Pot, Meet Kettle: The Oregonian on Moda Center

The Oregonian Gets Some Things Right on Moda — But Should Look in the Mirror First

The Oregonian’s editorial board dropped a piece today taking aim at elected officials they think have been too hot-headed in their public commentary about the Moda Center negotiations. As usual with the O, there’s something worth engaging with buried inside a piece that leads with finger-wagging they should probably reserve for themselves.

Let’s start there

Bill Oram — one of the authors attached to this editorial enterprise — has been anything but measured on social media toward anyone who dares question handing hundreds of millions of public dollars to the new Blazers ownership group. We’re talking expletive-laden posts aimed at skeptics. So when the editorial board lectures Portland’s elected officials about professionalism and hot takes, the self-awareness gap is… significant. This is a publication that has a long and well-documented habit of tone-policing the left while extending generous interpretive charity to the pro-corporate, pro-development lane. Today’s piece is that pattern on full display.

That said — and this is important — the O isn’t entirely wrong.

The public information rollout on this deal has been a mess. The ownership group’s posture has essentially been “take it or leave it,” and elected officials stumping for a deal have too often substituted enthusiasm for explanation. That combination has created a vacuum, and reasonable Oregonians — people who love this team, who want the Blazers to stay, who understand what the franchise means to this city — have been left without credible answers to basic questions. What exactly does the public get in return for its investment? What are the trade-offs? Why now, when public services are being cut at the state level and homelessness continues to rise?

Those aren’t radical questions. They aren’t anti-Blazers questions.

The O also sets up a straw man when it implies that critics don’t want a deal. From what I’ve actually seen and heard, the elected officials being criticized largely do support a deal. They support the team. They understand the economic and cultural value of the franchise to Portland. What they’re saying — and what’s being mischaracterized as absolutism — is that they won’t sign off on a bad deal. And by most honest comparisons, what’s being contemplated here would be an extraordinarily unfavorable deal relative to what other cities have negotiated in similar situations. Don’t take my word for it — take Chris Dudley’s. A former Blazer, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, and a man who helped launch the Rip City Forever campaign to keep the team in Portland. He’s as pro-Blazers as it gets. And even he has been publicly asking the basic questions: Is ownership contributing anything? What does the public-private partnership actually look like? Is there an ironclad commitment that the team stays for the length of the deal? When someone who literally wore a Blazers uniform is raising those questions, calling skeptics out for supposedly extreme positions isn’t analysis. It’s spin.

Cheap Seats

The O is right that Moda is the city’s liability — we took ownership in exchange for a dollar, and at some point we’ll have to reckon with that. But “we’ll have to deal with it eventually” is not the same as “we must deal with it right now, on this timeline, on these terms.” Context matters. We are in a moment of real fiscal strain. Opportunity costs are real. The fact that the building is our problem doesn’t mean we have no leverage — it means we need to use that leverage wisely.

I’ll also say what the O conspicuously avoids: the identity of the ownership group is not an irrelevant detail. We’re being asked to subsidize a deal led by a man who has faced penalties for predatory lending that harmed Oregonians, and a partner with documented ICE detention arrangements in other states. I understand that once someone is wealthy enough, we’re apparently supposed to set that aside and focus on the business at hand. I don’t accept that premise. Who we do business with as a city matters. It’s a legitimate question — not a smear, not a distraction.

Here’s the bottom line: everybody should want a good deal. The Blazers matter to Portland. Keeping the team here matters. But ownership and the officials advocating for this deal have to go out and earn public support. They have to answer the hard questions credibly. They have to make the affirmative case that the benefits outweigh the costs and explain what those trade-offs actually are. They are losing people every day they don’t do that — not because Portlanders are unreasonable, but because they’re not being treated as adults who deserve a real answer.

Portland should not be the poster child for the race-to-the-bottom strategy that NBA ownership groups and the league have perfected — threatening to leave, manufacturing urgency, and waiting for desperate cities to outbid each other into bad deals. We are better than that. And if this ownership group wants Portland to be their home, they should start acting like it.