The Conditional Yes

Public Assets, Private Profits, and the Fight for the Moda Center

Portland is negotiating a $665 million public commitment to renovate the Moda Center. A familiar argument has emerged: tax dollars are being diverted to enrich a billionaire. Opponents of the plan point to the degradation of public services, economic-impact figures cited by teams and their political allies that pale in comparison to those of opponents, and outrage that policymakers would succumb to the owner’s threats to move the team out of state. In short, the deal enhances private gain by underwriting at public risk.

Whether the Moda Center renovation fits the same pattern as the Washington Commanders deal, the King Dome saga, and the Tampa Bay Rays subsidy is not easily answered. The answer is more complicated than the public conversation allows: the framing drives the politics, and the conditions determine the contract. Whichever positions hold political weight over the next four months will shape the 20-year lease.

I. The proposal on the table

Nearly two years after the City of Portland purchased the Moda Center from the estate of Paul Allen for $7.13 million in August 2024, Senate President Rob Wagner introduced Senate Bill 1501. The legislation, which Governor Tina Kotek signed on April 27 after a bipartisan 24-6 Senate vote, established a framework for shared ownership of the arena between the State of Oregon and the City of Portland. The state is authorized to issue up to $365 million in general obligation bonds toward a renovation estimated at $600 million. The state’s contribution is contingent on the Trail Blazers signing a binding 20-year lease after the sale of the franchise to Texas billionaire Tom Dundon, who purchased the team for $4.25 billion in August 2025.

The City of Portland, under Mayor Keith Wilson, has proposed $120 million in upfront capital and an additional $14 million per year in operating and maintenance costs over the life of the lease, for a total city contribution exceeding $400 million over 20 years. Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson has proposed $88 million in renovation funding and an additional $13 million in maintenance from county sources, including motor vehicle rental tax and business income tax revenues. The Blazers, under Dundon, have committed zero dollars to construction, though the team would be responsible for cost overruns.

The combined public commitment, in present-value terms, is about $665 million against a privately held franchise that just sold for $4.25 billion, to an owner whose fortune was built running the nation’s largest subprime auto lender.

II. What opponents get right

Opponents are not wrong about how stadium financing works. A 2023 review in the Journal of Economic Surveys, conducted by economists John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad R. Humphreys, examined more than 130 studies of stadium and arena subsidies spanning four decades and concluded that large public subsidies for professional sports venues are not justified by their returns.

The Trail Blazers organization, Mayor Wilson’s office, and the bill’s legislative sponsors cite economic-impact figures. They list $670 million in annual regional impact, 4,500 jobs, 1.6 million annual visitors, and 7,000 hotel rooms booked for a single sporting event. But the figures rely heavily on flawed methodologies that treat money spent at the arena as new economic activity rather than as spending diverted from other regional venues, count private profit as public benefit, and label construction wages as economic stimulus without subtracting the opportunity cost of the public dollars.

Portland economist Joe Cortright has called the proposal a giveaway. State Senator Kim Thatcher, one of six votes against SB 1501, cited the same body of research on the Senate floor; her vote was correct on the empirical merits even if her broader politics are not.

Opponents are right about the pattern: the public bears the cost. At the same time, the private owner keeps the revenue, a recurring mechanism by which billionaires capture public subsidies for the construction of vanity assets that remain in private hands.

III. The distinction that changes the analysis

One feature sets the Moda Center deal apart from the standard pattern.

Because the City of Portland owns the building, the renovation, if it proceeds, would be a public investment in a publicly held facility, not a transfer of public money to a private owner for the construction of a private building. The closest analogies are the Portland International Airport, which Mayor Wilson invoked in his State of the City address; the Oregon Convention Center; the Veterans Memorial Coliseum next door; and the public museums, libraries, and concert halls that constitute the cultural infrastructure of every American city.

Public investment in shared civic infrastructure is a defensible tradition on the left, different in kind from the Washington Commanders subsidy, the Atlanta Falcons subsidy, or the dozen other deals Robert Reich has documented. The Commanders and their stadium are privately owned; the public was paying off a billionaire’s mortgage. The Moda Center is publicly owned, and the public would be paying for upgrades to a public asset. The distinction is necessary, though not sufficient.

Public ownership of the building does not, by itself, change the pattern: the public bears the cost while the private owner keeps the revenue. Under a 20-year lease to a privately held franchise, the renovation revenue, naming rights, concessions, ticket revenue, and franchise appreciation all remain in private hands. Public ownership relocates the cost-revenue split rather than ending it.

Public ownership creates a contractual position in which enforceable conditions can be written into the lease before public money is committed. Without such conditions, public ownership is a formality that changes the accounting but not the political or financial stakes. Under the conditions outlined in Section VII, public ownership becomes the precondition for a public investment that differs in kind from the standard stadium subsidy. The distinction depends on the conditions being written into the lease as enforceable terms. Failing that, the objection is valid.

What the council writes into the lease will determine whether the public investment returns enough value to the public to justify the expenditure, and whether the labor, environmental, and community requirements attached to the renovation are set out in enforceable contract language rather than left to the goodwill of a Texas billionaire.

IV. Lower Albina and the question of restorative development

For much of the twentieth century, the neighborhood now called Lower Albina was the heart of Portland’s Black community. The neighborhood was decimated in the 1950s and 1960s when scores of homes and businesses were demolished to make way for Interstate 5 and for the Memorial Coliseum. The displacement and redlining that preceded it have been documented by the Albina Vision Trust, the Portland City Archives, and the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project’s own history page. The Moda Center sits on land taken from a Black neighborhood under an urban renewal policy well-documented by historians.

The Albina Vision Trust, led by Executive Director Winta Yohannes, has spent several years building a restorative development plan for the neighborhood. Albina One, the 94-unit affordable housing development that opened in September 2025, was the first major project. It was designed and constructed by Colas Construction, only the second Black-owned construction company to put a crane in the sky in Oregon’s history. In 2024, the Trust entered into the Albina Rose Alliance, a formal partnership with the Blazers organization built on a joint development strategy, joint legislative advocacy, and a shared commitment to the generational prosperity of displaced residents.

Yohannes told state lawmakers in February that the success or failure of SB 1501 would depend on how the deal affected the entire neighborhood, not just the arena. Yohannes’s testimony places public investment within a frame that the populist objection does not address: whether the renovation of a community asset can be tied to the rebuilding of a community destroyed by prior policies. The frame is restorative, not philanthropic. It treats the Moda Center renovation as one piece of a larger accounting the city owes to Lower Albina, including the Albina Vision Trust’s freeway caps over I-5, the 1803 Fund, the affordable housing pipeline, and a community benefits agreement that has not yet been written into the lease.

V. Two tales of organized labor

The labor argument for the renovation breaks into two parts, and the two parts are not the same case.

The case for the construction workforce is the stronger of the two. Councilor Eric Zimmerman and the Mayor's office have committed to a project labor agreement, with prevailing wage requirements, local apprenticeship hiring through the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council, measurable diversity targets, and Pacific Northwest-sourced timber.

Multnomah County Chair Vega Pederson has demanded union labor for both construction and ongoing operations and maintenance work at both Moda Center and the Veterans Memorial Coliseum as a prerequisite for the county’s contribution.

The Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council represents 31 member unions. Laborers Local 737, Ironworkers Local 29, Glass Workers Local 740, Elevator Constructors Local 23, and Linoleum/Carpet Local 1236 are among its locals with jurisdiction over the work. A union-built renovation of a publicly owned building is precisely the project the labor movement has fought for across the postwar period, from the Hoover Dam to the federal courthouses to the PDX modernization that Mayor Wilson invoked as an analogy.

The case for the operations workforce is more troubling. The food service, concessions, parking, ticketing, and logistics workforce at the current Moda Center is not unionized, except for a small group of engineers. Mark Davison, president of Teamsters Joint Council 37, told the Portland Mercury in April that the lack of union representation in those categories is atypical for Oregon, a state without right-to-work laws, and that the Teamsters had been in conversation with Moda workers for roughly a year about the terms of their employment before the public funding negotiations began. The Teamsters represent workers at Lumen Field and Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Oracle Park in San Francisco, and Ball Arena in Denver; the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union represents workers at other comparable venues across the country.

Organized labor in Portland is pushing for a labor peace agreement, a neutrality contract committing the Blazers’ incoming ownership group, under Tom Dundon, to remain neutral during union organizing campaigns and to refrain from suggesting opposition to representation. Councilor Mitch Green has stated publicly that a labor peace agreement should be a bare-minimum precondition for any public financing of arena renovations. The condition is not currently in the deal.

The operations question is where the populist argument has the most political traction and where the conditional argument must be most precise. A renovation that creates union construction jobs while leaving the operations workforce in the hands of a billionaire who has no track record of labor neutrality is not a complete labor victory. The labor case for the renovation requires both union construction and a binding labor peace agreement covering the existing workforce, written into the lease as a condition of public funding.

VI. The Clean Energy Fund problem

The Portland Clean Energy Fund was passed by Portland voters in 2018 as a 1% surcharge on the sales of large retailers with more than $1 billion in national revenue. The fund was originally projected to generate $60 million annually; it has averaged $200 million per year since collections began. The mandate is climate investment with community benefit, with a particular focus on creating jobs for people of color, building infrastructure to respond to climate change. The mandate has not been amended by voters since.

Mayor Wilson’s proposed funding package includes up to $75 million in PCEF revenue, contingent on a Climate Investment Plan amendment and approval by the PCEF citizen-led advisory committee. This allocation is the most contested element of the package. Two left-leaning councilors, Mitch Green and Tiffany Koyama Lane, have refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement that would have given them access to the ongoing negotiations between the city and the Blazers; the stated reason is that the public case for the use of PCEF money should be made in public, not behind closed doors. Several other councilors, including Jamie Dunphy, Elana Pirtle-Guiney, and Sameer Kanal, have indicated they could support the use of PCEF revenue conditioned on the advisory committee’s recommendation. No advisory committee recommendation has been issued because no design plan or project scope has yet been finalized. The Blazers have not yet selected a general contractor, and the project timeline indicates that final design plans will not be available until December.

The PCEF allocation is the weakest point in the conditional case. The fund was created to support specific climate and equity work with accountability mechanisms in a city with a documented history of climate work being defunded when a higher-priority political demand arises. The Albina Rose Alliance includes climate-friendly building commitments, and some portion of the renovation could meet PCEF eligibility standards, particularly if the building is upgraded to a fully electric standard with solar generation, energy storage, and resilience infrastructure that serves the surrounding neighborhood during heat domes and ice storms.

PCEF eligibility has not been established. Until the design scope is public, until the climate components are itemized and budgeted, until the PCEF advisory committee has issued a recommendation against the existing Climate Investment Plan criteria, the PCEF allocation is a giveaway with climate language attached. It cannot be defended.

VII. The conditions of a defensible deal

The conditional case requires that the lease language include the following provisions as conditions of public funding:

• A binding labor peace agreement: Covering the food service, concessions, parking, ticketing, logistics, and operations workforce at the Moda Center, modeled on the Lumen Field and Climate Pledge Arena agreements.

• A project labor agreement: Covering all construction phases of the renovation, with prevailing wage, local hire through Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council apprenticeships, and diversity targets enforced through hiring data rather than aspirational language.

• A community benefits agreement: Coordinated with the Albina Vision Trust, the 1803 Fund, and the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center. It must be enforceable in court and include measurable commitments to affordable housing pipelines, displaced-resident return programs, and local procurement.

• A public equity stake: Capturing the franchise’s appreciation during the term of the 20-year lease, structured as a share of any eventual sale price above a defined threshold. (Edan Krolewicz, the Trail Blazers fan who launched the Rip City Not Rip Off campaign, has proposed a model that would generate $6.7 to $10.2 million annually for the city, and is one approach among several.)

• Restricted PCEF allocations: Tied strictly to verified climate components of the renovation, evaluated by the PCEF advisory committee against the existing Climate Investment Plan criteria, with the burden of proof on the city to demonstrate eligibility rather than on the advisory committee to identify exclusion.

The conditional case also requires that the negotiations be conducted in public, not under a non-disclosure agreement. Council Vice President Olivia Clark and Council President Jamie Dunphy have justified the NDA by arguing that complex commercial negotiations require confidentiality. Because the Blazers are negotiating with a public body to use public money to renovate a publicly owned building, however, the public has a right to see the terms before they are written into a 20-year lease that will outlast the current council. Councilors Green and Koyama Lane were correct to refuse the NDA. Their refusal sets a model for the rest of the council's negotiating posture.

VIII. The choice before the council

It is true that Portland is heavily taxed and that city services are deteriorating. It is also true that the maneuver by which billionaires take public money while teachers are furloughed is a recurring pattern of American urban politics, and that this pattern deserves our wrath.

Treating the Moda Center renovation as a replication of the welfare-for-billionaires scheme is misleading, however.

The current deal does not meet any of the conditions outlined in Section VII. It is being negotiated under a non-disclosure agreement. The funding package includes a PCEF diversion. The package contains no labor peace agreement covering the existing workforce. The package contains no public equity stake in the franchise. The team is contributing zero dollars to construction.

An optimal deal is possible. Councilors Green and Koyama Lane are exercising political muscle from outside the negotiating room, and they should be supported by every Portlander.

Two verdicts are possible. If the council writes the conditions of Section VII into the lease as enforceable terms, the renovation becomes a defensible public investment, and the case for support stands. If the council writes the deal currently being negotiated under non-disclosure, in which the team contributes zero dollars to construction, the operations workforce remains non-union, the PCEF is diverted, and the public retains no equity stake in franchise appreciation, the case for opposition stands.

Portland has the negotiating advantage in this political moment: the city owns the building, the state has conditioned its bonds, and the Blazers cannot move without a new arena, and no other city has one ready. The advantage stands, and the negotiations are not over. The council’s choice over the next four months determines which of these two verdicts prevails.