers, rather than just rearranging deck chairs — how much they stick to their guns from here will determine if they can earn the other thumb.

The Portland city council is set to vote on a term sheet today for the proposed $600 million Trail Blazers arena renovations deal, and it may not look like the one that was initially proposed. Late yesterday, four councilmembers issued a proposed amendment with revised terms that include team owner Tom Dundon paying $2 million a year in rent plus $3 million a year in payments in lieu of property taxes.

Dundon’s refusal to pay rent while insisting that state, county, and city governments cover the entire $600 million renovation cost has been a sticking point for many Portland councilors and residents. The city’s share comes to $120 million toward the renovation, plus $275 million in future maintenance spending over the next 20 years; combined that would cost the city about $22 million a year to pay off, meaning even the proposed rent and PILOTs from Dundon would only cover less than a quarter of the city’s arena expenses.

Dundon, who previously said he didn’t see why he should pay anything toward arena renovations when he already pays taxes (though not property taxes), is expected to object to the new terms. “No team would sign a lease that would keep this business in the red,” Blazers president Dewayne Hankins told the city council last month, which calls for a trip to the Forbes NBA team financial figures:

The Forbes numbers are estimates, though they’ve been proven pretty accurate when actual team financial documents have leaked over the years. Regardless, even if Forbes’ estimate that the Blazers turned a $111 million profit in 2025 is off by a bit, it’s hard to see how having to make $5 million a year in rent and tax payments to their public landlords would suddenly send the team into the red.

More to come once the West Coast wakes up and Blazers officials start issuing statements, almost certainly. The council meeting to discuss the term sheet kicks off at 9:30 am Pacific time; you can watch the drama unfold on the council’s YouTube channel.

Uproar continues to grow over Multnomah County hiring a negotiator in the Portland Trail Blazers arena renovation fight who has a curious resume:

Chair Jessica Vega Pederson disclosed Thursday that she had tapped former Trail Blazers executive Chris Oxley to represent the county as it worked with Portland officials on a framework aimed at keeping the NBA franchise in town for at least the next 20 years.

Okay, that’s a little weird, hiring an ex-Blazers exec. But maybe it’s not so bad to hire someone who knows the opposition’s side of things; after all, local governments way too seldom have people with actual sports business expertise on their side, and it’s not like this guy is currently working for —

Oxley also happens to be board president of nonprofit Sport Oregon, which has led a coalition that’s lobbied city and county leaders to back the proposed $600 million arena facelift requested by the team, which would be exclusively bankrolled by taxpayers.

Welp.

County commissioners were predictably gobsmacked when they heard about the hiring of Oxley, with commissioner Meghan Moyer interjecting, “I’m sorry, did I mishear? He is on the board of Sports Oregon that is currently lobbying us on how much we should contribute to this deal? We hired a negotiator that’s on the board of an organization that is lobbying us on this issue? How is that not a wild conflict of interest?” Vega Pederson replied that it’s not a conflict of interest because Oxley isn’t paid for his role as board president of the group that is behind the pro-arena-spending We Are Rip City campaign (which has most recently been paying influencers to stump for the public arena funding plan); that didn’t convince Moyer, but apparently placated the other commission members, who approved the hire by a 4-1 vote. Congratulations on your new job, Chris, and I’m sure you will have no trouble balancing the demands of your new paid gig to get the best deal for taxpayers and your unpaid gig getting the best deal for Blazers owner Tom Dundon.

One of several remaining shoes dropped in the Portland Trail Blazers arena renovation saga yesterday, as Multnomah County commissioners voted 4-1 to approve team owner Tom Dundon’s term sheet for $100 million in county funding for the project. Or maybe just half a shoe, as three of the five commissioners voted not to use $35 million in county taxes from the sale of the Blazers to Dundon to pay for the county’s costs, and the commission doesn’t have a substitute source of those funds. “How real is this commitment for money, if we can’t agree on a way to fund it?” asked commissioner Meghan Moyer, the only no vote. Next up is the Portland city council, which yesterday debated its own term sheet and failed to come to any agreement; several councilors said the term sheet needs more revenue going to the city and more costs being paid by the team, with councilor Angelita Morillo (last seen during Wednesday’s stadium economics webinar, a recording of which is now available online) arguing: “We are not in a negotiation, we are in a hostage situation. How does adding amendments to this term sheet make it worse?”

And in this week’s non-Portland news:

• San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones wants city residents to get to vote this November on whether to spend $489 million in city funds on a new Spurs arena; councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito argues that a majority of city residents already voted in favor of a Spurs arena funding referendum last year; sports economist Geoff Propheter says that’s “silly” reasoning given that that vote was on county spending on the arena, not the city’s larger share. Voters are split on whether to vote, reports KSAT, or at least whichever voters were at yesterday’s public listening session were split. Maybe there should be a city vote on whether to take a city vote? Somebody should vote on that.
• The Kansas City Planning Commission unanimously approved zoning changes for a new Royals stadium. The plan must next go to the city council, which also has to find $600 million in city funds to help pay for the public’s $1.35 billion share of a $1.9 billion stadium — details!
• The owners of the Orlando Dreamers (note: not actually owners, because the Dreamers aren’t an actual team yet) are still asking Orange County to approve using $975 million in tourist tax dollars to build their non-team a new stadium. “Investing $975 million and getting $32 million a year, we lose money in that investment as a return,” replied Michael Poole of the county’s Tourist Development Tax Citizen Advisory Task Force. “Where can you help us make up that loss?” An excellent question, but I have another one: Do the Dreamers really plan to build their lineup around a 52-year-old Johnny Damon?
• The Cleveland Guardians‘ stadium needs repairs to its elevators and hot water tanks, and its public owner doesn’t have the tax money to spend on them. If only there were someone around who’d already received at least $300 million in public money to help build and improve the stadium and could be asked to help chip in, hmm.
• FIFA management told World Cup 2026 host cities that they’d get $1 million in payments to spend on soccer infrastructure and other “legacy” projects, but has so far stiffed them. Can you really say you’re surprised?
• The latest Denver Broncos stadium renderings are all of people out and about enjoying new neighborhoods while the stadium itself is just a shapeless egg — seems like somebody’s got the message that people would rather their tax dollars go to things that they don’t have to buy PSLs to access, even if the lesson they’ve learned is “Shhh, ixnay on the uxury-boxes-lay.” Denver Gazette sports columnist Mark Kiszla is eager to lend a hand, with a long column saying it would be a “grave mistake” not to give Broncos owner Greg Penner what he wants, in which Kiszla calls the stadium’s proposed Burnham Yard site “blighted,” “dusty,” “a dump,” and “dilapidated” — everybody drink, several times!
• Vancouver is “ready to build [a] new ballpark” for an MLB expansion team, according to a talkSport article that is actually about how the city authorized a local real estate developer to try to propose a way to do so, which isn’t the same thing at all.

For anyone who holds to the belief that sports fans are mindless boosters who want their elected officials to keep their beloved team owners (or just beloved team’s owners) happy no matter what the cost, I present you with Blazer’s Edge, the SB Nation fan site for the Portland Trail Blazers. Site editor Dave Deckard yesterday did something that the rest of the local media hasn’t yet: He assigned a reader/contributor who goes by the handle BlazerTag (possibly Ryan Whitledge, who used to host a podcast by that name) to investigate whether the Blazers leaving town would really result in an economic and fiscal catastrophe for Portland, with the city left with “a skeleton building, unused and rotting.” And the answer is: If the experience of other cities is to be believed, Portland would be just fine.

The former NHL home of the Arizona Coyotes has been without its anchor tenant since 2022; they’ve moved onto the greener pastures of Salt Lake City. To see how bad the finances got in the immediate aftermath, let’s hear from Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps.

“The venue (Desert Diamond Arena) smashed its all-time record for revenue after the (Coyotes’) departure,” Phelps said. “The next year, they beat that number by almost $10 million.”

Glendale, you may recall, had an especially horrific lease with the Coyotes, under which the city had to pay the team to play there. Portland, meanwhile, has an especially horrific lease with the Blazers, under which team owner Tom Dundon doesn’t pay any rent or share any arena revenues.

At the peak of their popularity, the Warriors left Oracle Arena in Oakland for a new facility in San Francisco: the Chase Center. So what happened to Oracle (now called Oakland Arena) when the Warriors left? It had its best fiscal year ever and reduced its operating deficit by 97% between 2019 to 2023.

The Bay Area doesn’t have a ton of arenas — it’s basically the Warriors’ new arena in San Francisco and their old one in Oakland (not counting San Jose, the South Bay is really a different market [EDIT: or maybe one market but a really sprawly one or 1.5 markets or something, see comments if this is important to you]) — so getting the Warriors out of the way has been a blessing in disguise for the Oakland arena. Nobody ever talks much about San Francisco as an NHL expansion or relocation market despite its huge population, and this is likely one of the reasons. (The last attempt going extremely poorly would be another.)

KeyArena turned a bigger profit than it ever did with the Sonics. It happened the same way it did in Glendale and Oakland when their anchor tenants left: by freeing up the stadium revenue the sports teams were hoarding for themselves.

It goes on like that, but you get the idea. This is, in fact, a common theme in arena finances: Having an anchor tenant for 40 nights a year is nice, but not so nice when they’re not paying rent and are taking away dates that could be used on concerts that would. It’s still not especially likely that Dundon moves the Blazers, but it does seem that he needs Portland more than Portland needs him.

BlazerTag then summed up with a couple of paragraphs that reflect a position I’ve heard over the years from lots of sports fans who are all too aware they’re also taxpayers:

One of the persistent themes in the ever-non-evolving Portland Trail Blazers arena saga has been the question of what new team owner Tom Dundon really wants. Oh, he’s made clear enough what he’s asking for: $600 million in taxpayer money to spend on upgrading his 31-year-old arena, in exchange for which he’ll keep paying (some) taxes. But does he really want Portland officials to give in and cut him a check? Or is his secret plan to burn enough bridges in Portland that he can pick up the team and move it elsewhere?

This has been Oregonian Bill Oram’s theory for months now, going back to a February column where he wrote of “the overleveraged incoming owner who knows his new team’s greatest value lies in his ability to move it,” all as part of a plea for Oregon legislators to open their wallets, and fast, to head off such a dire outcome. But this week Oram was joined by former Oregonian columnist John Canzano, an opponent of the $600 million arena spending plan, who wrote in his (paywalled right after this point) Substack that “well-placed sources tell me they’re increasingly skeptical about Dundon’s motivations. He continues to appear disinterested, they say, in negotiating.”

As I’ve written here previously, figuring out whether a team owner is really looking for an excuse to move or is just using one of the oldest tricks in the playbook to create leverage is no easy task: They look pretty much the same from the outside, and one of the prerogatives of being a monopolist is that you don’t have to decide if your threat is a bluff or not until you see how well it works to shake loose public money. Some sports teams do move, absolutely; the vast majority of those that threaten to don’t, though, with some setting deadline after deadline until somebody finally takes their threat seriously. And as economist J.C. Bradbury noted in his presentation to last year’s sports economics conference, there really aren’t that many open sports markets that would be upgrades on current ones. (Bradbury will likely revisit this topic in today’s 5 pm Pacific webinar with fellow economist Victor Matherson, hosted by two Portland city councilmembers.) Yet even when this is the case, and when none of the smaller cities available are offering much in the way of venue funding to boot, team owners are still quick to suggest that they have one foot out the door.

So did Tom Dundon really buy the Blazers just to move them, or does he just believe in never giving an inch in negotiations? Another way of asking the same question: Is Tom Dundon playing 4D chess, or is he just an asshole? The answer, as always with billionaires who got their starts as used car salesmen, is always: It can be both! Presumably he’ll go with whatever makes him the most money, but billionaires can do things for dumb reasons just like other people, so maybe not. Either way, it’s Portland officials’ job to get the best deal for its constituents, and sometimes that means not giving in and repeating, “I will answer you when you stop yelling.”

The Portland Trail Blazers arena dispute so far in a nutshell: Tom Dundon, owner of the Carolina Hurricanes and past purveyor of predatory lending car loans, bought the Blazers from the estate of the late Paul Allen for $4.25 billion. With four years to go on a short-term lease with the city for the arena that Allen built and then his estate got the city to take over ownership of, Dundon asked for $600 million in city-, county-, and state-funded upgrades, with Dundon himself chipping in nothing on the grounds that he already pays taxes. State legislators said okay, but city and county leaders balked, at which point Dundon sent unnamed team officials to tell reporters that if they didn’t approve this deal, he could demand even more money or else he’d move the team — despite no other cities having expressed an interest in building him an arena, and a lease that prohibits Dundon from even talking to other prospective locations until 2030.

All typical sports venue gamesmanship, so far. But the sports media has lately zoomed in on only one piece of it: Oh shit, where are the Blazers going to move?

• Two writers for The Athletic, after breaking down the basics of the arena renovation funding dispute, launched into a discussion of places the Blazers could move. After ruling out Las Vegas and Seattle since the NBA has its heart set on putting expansion teams in those two cities, they floated Raleigh (too close to the Charlotte Hornets), Austin (too close to the San Antonio Spurs), Nashville (too close to the Memphis Grizzlies), or Kansas City (a good bit smaller media market than Portland). “The case might just come down to which city is willing to offer the best sweetheart deal for an arena and a slew of tax incentives for the Blazers to come,” they report, which is true as far as it goes, but for the small detail that none of those cities are currently offering anything.
• Fox 2 in St. Louis asks if the Blazers could move to St. Louis, noting that while “it’s unclear how strongly the Trailblazers would consider St. Louis as a possible relocation destination, and how much St. Louis city officials are interested,” one of the Blazers’ minority owners is from St. Louis, so it’s “an intriguing possibility.”
• Blazers arena cheerleader Bill Oram of the Oregonian writes that “if left entirely up to me, [moving a team] would be prosecuted as a crime,” but thinks Dundon plans to do it, without specifying where he would take the team to.

Exploring whether the Blazers could actually move is fine enough journalism. But at a time when Dundon and his execs are trying to frame this as “Give me $600m or we’ll shoot this team,” headlines floating destinations where the team could go end up doing the Blazers owner’s move-threat work for him. Portland leaders actually have a fair bit of leverage here — especially with Dundon prohibited by his lease from talking about relocation for now, and with state funding that was already approved expiring at the end of this year — but they’re unlikely to use it if the news media are constantly speculating about other cities allegedly waiting in the wings.

Speaking of leverage, the latest sticking point in Blazers arena talks is a state-of-the-art clause in the team’s lease that — opposite to how these things usually work — requires the team to “maintain the arena in a first-class manner.” Portland councilmember Steve Novick has suggested the city should consider suing Dundon for failing to provide proper arena upkeep if he tries to move the team; Blazers officials say they won’t sit down to talk about a new lease unless the city first attests that it won’t challenge the quality of the team’s arena maintenance. Again, all typical sports lease gamesmanship, and to be expected. The question here appears to be who’ll blink first — and if city and county officials are more afraid of the boogeyman of St. Louis than Dundon is of losing the $365 million in state money he’s already won, that could make all the difference in the blinking calculus.

The two Multnomah County commissioners who are trying to call a do-over on the county’s proposed $100 million or so in spending toward $600 million in Portland Trail Blazers renovations have revealed more details of their plan, and it’s looking less like pulling $35 million from the pot than taking it from a different pocket:

Commissioners Julia Brim-Edwards and Meghan Moyer, who have called on Chair Jessica Vega Pederson to rethink the county’s planned contribution to the arena’s renovation, proposed tapping an existing rental car tax to fund the county’s whole $88 million capital contribution. That would eliminate a controversial funding source, revenue from the county’s business income tax derived from the Trail Blazers’ sale, from the budget.

The Oregonian notes that keeping the $35 million in income taxes would mean the money would stay “in the county’s regular budget, where it could pay for county services.” It would mean instead taking $35 million in rental car taxes out of the county’s budget, but since that’s money that is earmarked for paying off the county’s 2019 expansion of the Oregon Convention Center, it’s not technically general fund money. Reading the tax law (start with section 11.300), it looks like the car rental tax is set to sunset once the convention center is paid off, so if there’s less rental car tax money available to pay off the bonds, this would effectively mean keeping the county’s 2.5% rental car tax surcharge in place for longer in order to give more of it to Blazers owner Tom Dundon.

It’s always baffling when elected officials spend time and energy debating which pool of public funds to hand over to a sports team owner, like someone trying to decide whether to pay for an expensive purchase with their debit or credit card. Money is money, and a government only has so much of it — raising (or in this case extending) taxes brings in more, sure, but that’s still taxes you could have increased and then used to pay for something else. We’re seeing the same thing right now in Tampa, where city councilmember Bill Carlson is proposing shifting around which taxes would be used to pay for which part of a Rays stadium deal: If taxpayers are covering the tab and not the team owner, all else is just bookkeeping details.

None of this may matter in the end for the Blazers arena plan, as the Portland city council still isn’t on board with its $120 million or so share of the costs. But all haggling matters, and when it appears that the most county commissioners plan to do is to debate which account to use to Venmo cash to Dundon, that’s disappointing, especially when Dundon’s lease says he can’t even threaten to move the team until 2030, if he could even find a place to move to. Hey, Multnomah County, you can be savvy negotiators too! All you have to do is use your leverage against the person on the other side of the negotiating table, instead of against a different part of your own public budget.