Everyone But You

The two letters

In January 2024, a senior advisor in Portland’s City Hall wrote a memo about the Trail Blazers. The team wanted public money for its arena — a lot of it — and it wanted the Mayor to go get it.

Rejected. Repeatedly. On principle, in writing.

Twenty-four months later, almost to the day, the team’s counsel wrote to the Mayor’s office about the same request. Not to demand anything. To say thank you.

Same request. Same building. Same team. In 2024 the City refused it. In 2026 the City offered it — unasked, with the team’s job reduced to gratitude and a target list. Everything you need to know about how Portland came to owe $573 million lives in the space between those two letters. This essay is the story of that space.

If you do not live here, read it anyway, because nothing in it is about Portland. The same play is available in every city with a franchise, and it runs in five steps:

1. A window opens. A 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 is not in the room.
2. The price arrives pre-set. Not from the building’s needs — from “market rate,” which means whatever the last city paid.
3. The threat stays authorless. The owner never says “we’ll leave” on the record. Officials and anonymous quotes say it for him.
4. The clock is borrowed. Every deadline belongs to the league and the team, and the governments obey it anyway.
5. The last vote can only say yes. By the time your council holds its first public hearing, the money is pledged, the chorus is hired, and a no vote means being blamed for losing the team.

Portland’s records let us watch all five happen, in writing, with page numbers. Look at the deals the league’s own Portland talking points cite as precedents — Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, Memphis, Charlotte — and you will find the same silence during the months that mattered. The strangest thing six months in the records taught me is that none of it requires anyone to break a law. It requires only comparables: each deal on that list became the benchmark that priced the one after it, until a number no building could justify arrived looking like a market. The one thing Portland did differently — the only thing — was read the documents in time to see the shape of it while the votes were still open. That is the transferable part, and it is the reason this page exists.

First, who I am. I am a Trail Blazers fan. I never wanted the team to leave and never argued it should. What I wanted was for my city to negotiate for it the way a city should negotiate for anything it buys with half a billion public dollars: a price built from evidence, terms written down before the money moves, a record the public can check. In February that seemed like the minimum. So I built a website that took the deal seriously — more seriously, it turned out, than most of the institutions deciding it.

Everything here comes from public records: the City’s own emails, calendars, studies and contracts, obtained under Oregon law and read in full. The complete chronology — every entry cited to its production and page — is at /timeline. The method of this whole campaign fits in five words: don’t take my word for it.

What happened, in four acts

A city that knew the rules

The record opens with a city behaving like a landlord. Portland hired its own arena advisor in 2021. It bought its own economic study in 2023 — flawed, as this site later showed, but answering to nobody’s advocacy — and its own program manager put the City’s actual annual revenue from the entire campus at $11.23 million. When the team came asking, the same 2024 memo you read above recorded the rest of the posture: the team was presenting no capital plan, and was “reluctant to share maintenance information or provide access to the building for inspection.” The City’s rule, stated flatly: “due diligence must be conducted before putting the question to Council.”

It followed that rule. Before buying the arena in 2024, the City commissioned a full engineering assessment of the building. The bridge lease it signed preserved the team’s “first-class” maintenance obligation — a clause the City had already enforced once, through a bankruptcy. Whatever else you conclude from this story, hold on to this: as recently as 2024, Portland knew how to say no.

The turn

The sale of the franchise changed everything, and the record catches the pivot almost to the day. In the summer of 2025, Commissioner Adam Silver publicly declared that the Blazers needed a “new” arena — a statement the team’s own advocacy materials would later cite as a reason to act. On October 23, 2025, Portland’s new Mayor had breakfast with Tom Dundon, the prospective buyer. That evening he wrote to Nike’s CEO:

Read it the way a negotiator would. Seven months before any term sheet existed, the man who would lead the public’s side of a half-billion-dollar negotiation committed — in writing, to a third party — to the outcome. Not “we’ll see what the terms are.” Partnering. To keep and grow.

The machinery followed the sentiment. In November, the “Project Mt. Hood” meetings began: a standing series merging City negotiators, team executives, the team’s consultant and a lobbyist into one invite list. In December, City staff flew to North Carolina with team executives to tour the buyer’s previous arena deal. Somewhere in those weeks the negotiation quietly became a joint venture. From that point forward, across more than 8,000 pages, I could not find one document in which the City demands a term from the team. Not one.

Ninety days in which the number was fixed

This is the window the whole story bends around, and the public was not in the room for any of it. On January 15, a “Moda Center Renovation Conversation” convened a state senator, a county commissioner, the Governor’s office, the Oregon Lottery, City staff, the team, and the team’s lobbyist. Circulated for it: the “Trail Blazers Toolkit” — talking points asserting a $600 million figure on the authority of unnamed “best firms in the nation,” sized, in its own words, to “what types of spaces a market like Portland can sustain.” A revenue target, not a repair bill. The toolkit supplied the deadline (the 2030 Women’s Final Four), the frame (“doom loop”), and the ask (the Legislature’s short session). Nine days later came the thank-you note you read at the top of this page — and by April, a Deputy City Administrator would describe the arrangement in the City’s own words: “partnered for the first phase of the coordination to support the State’s passage of SB 1501.” The wall the previous administration built took two years to erect and one winter to dismantle.

The pace of that winter tells you what was at stake. February 2: the Mayor’s office scrambles — “urgently… the timing is quite sensitive” — to book a twenty-five-minute call for the next day with the Governor, the Mayor, and Commissioner Silver. February 4: a senior mayoral aide proposes giving Salem a funding number “without telling them exactly where that $ would come from.” March: a majority of City Council declines to sign a letter to the NBA — and the letter goes anyway, from three offices, declaring Portland “united and all-in,” sent to meet a deadline the league had set. March 13: Silver comes to Portland — a private meeting with the Mayor in the arena’s Star Room A, then a reception for councilors, invitations handled by the team, its lobbying firm copied.

That same month, the sale closed. Five months later the Mayor described the result to reporters in a sentence that deserves to be carved above City Hall’s door:

Accepted by all parties — in March. Before Council saw a term sheet. Before any economic study was presented. Before, by the team’s own later admission, plans existed at all. The number was fixed, with the league, inside the sale window. Everything the public was shown afterward was downstream of it.

The ratification

Once you see the March lock, the spring reads differently. The listening sessions, the work sessions, the term sheet — all of it was the process of getting the public to approve a decision already made. The tell is what happened to the City’s own analyses. On May 29, the City asked its own economist what would actually be lost if the NBA left — “the key question from our elected officials,” the request says. Crossroads Consulting answered on June 5: isolating the building’s non-Blazers impact from the rest of the Rose Quarter is not feasible, because costs are reported on a combined basis and any allocation “would be subjective and difficult to support.” That answer has never appeared in a public presentation; it surfaced in a records production.

Two days before it arrived, the City’s Spectator Venues Program Manager had priced the building without the team. Of roughly $482 million in capital the arena needs over twenty years, removing every project that could be linked to NBA basketball — locker rooms, the team store, the family room, the media room, the courtside club, sports lighting, broadcast cabling — brings the twenty-year plan to about $402 million. A difference of $80 million. [Correction, August 8: this passage previously said that memo never reached Council. That was wrong, and I thank KATU’s Wright Gazaway for the correction. The memo went to every council office on June 3, 2026, from the Council President’s own policy director, together with the facility assessment, the twenty-year capital plan and the 2022–23 economic impact analysis, ahead of the June 24 work session. The error was mine and the record is the opposite of what I wrote.]

What the corrected record shows is not concealment from Council. It is something more ordinary and harder to fix. Council had the $80 million figure on June 3, in a packet the Council President’s office sent with the note that “the timeline here is ridiculously compressed.” The administration asked that a caveat be highlighted alongside it — that the assessment covers only keeping the building in its current configuration, and so “it is not appropriate to directly compare FCA cost estimates with the potential cost of the proposed major renovation.” That caveat is fair and this site accepts it. The memo carries a second one that cuts the other way and got less attention: some of the removed items would still be needed for WNBA and college basketball, so the true NBA-only number is smaller than $80 million, not larger. Either way, the figure existed, in writing, in every councilor’s inbox, seven weeks before the vote. It never became part of the public case for the deal. What reached the public, on July 30, was the team’s consultant presenting $15.2 billion — a number whose supporting memo, we later learned, sat behind the team’s own release approval. [Update, August 10: the memo was released, with the team’s permission, after this page’s public requests — and is published in full, with our reading, on the model review.]

The team, meanwhile, had gone silent in public while staying busy in private. In June the City Attorney sent seven written questions. The team’s internal emails answered them honestly: “I don’t think our public answers will be well-received.” “We should discuss whether we even respond to this.” “Very much feels like a trap.” A written response was drafted. It was never sent. When the team finally offered the public a reason for its silence — fear of litigation — the City had already delivered the legal cure in writing, twice.

Even the “public conversation” was staged. On July 30, Council’s session with the team’s president was preceded, 45 minutes earlier, by a private prep meeting in City Hall’s Rose Room — the Mayor, the Council President, the City Attorney, and the executive Council was about to question, whose one-hour appearance and early exit had been arranged the day before. Four days later the team circulated a general-contractor cost comparison and booked its architect’s lead for the next design meeting. The public was told there were no plans. Only concepts.

Then, right on schedule, the boosters arrived. On July 16 — the day the term sheet went to the team — a coalition called “We Are Rip City” launched, describing itself as “a broad coalition of Portland restaurants, small businesses, community organizations, and civic leaders,” warning that “if we miss this window, we will not get another.” Its launch materials left one thing out. According to the state ethics commission’s own registry, the coalition’s media contact was a registered lobbyist for Rip City Management/TBI from February 16 to April 9, 2026 — the exact window of the Legislature’s $365 million push — and is a former deputy chief of staff to the Governor. The restaurant owners on that letterhead believe every word they signed; their sincerity is not the question. The question is who organized the chorus, and the registry answers it. The full documentary record of all of this, with every citation, is at /paper-trail and /timeline.

The missteps — with the fair reading printed beside each

This site has followed one discipline from the start: the damning read and the innocent read, side by side, and the reader decides. Here is the whole ledger at once.

The deal, measured

I believe this is the worst modern NBA arena deal an American city has signed. That is a claim about arithmetic, not a slogan, and it is conditional in exactly one way: it describes the term sheet as drafted, and the outcome box above will record what actually passed. On the metrics, as drafted:

• The public share: $573 million of initial capital — roughly the entire construction cost — from City, County and State, for a building whose tenant is owned by a group that just paid over $4 billion for the franchise. Comparable deals: /deals and /councilor-comps.
• The rent: one dollar per year — against roughly $4.5 million in Raleigh under the same owner, $2.4 million in Oklahoma City, $1.6 million in Minneapolis, $1 million in Orlando. The chart: /the-model.
• The building’s own arithmetic: by the City’s internal analysis, only about $80 million of the $482 million twenty-year capital need is tied to NBA basketball — less, by the memo’s own caution, since some of it would still be needed for WNBA and college games — yet the NBA tenant is the argument for the entire package.
• What the public gets back: no guaranteed private minimum anywhere in the term sheet; an arena fund the state’s own revenue office scores as capturing tens of millions per biennium from the general fund; and $11.23 million in actual annual city revenue — the City’s own number. The full accounting: /public-balance-sheet.

“Worst” is a comparative claim and I hold it to comparative discipline: on public share, rent, revenue participation, and enforceable private commitments, I have not found a modern NBA deal that combines all four this unfavorably. Show me one and I will publish the correction, dated, as this site always has.

Added August 8, four days before the term-sheet vote — a prediction, so this page can be graded later. Between now and December this deal will improve, and every improvement will be ranked by its cost to the owner, not its value to the public. What fans pay will move first: the ticket fee. Government accounting will move second: bonding language, fund mechanics. Optics third: reporting. The owner’s own cash will come last and smallest, and the recurring terms — rent, revenue share, naming rights — will not come at all. The deal will improve by roughly the price of the seventh vote, and not a dollar more. If December delivers real rent, a recurring share, or a binding private minimum, I will print this paragraph’s failure beside it.

What we accomplished — and honestly, what we didn’t

Start with the thing that made Portland different, because it is the point of everything else on this page. In every other city on the league’s comps chart, this process happened behind closed doors, and the public learned the price retrospectively — from economists’ post-mortems, years after the ribbon was cut. Portland is, as far as I know, the first city where the extraction was documented in public, in real time, from the government’s own records, while the votes were still open. Portlanders did not have to wait a decade to find out how this was done. You could watch it happen. The owner will very likely get his money. What he did not get was the dark.

What worked

• The record is public before the vote, not after. 879 dated records, cited to the page, while the decision is still open. Whatever happens on the 12th, no one gets to say they didn’t know.
• Things exist in writing because someone kept asking. The economist’s support memo is now acknowledged to exist — and, as of August 10, released and published in full. The seven answers exist in draft. The admissions from two work sessions are on the record. Silence, it turns out, is a statement too — but only if someone counts it.
• The bar moved. County amendments demanding scope before money. Councilors demanding the methodology behind the headline number. Reporters asking who accepted $573 million, and when. I don’t claim credit for all of it. I claim the conversation in August does not resemble the conversation in February — and that was the aim.
• Blazers fans became civic actors — and this is the part I did not expect and care about most. People who came for basketball stayed to read a term sheet. They learned what a guaranteed maximum price is, what revenue sharing means, why a dollar of rent is a policy choice. They testified. They emailed councilors who had never heard from them about anything. A fandom is a civic muscle that mostly gets used for cheering; for six months, Portland’s got used for governing. Whatever the vote says, that muscle is stronger than it was in February, and it does not only work on arenas.

What didn’t

• The number never moved. $573 million entered the process in March and will likely leave it in March’s condition, untouched by public scrutiny — because it was never on the table in public.
• Money still precedes scope. The votes are being taken before the plans exist. That is the failure everything else flows from, and we did not stop it.
• The information regime held. The NDAs, the withheld attachments, the unanswered questions — the asymmetry survived every challenge, including ours.
• The honest one: the fight was probably lost before it started. The decisive window was January to March, inside the sale process, and the public — including me — did not know there was a contest until it was over. That is not despair; it is the single most important lesson here, and it is about process, not effort: a city that only mobilizes when the term sheet appears has already lost.

Who is responsible — and what I call it

Responsibility here is layered, and naming the layers matters more than naming a villain. The league built the structure: thirty franchises, more cities wanting one than have one, and a commissioner whose job is converting that scarcity into member revenue — a job he does exceptionally well, which is an indictment, not a compliment. The sale window was the mechanism: for ninety days the league, the seller, the buyer and the governments all needed the same thing — a closed deal. The league was in that room. The team was in it. Three governments were in it, along with their lobbyists, their consultants and their press advisors. Everyone was in the room but you. The Mayor’s office made the decisive local choice: partnership over negotiation, months before terms. The state supplied speed without scrutiny. The councils and boards treated the information they were denied as an inconvenience rather than a reason to stop the clock.

Beneath them sits the quietest layer: the expert class. A city that needs arena advice hires from the arena industry — consultants who have spent careers on both sides of this table and internalized its rules as physics. Ask them whether a deal is “market rate” and they answer honestly, by their lights: they benchmark it against what other cities gave away. In a market where every prior price was extracted the same way, the comparable-deals method launders the extraction into a standard. The one sentence a city most needs from its advisor — this market is rigged, and the comps prove the rigging, not the price — is the one sentence the industry’s alumni are professionally incapable of writing. Nobody in that room is lying. That is what capture means.

Then there is the personnel chart, because the capture is not only intellectual. The team’s public voice in this fight is a former press secretary for Oregon’s previous governor. The “grassroots” coalition’s media contact is a former deputy chief of staff to the current one — and was the team’s registered lobbyist during the session that produced the $365 million. The City advisor who wrote the saner-timeline memo of January 2024 reappears, two years later, on a Legislature email address, sending the invitation to the meeting where the toolkit was circulated. The Governor’s office sat inside the standing design meetings; a Metro official sat inside the Council President’s drafting thread. None of this is conspiracy — a conspiracy would require secrecy and effort. This is staffing: a small set of people rotating among the offices that were supposed to check one another, until the deal could be done in a back room and handed to the front rooms for the stamp. By the time the public’s representatives got their turn to deliberate, everyone who mattered had already agreed — because everyone who mattered had already worked together.

Within those layers, four names belong on the record together: Wilson, Wagner, Lieber, Vega Pederson. They made the pledges; the record of what they demanded in return is empty. Not thin. Empty. Be precise about that word, because the City did ask. On June 15 the City Attorney put it to the team in writing — how much private capital is the team willing to contribute, what annual rent is it willing to pay, and on what basis. Those questions are in the record, and they are the right questions. But a question is not a demand. Nobody attached a consequence to the answer, the team drafted answers and shelved them because they would not be “well-received,” and the schedule moved on regardless. Asking without a consequence is how a government produces a paper trail instead of a return. I want to name that failure precisely, because it is neither stupidity nor conspiracy: a difficult negotiation was available, and they could not stomach it. Testing the threat, demanding the drawings, holding the money until terms existed — that would have been hard, uncomfortable, slow. Saying yes was easy. So hundreds of millions that could fund the things this city and state say they cannot afford will flow to the arena fund instead, tens of millions per biennium by the state’s own scoring, because comfort won. The ribbon-cutting will be lovely. The invoice arrives for twenty years.

To be precise about what the record does not show: no one pocketing anything, no law broken that I can point to, and small-dollar ethics enforced scrupulously. These are public servants who believe keeping the Blazers is good for Portland — and about that much, they are right. What the record shows is a thing that never needs a lawbreaker: a city’s institutions converted, one meeting at a time, into the delivery mechanism for someone else’s price.

What Portland should build instead

The Mayor says Portland needs to prove it can do hard things and build big projects. I agree completely — which is exactly why this process deserves everything written above. A city does not prove it can build by saying yes quickly. It proves it by running a process so predictable and so airtight that everyone — teams, leagues, developers, voters — knows what dealing with Portland means: fair, fast, and priced by evidence.

A public-assets deal charter for Portland

1. Scope before money. No vote commits public capital until a scope of work, budget breakdown and risk plan exist — the county’s own amendment language, made standing policy.
2. A guaranteed maximum price and named responsibility for overruns, in the first document, not the last.
3. The market test. Every operating arrangement for a public venue is priced against third-party operation — the City’s own staff proposed this in an internal memo; it should be policy, not a footnote.
4. Transparency by default. No NDA may cover the methodology behind any number presented to a public body; consultant work cited in a public decision becomes public on presentation.
5. Information preconditions. A body that has asked written questions does not schedule the vote until they are answered in writing. Silence pauses the clock. It never runs it.
6. No borrowed clocks. Deadlines asserted by a counterparty are evidence to be verified, not calendars to be obeyed.

And a national ask — which now exists

Commissioner Silver does not need Portland to design the fix; he has had the power to build it for a decade. He has not, and I have stopped believing that is an oversight — the city-versus-city auction is worth too much to the sellers. So the cities have to force the question. No coalition of host cities has ever jointly demanded a compact with the league. Not once, in the league’s entire history.

So we wrote one. It is called the Fan Compact, and everything I learned reading 8,000 pages is compressed into five rules that would have made this deal impossible:

1. Show us the numbers. Before any vote.
2. Put in real private money. Owners build with owners’ money first.
3. Tell taxpayers what they get back. A number — not a dollar a year.
4. Prove relocation threats are real. Or don’t use them.
5. Same rules in every city. No more auction.

Read that list against this essay and you can watch each rule catch the thing that actually happened here. Article I is Exhibit A left blank. Article II is the guaranteed private contribution of zero. Article III is the dollar-a-year rent. Article IV is the threat nobody would sign but everybody priced. Article V is the auction that made all four possible — and it is the reason this has to be a league rule rather than a Portland ordinance. One city refusing the ransom just moves the ransom to the next city.

The NBA says its teams are civic institutions. Civic institutions accept civic terms. The question I would put to the league, and the one I hope reporters keep putting to it, is not whether Portland got a bad deal. It is simpler and much harder to duck: which of those five rules is unreasonable?

What remains, concretely

This deal is not over on August 12. The lease negotiation runs through December. A final Council decision follows. The county’s conditions need enforcing, records requests are still pending, and what they return will be added to the timeline. This site stays up, the archive stays public, and corrections will be honored and dated. My own role will shrink — by design. The point was never that one person should have to do this. The point is that no one should have to.

To the fans

One more thing, and it is the thing I care about most. Throughout this process, the deal’s arithmetic has treated Portland’s fandom as worthless — a given, a rounding error, a thing that will show up and pay regardless. Every number in the term sheet prices the team’s scarcity. Not one prices ours.

But an NBA team is only a civic good because a city makes it one. Thirty years of sellouts in a small market. The loudest building in the league, for teams that often didn’t deserve it. Your hours, your money, your best memories — my best memories. That devotion is the asset this entire deal is secured against, and the people who hold it were the only party never represented at the table.

So here is my last request, as I step back. Keep loving this team — that was never the question. But remember what you now know. The record of how this was done exists, in public, with page numbers. The next time someone tells Portland the clock has run out and the price is the price — pull up the record, and start the meeting over.

And do one thing for the city that gets this next. Somewhere right now — Memphis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, San Antonio, a city that doesn’t know it yet — someone is about to spend their summer the way I spent mine, discovering far too late that the number was settled in a room they were never in. They should not have to start from nothing, the way we did. The Fan Compact is what I wish had existed in February: five rules, written down, that a fan in any market can hand to their council before the clock starts.

Owners are organized. Players are organized. We are the only ones who never were — and the only reason any of it is worth anything.

Sign the Fan Compact →