Skip to main content
Portland city leaders took the first step toward breaking an impasse over public funding of Moda Center renovations on Thursday afternoon. Following a four-hour executive session, they presented the Portland Trail Blazers with a draft term sheet detailing what Portland taxpayers should expect in return for contributing at least $120 million to the arena overhaul.
The significance of the draft term sheet is not really in its terms. It was that the City Council, after weeks of balking, at least tacitly agreed Mayor Keith Wilson should send the Blazers the sheet at all.
While the draft itself was not made public, the city’s press office released a summary of its provisions. None is substantially different from what was widely discussed when the Oregon Legislature approved $365 million for the project in April. Those conditions include a 20-year commitment from the Blazers to play home games at Moda Center, labor peace agreements to assure trade union jobs on the renovation, and an annual property tax offset payment that starts at $3 million and escalates over the next 20 years.
None of the ideas bandied about in recent council hearings—including making the Blazers pay rent to the city or securing proceeds from arena naming rights—is mentioned in the draft term sheet description, although they could certainly come back into the discussion as the council debates the funding package in coming weeks.
The City Council’s choice to budge comes as tensions hit an all-time high. In recent weeks, city officials balked at releasing a term sheet before seeing more details of the arena upgrades from the Blazers. The team refused to send more details—and, by some accounts, ceased responding to city inquiries at all.
The deadlock reached a crisis point Tuesday, when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told a press scrum in Las Vegas that Portland arena negotiations “seem to have gone off track” and expressed dismay that a deal wasn’t further along. Public finger-pointing ensued. Wilson and City Council President Jamie Dunphy said the Blazers were stonewalling the city—and people close to the negotiations speculated that new team owner Tom Dundon was ghosting elected officials so they would deny him the money and free him to pursue other markets where sponsorship dollars and luxury-box purchasers are more easily scooped up.
The Blazers, for their part, repeated that Portland City Hall had as much information as anybody. “We share the city’s sense of urgency,” Blazers director of public affairs Charles Boyle said Wednesday. “The next step is for the city to bring a term sheet to the table.”
On Thursday, the city did. Now some very delicate negotiations begin: between the Blazers and the city, between the City Council’s centrists and socialists—and, perhaps, between the city and the county. Two county commissioners, Meghan Moyer and Julia Brim-Edwards, called on Thursday night for the county board to “reset” its own commitment to the Moda Center overhaul and try for a better deal.
