Owners are organized.
Players are organized.
Fans aren’t.
Big-league teams have taken $33 billion in public money for their venues — under no league rules for how they ask. Five rules end the auction:
- Show us the numbers.
- Owners put in real money.
- The public gets paid.
- Prove relocation threats — or drop them.
- Same rules in every city.
If we pay, we get a say.
They use your love for your team against your city
The knot in your stomach when the relocation rumors start — that dread is not a side effect. It is the product. The league prices your fear and sells it to your own government: taxpayers against fans, thirty cities against each other, while franchise values climb on the one thing no owner ever paid for — your hours, your money, your whole heart.
A million uncounted fans are a mood. A million counted fans are a force.
The only force that has ever rewritten a league’s rules is the people the league cannot exist without. Be countable →
What your name actually does
- The league officeDelivered to Commissioner Silver and the Board of Governors, every signature attached — copied to the players’ union.
- Five marketsFans and officials in five NBA cities make this a national standard forming, not one city’s complaint. San Antonio is already live.
- City adoptionsAny council can write the five rules into its own process tomorrow. One city is a policy; five are a standard.
- The playersOne locker room saying fans deserve what players won turns a policy argument into a basketball story.
- CongressBipartisan bills to end the stadium-bond subsidy are already filed. Signatures make their constituency countable.
It keeps going until one question gets answered in every market: players bargain collectively and owners govern collectively; why don’t fans and taxpayers have basic protections when they’re asked for hundreds of millions? The day the league answers that in public, this stops being a petition and starts being a negotiation.
— of 19,393 signatures — one sold-out Moda Center
Delivered to Commissioner Adam Silver and the Board of Governors, copied to the players’ union, the day the count could fill Moda Center. 19,393 is the building’s basketball capacity. A petition delivered early is a press release; at arena scale, it is a constituency. Every response, and every silence, is logged here with a date.
One group already proved this works
A franchise’s value is mostly capitalized fan loyalty — and everyone this league needs holds a document protecting their share of it, except the people who create it.
Their own rulebook — and its Article 43 makes it enforceable by members alone. Everyone else is written out.
A 676-page union contract with audit rights — won by organizing, 1954 to 1967. It made basketball investable.
No agreement, no standards, no seat. In Portland: $573 million in, one dollar a year back, from a franchise that just sold for $4.25 billion.
Fans are the only group still waiting for their 1954 — and the waiting has a price: $33 billion over fifty years, 73% of construction in the typical deal. The whole table, documented from the league’s own papers: who has power · how the NBA works.
The longer version
Fans build the asset with decades of devotion, then pay for it three times over — at the gate, on the screen — and then, when the arena bill arrives, through their governments, for permission to keep paying.
Players faced exactly this math once: individually powerless, collectively indispensable. In 1954 they founded the NBPA — the oldest players union in the four major U.S. leagues — and bargained their way from no leverage at all to a contract that guarantees them a share of basketball-related income that can never fall below 49%. The league that fought them became richer than ever alongside them. Nobody today argues the players’ union destroyed basketball. It made basketball investable.
Widen the lens and the players’ story turns out to be the rule, not the exception. Everyone this league needs has a document. Owners have the NBA Constitution. Players have a collective bargaining agreement with a guaranteed revenue share and audit rights. The networks hold eleven-year, $76-billion contracts; the sponsors and licensees hold theirs. Host cities negotiate alone, thirty separate times, against all of the above. And fans sign terms of use. Next year the price looks like somewhere else. It always looks like somewhere else — until fans stop waiting.
The auction runs the same play on every city
We documented one from the inside — 8,000 pages of our own government’s records, in real time. The play has five steps, and it has run for half a century, to $33 billion and a median 73% public share, by the most comprehensive academic count:
- A window opensA sale, a lease expiry, an “aging” building. For ninety days, the league, the seller, and the buyer all need a closed deal — and the public isn’t in the room. Portland receipt: $573M “accepted by all parties” in March, inside the sale window — before any public hearing. The whole story →
- The price arrives pre-setNot from the building’s needs — from “market rate,” which means: whatever the last auctioned city paid. Portland receipt: the bill’s own sponsor, on camera — “what they wanted from the state… that’s what we tried to put together.” No architectural drawings existed. The blank check →
- The threat stays authorlessThe owner never says “we’ll leave” — on the record. Anonymously, his own officials price the move out loud, while the signed position stays “relocation is not our preferred outcome.” The threat does its work precisely because nobody ever has to own it. Portland receipt: a “top Blazers official,” granted anonymity, to The Oregonian: “It’s not like we lose money moving the team… It might be OK to spend a billion dollars on a relocation fee if the valuation of the team doubles. Of course you would do that.” And: “if they don’t want us, then that’s fine.” The Oregonian, July 2026 →
- The clock is borrowedDeadlines arrive from the league and the team — letter deadlines, session deadlines, “windows that won’t come again.” Portland receipt: a Council majority refused to sign the NBA loyalty letter; it went anyway, from three offices, to meet “their deadline.” The record →
- The last vote can only say yesBy the time the public’s representatives deliberate, the money is pledged, the chorus is hired, and a no vote means being blamed for losing the team. Portland receipt, August 6, 2026: council met to amend the term sheet. Eleven amendments reached a vote. Zero passed. Rent on a city-owned building leased for $1 a year: failed. Private capital from an owner who paid $4.25B for the team: failed. One sentence directing the mayor to negotiate any return: failed, 6–6. And councilors established on the record that this was their only door. The session →
Every city fights this alone, and that is exactly why every city loses. Academic economists are as unanimous as their field ever gets — in one poll of leading academics, 80% of those answering agreed subsidies cost taxpayers more than they return; a 2023 review of 130+ studies found the same. You cannot fix a thirty-city problem one city at a time. Only one institution spans all thirty markets. That is what a league is.
And the league already capped an auction like this — its own. A salary cap stops owners bidding each other into ruin over players; revenue sharing moves ~$400 million a year so no small market falls out of the game. In one market the owners are the bidders, and in the other they are the auctioneer. The Compact asks for nothing more exotic than what the league already gives itself: a cap on a ruinous auction. The rulebook, translated into money →
More Portland receipts
On “market rate”: asked, six days before the vote, where the number came from, the Mayor answered: “There’s nothing written down, but we used our discussions with the NBA to frame what a market rate deal is.” The consultant hired to check the number was checking whether the deal was “acceptable through the NBA and the team.” The price was defined by the party being paid.
On the borrowed clock: by August 6, a councilor was saying it from the dais — these are “quick timelines and I think sometimes… fabricated timelines.”
The money comes from the communities the league says it champions
Public money is not abstract — it comes out of the budgets that fund schools, shelters, and buses, and it lands hardest on the people with the least. The league that created a $300 million foundation for Black economic empowerment is financed by $33 billion drawn, again and again, from those same communities — Portland’s single deal is nearly twice the foundation’s entire decade. No arena presentation has ever been required to show who actually pays. Article I ends that.
The ground under Portland’s building
The arena district stands on lower Albina — the historic heart of Portland’s Black community, the neighborhood the West Coast once knew as Jumptown. The first thing that displaced its residents was the construction of the arena campus itself: the Memorial Coliseum, in the 1950s. Then the freeway. Then the hospital expansion. The Eliot neighborhood alone lost 3,000 people — half its residents — to involuntary displacement in a single decade.
History of Albina · Fair Housing Council of Oregon · Albina Vision Trust
Seventy years later, a $573 million public package is being routed through that same ground — and when Portland’s draft term sheet asked the team to commit to community partnerships in Albina and fund public benefits, a top team official dismissed the provisions anonymously to The Oregonian: the team “already partners with organizations and doesn’t need the city to interfere,” with nearly every provision “a non-starter.” On that land. And the draft’s school payment, as written, reached only one district — county commissioners had to draft an amendment just to demand that the county’s other, poorer districts be included at all.
A league that paints its courts with commitments to Black communities has never once had to defend, out loud, taking its arena money from those same communities’ budgets. If it believes that is defensible, it is welcome to make the argument in public, on the record, in every city it asks. It has never had to before. That ends here.
Five rules. One league. Every market.
A national standard for fans and cities when teams ask the public for money. The principle: if the NBA asks communities to invest in its franchises, communities get basic negotiating rights in return.
Show the numbers
When a franchise seeks significant public money, the public receives the full financial picture before any binding vote: proposed public and private contributions, lease economics, operating revenues, development rights, and the material assumptions behind every headline figure — including who actually bears the cost, broken out by income level and by neighborhood. No number presented to a public body may rest on methodology the public is not permitted to see.
Owners build with owners’ money first
League policy establishes a presumption of substantial private capital in any facility from which an owner takes substantial private benefit. Public financing is the exception that must be justified — never the default source of arena capital for a league whose franchises sell for billions.
The public gets paid
Where taxpayer capital is invested, the agreement identifies what taxpayers receive in return — rent, revenue participation, repayment, equity, or other quantifiable value — benchmarked by an independent expert against comparable agreements, not by studies the beneficiary commissioned.
No hostage negotiations
A franchise seeking public money may not imply relocation it cannot substantiate. Any genuine relocation process requires long minimum notice, disclosure of bona fide competing offers, and time for the home market to respond — and a community that has built a franchise’s identity for decades retains its name, colors, and history if the franchise departs.
One clock, one set of rules
These standards apply identically in all league markets, and no franchise may impose artificial deadlines that outrun independent analysis and ordinary democratic process. This article is the keystone: applied everywhere at once, it ends the auction — because “another city will pay more” stops being true when every city plays by the same rules.
One city tried these rules alone. Watch what happened.
On August 6, 2026 — six days before its final vote — Portland’s city council spent an afternoon attempting, without knowing it, to write this Compact into its own arena deal. Eleven amendments reached a recorded vote. Read them against the five articles above:
- Article I — show the numbers. A required report on every funding source and its opportunity cost, 30 days before any vote. Failed 5–7.
- Article II — owners build with owners’ money. A defined private-capital contribution from an ownership group that paid $4.25 billion for the franchise. Failed 5–7.
- Article III — the public gets paid. Rent on a building the city owns and currently leases for one dollar a year. Failed 6–6. A share of naming-rights revenue. Failed 5–7. A single sentence directing the mayor to negotiate any return at all. Failed 6–6.
Not one passed — and never because the ideas were bad; councilors praised them while voting no, afraid to weaken a negotiation their city had not yet reached. That is not a story about Portland’s council being unusually weak. It is what the auction does to every council. These rules are unwinnable one city at a time and unremarkable all thirty at once — adopted league-wide they cost no owner a competitive inch. They cost only the auction.
The afternoon in detail — and the math beneath it
Watch the last amendment. It changed no term in the deal. It added a single line telling the mayor to go get some return — any return — on the public’s money. Its author had cleared it in advance, exactly as instructed. And minutes before the vote, the mayor was asked from the dais whether he wanted a return on this investment and answered: “Absolutely… it’s absolutely at the core of what we’re trying to do.” It failed, 6–6. A room that agreed on the goal could not vote for the sentence — and everyone in that room knew why: a city that moves first, alone, is a city volunteering to be the cautionary tale.
Beneath the politics sits seventy-year-old math. In 1956 the economist Thomas Schelling showed why the side with the next negotiation always beats the side without one. The league has a next negotiation — thirty of them, forever. It can never concede rent in Portland, because San Antonio is watching. A city has no next time, so a city can always concede — and everyone at the table knows it. The only move a once-a-generation player has ever had is to become a permanent one. That is what signing this does: it gives the public side a next negotiation, in every market, forever.
Every piece of this has happened before
Nothing in the Compact is unprecedented. Every piece has already happened — and the sport survived all of it.
Green Bay proves the model
The Packers become a publicly owned nonprofit — 539,000 fan shareholders in the league’s smallest market, with more championships than any NFL franchise. The NFL’s constitution now bars any new community-owned team.
Players refuse to take the floor
Minutes before the All-Star Game, NBA players refuse to play until the league guarantees a pension plan — on the spot. The union they build goes on to guarantee players a share of defined basketball income that cannot fall below 49%.
Sacramento calls the bluff
Voters reject the arena question 71–29 — the tax itself, 80–20 — and keep their team anyway. When the owners try to move it, the league itself blocks the relocation 22–8 and steers the sale to local buyers.
Fans kill the Super League
Twelve of the richest clubs on earth announce a breakaway league. Organized fan revolt drives every English club out within 72 hours — and by 2025 the UK has an Independent Football Regulator with statutory power, operating today.
And signing works even if the league ignores it, because the NBA’s business runs on favors from Congress — a 1961 law letting it sell thirty teams’ TV rights as one package, and tax-free stadium bonds that have cost federal taxpayers $3.2 billion since 2000. Bills from both parties to end that favor are already filed, and Congress answers to the exact people this page is asking to sign. You don’t have to boycott a single game. You just have to be countable.
The Compact at full strength
The five articles are the floor. The ceiling is the players’ road, walked again: institution first, everything into contract, and withhold what you supply at the moment it is worth the most. For once the calendar favors the public — three doors open by 2029, and behind each one the league is the party that needs something:
- Expansion (now–2028). Reported at $7–10 billion a team — but the seller needs host cities, arenas, and civic yes-votes.
- NBA Europe (target 2027). The league is writing a brand-new rulebook for a continent where fans already hold rights American fans don’t — and where a billionaire breakaway died in 72 hours. Every protection written there becomes a question here.
- The labor agreement reopens (notice due October 15, 2028). The definitions that power the machine go back on a table.
That third door hides the keystone: the labor contract excludes arena subsidies and stay-inducements from the pool players share — so half of every subsidy dollar is money the players never see. Counting public money in Basketball Related Income is a bread-and-butter union demand with fifty fan bases behind it.
Count the public’s money in the players’ pool, and the subsidy stops being the owners’ most efficient dollar.
The four pillars of the full package
- The institutionAn association of host communities — and a federated fan organization with membership and continuity. The league only negotiates with counterparties that exist.
- The contractThe five articles hardened to labor-agreement grade — every instrument already exists in executed form somewhere in the thirty-team record. It has simply never been demanded as a package.
- The leverageCoordinated bidding floors, the players at the 2028 table, attention made countable in the streaming era, and legal exposure held in reserve.
- The legal floorState law where contracts can’t reach: Modell statutes, voter thresholds, statutory standing — the direct answer to Article 43.
The full package, unabridged
The institution. The twenty-eight metro areas where the league’s thirty teams play (New York and Los Angeles each host two), plus both expansion markets, adopting shared model terms. The proof it matters: Seattle extracted the only cash in NBA relocation history because a drafted lease existed; players hold 49–51% because a union existed.
The contract. Audit rights for public capital; a private-capital floor; rent that services the bonds and naming revenue where the public owns the building; relocation votes raised to three-quarters — today, moving a team requires less consent than selling one — with Sacramento’s executed standard (declining damages, a negotiation ban, the heritage clause) as the league minimum and a share of any relocation fee going to the abandoned city’s bonds; a sale-participation covenant so public capital shares the appreciation it funds; minority community ownership permitted; and subsidies counted in BRI. The catalog of executed examples: every instrument, sourced.
The leverage. An expansion city pledged to the model terms is a relocation threat that stops working. The courts treat league rules as reviewable concerted action, and the old broadcast-law safe harbor does not clearly cover the streaming money. How fast contracts move this league: a jilted network sued on a Friday and had a decade of consideration by November.
The legal floor. Dallas voters capped their share in 1998 and the cap has held for a quarter century. Oregon currently has none of these statutes — that is a to-do list, not a tragedy.
And name the endgame honestly, because it keeps this coalition broad: not the abolition of public investment — communities will sometimes choose to invest in the places where they gather. The fight is for priced capital: public money disclosed like capital, conditioned like capital, participating like capital, enforceable like capital. The players’ union never ended owner power; it ended unpriced player labor. The Compact at full strength ends unpriced public capital — and unpriced fan loyalty. The whole map: /who-has-power.
To the players — and to Commissioner Silver
To the players: everything fans are asking for here, you already fought for and won. You were once exactly where fans stand — indispensable and powerless, priced one at a time. Nobody is asking you to march or to bargain; only to say, publicly, what your own history proves: constituencies that build this league deserve a seat in it.
And there is a harder-edged reason, in your own contract. Article VII excludes arena subsidies and relocate-or-remain inducements from Basketball Related Income — when a city hands an owner half a billion dollars, half of that value would have been yours had it arrived as revenue. The owners wrote the public’s money out of your split, and your opt-out notice is due October 15, 2028. Demanding it back would cool the subsidy auction in every host city at once. The clause, documented →
No roster is better built to say it than Portland’s — a locker room heard on three continents, anchored by two of the most respected voices in the sport. Nobody has asked them. This page is the ask.
To Commissioner Silver: this reads as a challenge, and it is one — but read it again as an opportunity. You are, by wide agreement, the most capable executive this league has ever had, and history will file all of it under commerce — because no commissioner, in any American sport, ever, has given the fans a seat. The one who ends the arena auction does something none of his predecessors attempted. The working group in Article V’s ask is yours to convene, and this page will record the day you do it as gladly as it records anything else.
And there is a rulebook on your desk right now. NBA Europe launches in 2027 — sixteen teams, twelve cities, bids reported above $500 million apiece — into a continent where fans already hold what American fans do not. In England, the Football Governance Act 2025 gives supporters a statutory say over their club’s name, crest and home colours, consultation on ticket prices, and a regulator whose approval is required before a club can move its home ground. In Germany, the members of a club must hold the majority of its voting rights. Those laws cover football, not basketball — the NBA arrives unbound by them, free to write whatever it likes. That is precisely what makes the question unavoidable.
When you write the fan protections into NBA Europe, what will you tell a fan in Milwaukee about why she doesn’t have them?
European fans did not receive those rights because a league offered them. They organized — and their governments wrote it down. That is the only route anyone has ever taken to this destination, and it is the one this page is asking American fans to take now. The alternative is a league that treats its founding market as the one place where fans need no protection at all.
And Commissioner — this is no longer a Portland conversation:
“Last couple years it seems revenue, money, finance driven is the job and I don’t know if that’s the job… In this case, you should care about Portland… This would be a really bad one.”
Bill Simmons, The Bill Simmons Podcast, August 2026 · the clip
When the loudest friendly voice in basketball media and an anonymous team official are describing the same machine from opposite directions, the question stops being whether it exists. The question is who fixes it — and that seat, Commissioner, is still yours.
The case study with page numbers
Portland’s arena deal was documented while the votes were open — 8,000+ pages of the government’s own records, published with citations. The Compact’s five rules look the way they do because each one blocks a move you can watch happen in the file.
The “no” caucus already exists. It just hasn’t met yet.
Every person on this list was told what Portland is being told this week: say no and lose everything. The scoreboard: four public no’s where the team stayed or is staying, two departures where the city came out ahead, zero ruined cities.
Voters say no, 71–29
The arena question lost 71–29, the tax itself 80–20; the Kings stayed a decade — and when the owners tried to move them, the league itself blocked the move 22–8 and forced a sale to local buyers.
Sen. L. Louise Lucas blocks $1.5 billion
One Senate Finance chair kept $1.5 billion in arena bonds out of the budget. The Wizards and Capitals re-committed to downtown D.C. within weeks — “we avoided the Monumental Disaster.”
Frank White vetoes the stadium tax
A Royals Hall of Famer vetoed a sales-tax extension worth “over $2 billion from our residents.” The legislature overrode him; voters backed him, 58–42. The Chiefs and Royals are still there.
Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones calls for a vote
Facing a $489 million city share and a $158 million deficit, San Antonio’s mayor is calling for a citywide vote this November before the public’s money moves, while calling on the team’s billionaire owners to put in more — residents are split and council members oppose even allowing the vote, in a city staring at that deficit. And the county’s deal already extracted ~$500M of private construction capital — where Portland’s draft guarantees zero.
Mayor Jerry Weiers ends the arena deal
Glendale declined to renew the Coyotes’ agreement. The team left; the city-owned building became a concert venue the local press calls transformed and thriving.
Council President Nick Licata holds the line
Licata fought a $200 million bailout and backed I-91, the voter-approved fair-return rule. The Sonics left — then a private operator rebuilt the city’s arena with $1.15 billion of its own money, pays rent, and Seattle sits first in line for expansion.
This list is running — Portland belongs on it too (the record credits its officials by name), and Article V’s working group is the table where the “no” caucus finally sits down together. Know an official who said no and belongs here? Say so in the signature form.