Renovate Moda. Keep the Blazers.
Get a market deal.

Let the market tell us. Portland is being asked for ~$1 billion with no competitive process — the operator role was exempted from bidding by Council’s own choice (Ordinance 191857, findings 17–19), not by law. Only the Blazers can be the Blazers’ home team, so no one is bidding that out. But construction, district development, and non-game operations are routinely bid — and operators like Oak View Group, ASM, AEG, and Legends compete for exactly this work. When Seattle bid out Climate Pledge Arena, OVG privately financed the ~$1.15B renovation with no public construction subsidy. A market test doesn’t cost us the team — it tells us what the upgrade is really worth before we commit a public dollar.

No — the opposite. Renovate the Moda Center, keep the Blazers, sign a long lease. The only question is the terms. And no vote leaves the team homeless: the Blazers already hold the right to play every home game, fee-free, at Memorial Coliseum across the plaza (ESA §1.2.3). “Approve fast or they have nowhere to play” is contractually false.

One principle: if public money builds it, the public shares in it. A fair lease gives the public six things the state bill requires none of: (1) the owner helps pay for the building he profits from; (2) rent — he pays $1 a year today; (3) a share of the new revenue the upgrade creates; (4) the Rose Quarter on the tax rolls, with affordable housing; (5) a real penalty if the team ever tries to leave; (6) published terms and a hard cost cap before any money is committed.

It’s the deal the Blazers’ own owner already signed. Renovating Raleigh’s arena, Tom Dundon agreed to rent ($4.5M→$5.5M/yr), his district on the property-tax rolls, development milestones ($200M by year 5, $400M by 10, $800M by 20), 6% ground rent, and 10% affordable housing — all secured by the public side’s negotiator. Portland is asking its new owner for the same deal he already calls workable, somewhere that isn’t Portland.

Yes, and it’s specific. Under SB 1501 §5, the state cannot issue a dollar of arena bonds and no tax-capture money can flow until the City signs the lease and makes binding commitments. The statute calls its own protections the floor — required “at a minimum” (§6(1)(d)). Everything above that floor is Council’s to negotiate, through one act: not committing the money until the terms are in writing. That is the power to set the price of “yes.”

Read the two enacted laws. SB 1501 contains no deadline at all. SB 5701 — the actual bond bill — splits the $365M: the $200M tranche can be issued through June 30, 2027 (six and a half months after the claimed cutoff), and the $165M can't be issued until the biennium starting July 1, 2027 — so 45% of the state money cannot lapse in December under any scenario, and even the June 30 line carries forward by statute (ORS 286A.035(4)) until the next bond bill passes. So where does “December” come from? The state's own XI-Q bond manual schedules a readiness checkpoint about three months before the biennium's last bond sale (early spring 2027) — back-calculate and you land on December. It's a scheduling preference, not a law; the City's own page even schedules the binding vote for Q1 2027, after the “deadline” it cites. If a hard date exists, it lives in a document — ask whoever asserts it to produce the statute, bond resolution, or Treasury calendar.

A package built from peer-city benchmarks and the owner’s own Raleigh numbers is worth roughly $1.1–1.2 billion over 20 years, counted once — against close to nothing today ($1/yr rent, and the 6% ticket fee diverted into the Arena Fund before it reaches the General Fund). Even the conservative floor — what an average city negotiated — is $450–600M in offsets, plus a tax-equivalent PILOT, before the relocation-protection stack. Every figure is derived and sourced at ripcitynotripoff.com/terms.

The City already holds a preserved claim that the operator keep the arena in “first-class” condition (Lease §5.4, §10.2) — the City’s own study puts the accrued repair near $164M. Don’t let it be quietly waived in the final documents (watch for a lease styled “superseded and replaced,” or a “novation”); credit it against any public contribution. And require every public return — rent, PILOT, revenue share — to be paid to the City directly, never into the Arena Fund, where the public would just be paying itself.

A few reasonable process gates: separate the lease vote from the funding vote; publish the draft lease and the full revenue waterfall 30 days before either; and release the benchmark study SB 1501 §6(2)(a) already requires — an independent review of comparable NBA arena deals in similar-sized markets — before the vote. If the deal is fair, daylight only helps it.

No. This is the substance, not a script — so you can press the negotiating team where it counts. A published public benchmark actually strengthens the City’s own negotiators (“my constituents have a number I can’t sell below”). Council holds the pen. The ask is simply this: use Portland’s leverage to get the terms in writing before the money moves, not after.