Price the contract.
Keep the team.
The Blazers’ home court is theirs in every scenario on this page. The building’s operating contract — 200+ event nights a year on an arena Portland owns — has a market price, and the only instrument that reveals it is competition.
The single highest-leverage move Council can make: competitively bid the arena operating contract — not the tenancy. The Blazers stay the tenant in every scenario; the market prices everything else.
$1.15B Verified — the private financing Seattle’s city-owned arena drew when it went to market.
No one has to guess what rent, naming, or revenue shares are worth. A bid sheet answers all of it before Council signs.
How these numbers fit together
The same scope, escalated and repeated over 20 years: $505M. Inside it: ~$164M genuine repair, ~$341M revenue-generating upgrades.
This is the current number. The earlier “$600M ask” you may have seen was the floated figure this draft replaced.
The balance sheet’s ~$850M–1B modeled core sits inside this range.
Not the $2.5M-per-year maintenance reserve — that is a separate recommended term.
Verified primary document · Calculated arithmetic from verified inputs · Modeled assumptions disclosed & adjustable. Every line’s paper trail: the Public Balance Sheet.
One building, two different contracts
The negotiation treats these as one bundle. They aren’t — and unbundling them is where the City’s leverage lives.
The tenant: the Trail Blazers
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.
The operating contract
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.
Why this is the City’s strongest card
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. A competitive process is the one demand that changes the City’s fallback — 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. 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 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 asking the question every other procurement asks: what would the market pay for this? Until someone is allowed to answer, every “market deal” claim on both sides is an assertion.
The team-as-tenant model is the record
It has already happened in this exact building
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 history →
It’s in the state’s own benchmark study
- Minneapolis: Target Center is managed by Legends under a revenue-sharing formula with the city — and the Timberwolves pay $1.6M/yr rent as the tenant. (State PFM comparables summary, July 9.)
- Orlando: the city itself operates the Kia Center through Orlando Venues; the Magic pay $1M/yr base rent, and the city keeps non-NBA event revenue plus a share of naming and suite sales. (Same study.)
- Seattle: the city put its arena to a competitive process — the winning operator privately financed the entire ~$1.15B rebuild and pays the city rent. The bid didn’t cost Seattle its teams; it bought Seattle a building. And Portland doesn’t have to import the expertise: the administration’s own March 30 email says “The Seattle Climate Pledge Arena term sheet has garnered quite a bit of interest as an example for Portland to follow, and Mr. Hirsh led that on behalf of the City” — describing Carl Hirsh, the negotiator Portland currently has under contract (public records production 467663-0001 Verified). The only open question is the mandate he’s given.
The market is deep — and the incumbent is in it
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.
At the July 30 work session, a councilor asked why the City never ran even a request for information — not a bid, just information — with other arena operators to learn what market rate is. Staff’s answer, per the session’s caption record: the incumbent relationship made it impractical, and it “probably needed to start a few years ago.” The market test has now been declined on the record — which means the only market price Portland will ever see is the one this page assembles from other cities’ deals.
What Council actually does — three moves, none of them a threat
Issue a benchmark solicitation — before August 12
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 produces the number the negotiation is 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.
Adopt the dated resolution
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.
Don’t renew the sole-source exemption
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.
The objections, answered
“This threatens the Blazers.”
“The operator and the team have to be the same company.”
“A bid process is hostile.”
“There’s no time.”
“What if no one bids, or the bids are weak?”
The price finally should be.
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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