The Moda Center is really two things: the Blazers’ home court — which is theirs, and stays theirs, in every scenario on this page — and a public building’s operating contract: 200+ event nights a year of concerts, shows, suites, concessions, parking, and naming, on an arena Portland owns. The first is sole-source by nature. The second has a market price. The only instrument that reveals it is competition.
The market test is not a threat to the team, and it has no predetermined winner — the incumbent operator can bid, and may well win. A test the incumbent wins still succeeds, because the winning price is the market price. That is the entire point.
The negotiation treats these as one bundle. They aren’t — and unbundling them is where the City’s leverage lives.
Only the Blazers can be the Blazers. Their home-court tenancy is guaranteed by the signed non-relocation covenant (ESA §1.3) and strengthened in the City’s July 17 draft — specific performance, clawback, a parent guaranty. Nothing about a market test touches the team’s tenancy. In every peer model below, the team plays every home game in the building.
Managing the building the other 200+ nights: concerts, family shows, suites, concessions, parking, sponsorship, naming. This is a commercial services contract on a public asset — the kind national operators compete for routinely. Portland has awarded it sole-source, twice, without ever asking what it’s worth. Its price has never been tested.
A bilateral negotiation has positions; a market has prices. Every other term on this site — rent, the PILOT, private capital, revenue sharing — is an argument inside a two-party room where the City has no visible alternative. Arguments move negotiations by inches. Alternatives move them by contracts. A competitive process is the only demand that changes the City’s fallback rather than its rhetoric — and negotiation outcomes track fallbacks, not rhetoric.
The test works before it runs — that’s the design. An incumbent facing a credible process doesn’t wait to be outbid in public; it improves its offer so the process never matters. This is ordinary procurement behavior, not game theory exotica: the moment a benchmark solicitation exists, every term the City asks for stops being a favor and becomes a price the incumbent can simply choose to match. The strongest outcome is the one where no rival ever operates the building — because the incumbent met the market first.
And it is the only real way to learn what the operating contract is worth. An appraisal estimates. A consultant benchmarks. A bid commits — it is the only number backed by someone’s own money. Portland is about to sign a 20-year lease on a $573M publicly funded renovation without ever having asked the one question every other procurement asks: what would the market pay for this? Guaranteed NBA and WNBA tenancy, a hockey tenant, a concert market of 2.5 million people, and a newly renovated building — operators pay for far weaker packages. Until someone is allowed to say what they’d pay for this one, every “market deal” claim on both sides is an assertion.
From 2004 to 2007, the Rose Garden was run by a national third-party operator — Global Spectrum, hired by Portland Arena Management — while the Blazers played every home game in it as the tenant. The model being described here isn’t imported; it is this arena’s own operating history. The history →
Third-party venue operation is a competitive national industry: Oak View Group (OVG360), Legends / ASM Global, and AEG all operate major arenas, and concessions specialists like Levy and Delaware North compete for the food-and-beverage layer alone. And the deepest-pocketed potential bidder of all is Rip City Management itself — the incumbent knows the building’s economics better than anyone, which is exactly why its competing bid would be the most informative number in the whole process. The test has no predetermined winner. It has a predetermined output: the price.
A request for information on management terms for the post-bridge operating contract: what would qualified operators pay, invest, and share for these rights? Costs nothing, commits nothing, fires no one, requires no vote against the team. It simply produces the number the negotiation is currently missing — and under SB 1501 §6(2)(a)’s own logic, market information is exactly what the State is supposed to gather before terms are set.
One sentence of Council policy: if final lease terms do not meet the peer market documented in the state’s own comparables, the City will open a competitive process for the post-bridge operating contract. The bridge lease runs to October 2030 (extendable to 2035) — the calendar does the negotiating, and no one ever has to raise their voice. The team’s tenancy is expressly reaffirmed in the same resolution.
The no-bid award was a choice — Council, sitting as the Local Contract Review Board, exempted this contract from competition (Ordinance 191857, findings 17–19). Declining to renew the exemption for the pieces that are routinely bid — operations, non-game programming, development — restores the default every other public contract lives under.
Sequencing note: Move 1 is the first domino, and it is deliberately the cheapest. A single RFI produces a market reference that disciplines every line of the term sheet — rent, capital, revenue share, naming — at once. That is why it belongs before the August 12 vote, not after.
Ask Council for the three moves: the benchmark solicitation now, the dated resolution, and no sole-source renewal. The Blazers stay. The contract gets priced. Everything else on this site follows from that number.
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