The model

The questions people actually ask — in numbers

Every figure below comes from the study itself, the deal’s own documents, or public payroll and wage data. Nothing here requires trusting us.

The tax ledger — what actually reaches a general fund

The study says the Blazers generate $940 million in state taxes. The number is real — and almost none of it will ever pay for a school, a shelter, or a pothole. That is not an accusation. It is how this deal and Oregon’s tax code are written, and three facts explain it.

Fact one: Oregon has no sales tax. In other states, an arena throws off sales tax on every ticket and every beer. Oregon doesn’t work that way — here, almost all public revenue comes from income taxes. Those come in two kinds: taxes on profits, and taxes on paychecks. Follow each one.

Fact two: the profit taxes disappear on paper. Buy a sports team and federal law lets you write off the whole purchase price over fifteen years. Tom Dundon paid $4.25 billion, so his books can show roughly $280 million a year in losses Modeled — even in years when Forbes estimates the team actually earned nine figures. Oregon, Multnomah County, and Portland all calculate their business taxes from those same books. Paper losses in, zero taxes out — the state’s corporate tax, the county’s business tax, and the city’s business tax alike. Legal, standard practice, and more effective after a record sale than before it. The write-off, documented →

Fact three: the paycheck taxes get taken by the deal itself. Nobody can write off payroll taxes — players’ checks get taxed no matter what the books say. But the deal’s own law, SB 1501, takes exactly that money — the income tax withheld at the arena, including the Blazers’ own payroll — out of the state’s General Fund and puts it in the fund that pays for the arena: −$72.3M, then −$82.6M every two years, by the state’s own estimate Verified. The 6% ticket fee? Also goes to arena funds. Property tax? The building is city-owned, so there is none — forever (the PILOT paper).

Now the twenty-year ledger, government by government:

• The State of Oregon nets $0–250M Calculated — the study’s $940M is the before picture. Subtract what the arena fund takes back — roughly $700M at today’s rate, more if payroll grows the way the study assumes — and the General Fund keeps somewhere between nothing and $250M over twenty years. What survives everything is one small tax on gross sales that write-offs can’t touch: about $1.5–2M a year Modeled. Against this, the state is putting up $365M — and its repayment plan for that money is the captured tax stream itself.
• Multnomah County + Metro net roughly $80–140M Modeled — the taxes that survive are the ones players pay personally: Preschool for All and the homeless-services tax come straight out of high salaries, and no team bookkeeping can erase them. Roughly $3–6M a year today, growing with payroll. Everything else rounds down: the county’s business tax hits paper losses; the deal’s $3M-a-year payment sits below the $5.1–9.4M floor the county’s own formula calls for Verified; and the one big check the sale itself produced — $35M in business income tax — the county put back into the deal. Its true cost: $138.6M with interest Verified.
• The City of Portland nets about zero ($0–10M) — rent: one dollar. Business tax: paper losses. Property tax: exempt — if Portland taxed this building the way San Francisco taxes the Warriors’ arena, that would be ~$9.7M a year Calculated. Ticket fee: captured for the arena. And the $11M the City already collects from the campus keeps arriving with or without this deal — it isn’t new money. Against this: $120M-plus with debt service.

Add it up, taking the study’s own numbers as the best case: roughly $100–400M reaches all three general funds combined over twenty years, against $848M of public money committed Calculated — 12 to 47 cents on the dollar. The player-tax and sales-tax estimates are honest ranges, not precision, because the team’s actual filings are private. That privacy is part of the finding.

Which is why the fair-deal terms were never optional. In Oregon, the only dollar the public can count on is a negotiated one. Rent, a real tax-equivalent payment, a share of naming rights — those arrive by contract no matter what the books say, and no statute can reroute them. The draft sets them at $1, $3M, and zero. →

The grade

Should councilors use it? As evidence that the franchise generates real statewide value — yes, with the caveats above; it is the most serious effort yet on that question. As evidence for the $573M package, or for the City’s $120M share — no, not in its current form. It measures the wrong quantity, at the wrong level of government, with the machinery hidden. That changes the day the thirteen questions below are answered. (August 6: the author answered the core of questions 1–4 in writing — see the response — and the grades above were revised accordingly, with the changes shown.)

Where it deserves real credit

The category error at the center

The study compares Oregon with the Blazers against Oregon without them. But nobody is voting on whether the Blazers should exist. Council is voting on the terms of a $573M renovation subsidy. Those are different quantities: the first is what the team is worth by being here at all; the second is what the public’s next dollar actually buys. If Intel announced that its departure would cost Oregon tens of billions, that might be true — and it would not prove Oregon should hand Intel any particular check. The value of a thing existing is not the value created by subsidizing it.

Attributing the full $15.2B difference to this subsidy requires an unstated assumption: that without this exact public package, the team leaves with 100% certainty. The study never states, defends, or prices that probability — and the public record leans against it: a lease through October 2030 (team-extendable to 2035) with a clause letting a judge order the team to stay, a $4.25B purchase priced on a team that plays in Portland, and the team’s own April letter proposing to finish a Portland lease by February 2027. Dr. Wilkerson was careful on this in testimony — the counterfactual “isn’t an assumption that that is going to happen; it’s a tool.” He is right: it is a tool for measuring what the franchise is worth by existing. The presentation then let the room read it as the return on the renovation. The missing scenarios are exactly the ones Council must weigh: a smaller renovation; a larger private share; the team staying on its current trajectory; the team leaving despite the renovation. The model contains none of them.

Where the counterfactual falls apart — and what an honest model looks like

The blind-spot-by-design assumption (retitled Aug 6; we originally called this “the dark-arena assumption,” and the author’s response corrected our mechanism — the model keeps the concerts, the Fire, and the Winterhawks). The deeper problem his letter confirms: the model scores locally sourced revenue as zero net impact, and ECONW itself estimates that 80%+ of any events replacing Blazers dates would be locally sourced. So in the real no-deal world — where the City hires a new operator who backfills the calendar and pays rent for the privilege, as Seattle’s operator does after privately financing a $1.15B rebuild — almost none of that recovery can register in this model, and the successor’s payments to the City are outside it entirely. The chart’s persistent losses are not a finding about the building’s future. They are a property of the lens.

Follow that to its uncomfortable end: under the study’s own logic, the counterfactual it never modeled — team leaves, City runs a market process — could produce more direct City revenue than this deal does, because this deal prices the City’s return at $3M a year while comparable operators pay rent on buildings they financed themselves. The study treats the team’s departure as the end of the building’s economy. The City’s own comparables say it would be a re-pricing of it.

What a decision-grade model contains — six components, all standard, none exotic:

• 1 · The actual decision. Model the subsidy’s increment against realistic alternatives — smaller scope, larger private share, current-lease trajectory — not team-exists vs. team-vanishes.
• 2 · A building that keeps operating. The no-deal scenario keeps the arena open under a new operator paying market rent and revenue shares, possibly bringing its own capital — because that is what actually happens to city-owned arenas, not the mothball assumption.
• 3 · A priced departure probability. The honest math multiplies what the team is worth by the chance it actually leaves if this deal fails. The lease to 2030, the stay-or-be-sued covenants, and the team’s own 2027 letter all say that chance is well below certain — and the study sets it, silently, at 100%.
• 4 · Net taxes, not gross. State taxes after subtracting what the deal itself diverts and what the bonds cost — and City revenue on its own line (this deck’s City line is blank).
• 5 · Opportunity cost. $573M of public capital has a next-best use; we model it — any honest analysis must, because “impact” without opportunity cost is just a description of spending.
• 6 · Income people keep, valued in today’s dollars. Not gross output, and not 2045 dollars counted at face value.

Run those six on the study’s own inputs and the story changes from “$15.2 billion” to something like: a real but modest expected value of retaining the franchise, against a public price that exceeds it under every scenario where the team wasn’t leaving anyway — and a no-deal world where the building itself keeps earning. That is the analysis Council has still never been shown, by anyone paid to produce one.

The distinction the vote bundles: tenant vs. operator

The August 6 letter makes it possible to say something precisely that this page previously only circled. The author’s counterfactual removes exactly one thing: “Blazers operations supported by out-of-region revenue and spending by nonlocal Blazers visitors” — the national TV money and the visiting fans. Everything else in the building stays. Which means that whatever the $15.2 billion is, it is a measurement of the Blazers as a tenant.

But the August 12 package is not a tenant deal. It renews, in a single vote, two very different arrangements: the Blazers as anchor tenant, and the team’s affiliate as operator of the City’s building — the concerts, the calendar, the concessions, every revenue stream the arena produces, at one dollar a year of rent. The study prices the first. It is silent, by its own design, on the second: successor-operator activity would be “80%+… locally sourced, and therefore excluded,” and the rent a market operator would pay the City sits outside an economic-impact model entirely.

The second thing is not hypothetical, and it is not small. When Seattle’s city-owned arena went to market, the winning operator privately financed a $1.15 billion rebuild and pays the city rent. Under this same ownership group, Raleigh’s building pays roughly $4.5 million a year. Portland’s draft: one dollar. For the City’s own books, the tenant increment is knowable and modest — the City’s number for its total annual campus revenue is $11.23 million, and its own Spectator Venues Program Manager ties about $80 million of a $482 million twenty-year capital need to NBA basketball — and cautions in the same memo that some of those items would still be needed for WNBA and college games, which makes the NBA-only figure smaller still. The operatorship of the building — the thing being handed over for a dollar — is the big-ticket item in this transaction, and no analysis anyone has produced puts a price on it.

So the question for Council is not “what are the Blazers worth?” It is: price the two things separately. What does the tenant increment justify — and what would the operator concession fetch if it were ever tested against a market, as other cities have tested it? What else would $573 million buy, priced against the same horizon? Nobody has answered either question. The vote bundles them so that no one has to.

The arithmetic that needs showing

Output that equals input. The model retains $14.3B of non-local revenue and reports $14.0B of economic output — identical to within 2%. Either the multiplier and leakage work nets to approximately nothing, or revenue has been relabeled as impact. Six slides cannot tell us which. The full model can.

A revenue base roughly double any public build-up. $14.3B + $7.7B = $22B of revenue “supporting Blazers operations” over 2030–45 — an average of $1.375 billion per year. Public estimates put the team’s current revenue near $350M; even aggressive media-deal growth strains to average half the modeled figure. What’s in the base?

A fiscal benefit the deal itself spends. The marquee $940M in “incremental state tax revenue” is substantially the same stream SB 1501 captures into the Arena Fund to pay for the arena — the Legislature’s own revenue office records the diversion at −$72.3M and −$82.6M per two-year budget out of the General Fund — the account that pays for schools and services. Counting as a return what the legislation pledges as the funding source — without subtracting that diversion or the payments on $365M of bonds — is circular. The net-new-to-services number is the one that matters, and it isn’t in the deck.

Friction for leaving, none for building. The chart charges the departure scenario with years of “disruption” (negative bars deep into the 2040s) while the three-year construction period — in a working arena — shows no displaced events at all. Adjustment costs appear only in the scenario that helps the client.

Smaller, but telling: the construction slide runs on $600M, not the $573M actually committed — a ~5% pad on every construction figure; the $15.2B total adds up nineteen years of future dollars with no discount for time — a 2045 dollar counted as a today dollar; the testimony called 2030–2045 “a 20 year time horizon” — it is sixteen; and a team modeling a $1.4B-a-year revenue enterprise told the same Council, the same morning, that it has “accrued losses of more than $1 billion” and can’t pay for architects. Revenue is not profit — but the audience is being sold both stories at once: too big to lose, too poor to contribute.

The City has its own economist — and he said this cannot be done

Portland did not need to borrow the team’s economics. The City has commissioned its own economic-impact study of the Rose Quarter, from Crossroads Consulting Services, delivered to the Office of Management and Finance in August 2023. It is a conventional, transparent piece of work: it names its model (IMPLAN), and it makes the adjustments a careful analyst makes — stripping out spending that would have happened locally anyway, accounting for money that leaves the region, adjusting for players who live elsewhere half the year. For FY 2022–23 it found the Trail Blazers and the whole Rose Quarter campus generated $631 million in total output supporting 5,940 jobs across the Portland area in a year.

In the spring of 2026, the City went back to that consultant with the exact question this vote turns on. On May 29, the City’s Spectator Venues manager wrote: “The key question from our elected officials is how much economic activity is lost if the NBA team is no longer playing in the building.” On June 5 he confirmed the engagement and said why the timing mattered: the update would be “a reference point in the conversations City Council will be having about the renovation project and the City’s funding component this July.”

Then the City’s own consultant said the analysis could not be done reliably. On June 5, 2026, Crossroads’ project manager wrote back:

The City’s reply, the same afternoon: “Got it. Thank you for this explanation.” (464128-0587_PRR.)

Read that against what happened next. Separating the Blazers’ economic footprint from everything else the building does is not a footnote to the July 30 presentation — it is the presentation. A number for what Portland loses if the team leaves requires knowing which activity leaves with it. The City’s own retained economist, working from the same operator’s data, put in writing that the separation would be subjective and hard to defend. Eight weeks later Council was shown $15.2 billion by the team’s consultant, and was not told that its own consultant had flagged the problem. Nothing in the records shows the City’s update was ever completed.

The fix: release the Crossroads engagement, any draft or completed update, and the instruction that ended it — and put the City’s own 2023 study in front of Council beside the team’s, before the vote.

And the City’s own engineers already priced the no-NBA building

There is a second City answer to the same question, and it is arithmetic rather than modelling. Before Portland bought the arena, it commissioned a facility condition assessment from Venue Solutions Group. On June 3, 2026 — three weeks before Council’s first work session — the City’s Spectator Venues manager sent the Deputy City Administrator a memo doing exactly what no one has done in public: costing the building with the Blazers in it, and then without them.

City of Portland internal memo, June 3, 2026, on the 2024 Venue Solutions Group facility condition assessment. Verified

The gap between the second and third line is $80 million. That is the City’s own estimate of what NBA basketball specifically adds to two decades of capital need — locker rooms, the team store, the family and media rooms, the courtside club, sports lighting, broadcast cabling and production suites. Everything else on the list — roofs, elevators, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, structure — the building needs whether or not the Blazers are in it, because the Fire, the Winterhawks, college basketball and every concert need a working arena too. Roughly five-sixths of the twenty-year capital requirement is not about the NBA at all.

Two more sentences in that memo deserve to be read aloud before any vote. On the lease clause the team wants released: “The City has successfully enforced this provision, ensuring the ongoing obligation to improve Moda Center remains effective despite bankruptcy claims brought by RCM’s predecessor in interest.” That is the City’s own assessment that the first-class obligation has already survived a court fight — and that it “potentially may be able to recuperate some of the FCA’s deferred maintenance costs if the NBA team were to leave.” And on who would run the building in that scenario: “it is also possible a new third-party operator may be willing to contribute to some capital costs in exchange for a long-term operating lease” — the market test, proposed by the City to itself.

The study, slide by slide

What follows is the entire presentation — all five content slides, reproduced for review and comment, each followed by what to notice. Per Dr. Wilkerson’s testimony, the work was commissioned by the Trail Blazers and conducted “in late fall and early spring” for the state-funding push in Salem (SB 1501, the law that pledged $365M); Council saw it for the first time on July 30. There is no report, no appendix, and no named model behind these slides — yet.

Review · the provenance

Commissioned by the team for the state-funding fight; dated July 2026 on the cover but, per the author’s own testimony, completed around the spring session — then shown to Council for the first time on July 30, six days before public testimony. “If we’ve had this since the spring and I’m just now seeing it… that’s troubling to me,” said Councilor Mitch Green — an economist by training. A study’s timing is part of its content.

Review · the load-bearing slide

The base: $14.3B non-local + $7.7B local = $22 billion “supporting Blazers operations” over sixteen years — an average of $1.375B a year, against public estimates of team revenue near $350M today. No build-up is shown. (Questions 2 and 3.)

The asterisk: “Non-local revenue *” carries a footnote marker — and no footnote appears anywhere in the deck.

The study’s revenue base, 2030–45$22B

Build-up from public estimates (~$350M/yr growing with the media deal) Modeled≈$9–11B

Roughly double any public build-up. The year-by-year table would settle it. (Question 2.)

The caption’s quiet merge: the gray box says the difference represents the impact of “the renovation of the Moda Center and Trail Blazers operations” — the renovation and the franchise’s entire existence, fused into one number. And the no-team comparison redistributes local spending while assuming nothing about the building — as if no one else would ever run it: no replacement operator, no concerts, no Portland Fire. (Questions 5 and 6.)

Review · true of any $600 million

Ripple-effect math (each construction dollar re-spent through the economy, ≈1.57×) applied to the act of spending money. Schools, housing, or bridges built with the same dollars would produce comparable lines — this slide measures spending, not arenas, and says nothing about the best use of the money (we model that). Note the input: $600M, not the $573M actually committed — a ~5% pad on every number shown. (Question 12.)

$600M arena construction≈$942M

$600M housing construction≈$940M

$600M school construction≈$940M

Same construction industry, same ripple effect, any project. The question is never “does spending create jobs” — it’s what $600M should build. The ~$900M opportunity cost, modeled →

Review · the output that equals the input

$14B of “output” against $14.3B of revenue fed into the model — identical to within 2% (see the comparison below). Output is gross receipts, not income; the income line is $10B, before player-salary leakage out of Oregon. (Questions 4 and 11.)

$940M in state taxes is substantially the stream SB 1501 itself captures into the Arena Fund to pay for the arena — the Legislative Revenue Office books the diversion at −$72–83M per biennium from the General Fund. The slide counts as a return what the deal spends as its funding source. (Question 8.)

Claimed “incremental state tax revenue”$940M

Already pledged to the Arena Fund by SB 1501 itself (from the LRO’s −$72–83M/biennium) Modeled≈$700M+

What’s left for schools and services, after the diversion and the bond payments: approximately zero. (Question 8.)

Review · the dark-arena chart

The red bars are the tell. The no-team scenario carries losses deep into the 2040s. [Corrected Aug 6 — see the response section: ECONW clarifies the counterfactual keeps the concerts, the Fire, and the Winterhawks. The persistent losses are the modeled ripple of the Blazers’ nonlocal revenue leaving — and because the model scores local revenue as zero net impact, replacement events (80%+ local, per ECONW) and successor-operator rent, as Seattle’s operator pays, cannot appear in this chart by construction.] (Questions 6 and 10.)

And the orange bars are the other tell: three years of construction inside a working arena, with zero modeled disruption. Friction exists only in the scenario that helps the client. And the $15.2B header simply adds nineteen years of future dollars as if a dollar in 2045 were worth a dollar today. (Question 9.)

Slide 5, corrected — what the chart looks like if the building keeps operating Modeled · illustrative

The gold strip along the zero line is the series the study never models: successor-operator payments to the City — market rent plus revenue shares, roughly $5–15M a year. A sliver at this scale. Still larger than the deal’s $3M a year to the City.

Illustrative reconstruction at the slide’s own scale, in the slide’s own palette. Top: as presented — deep losses persisting to 2045, possible only if the arena’s economy vanishes with the team. Bottom, three corrections: a brief two-to-three-year transition instead of a permanent wound (a successor operator backfills the calendar — activity the model excludes as local, per ECONW’s Aug 6 letter); the renovation disruption their construction bars omit; and the gold sliver they never model — successor-operator payments at market rates (Seattle’s operator financed a $1.15B rebuild privately and pays rent). Assumptions stated, adjustable, and answerable — unlike the original’s. (Questions 6, 9, 10.)

One more thing the five slides never contain: a City of Portland revenue line. Every fiscal figure is a State of Oregon number — a study built for Salem, presented to the council being asked for $120 million. Dr. Wilkerson said it himself: “there are some limitations here as it relates to the city.” That candor is to his credit. The deployment is not. (Question 13.)

The thirteen questions

Each is answerable from the study’s own files — most in an afternoon. Together they determine whether the headline numbers are evidence or advertising.

1. Name the model and release the report. What software and version (REMI, IMPLAN, custom CGE, other), and where is the full report this six-slide deck summarizes?
2. Publish the revenue build-up. The year-by-year table behind the $22B base ($14.3B non-local + $7.7B local): what revenue categories are included, at what starting values and growth rates? How does a ~$350M-revenue franchise average $1.375B per year?
3. Derive the 65%. Category by category — national media, league revenue sharing, sponsorship, gate, arena events — and the treatment of player-salary leakage out of Oregon. What moves the figure to 45% or 80%?
4. Reconcile output to input. Is the $14.0B in output net of the $14.3B revenue fed in? Show the value-added shares and the effective multipliers by channel.
5. State the departure probability. What likelihood of the team leaving, absent this subsidy, does the analysis assume — and what is the impact per public dollar at that probability rather than at certainty?
6. Model the building, not only the team. What does the counterfactual assume about the arena itself? Does it go dark, or operate under a successor hosting the concerts, the Fire, and the Winterhawks — at market rent, per the Seattle precedent? How do the disruption losses change with a going-concern building?
7. Model the middle. Results for the scenarios Council actually faces: a smaller renovation; a larger private contribution; the team remaining on its current lease trajectory; the team leaving despite the renovation.
8. Net the fiscal claim. Of the $940M in state tax revenue, how much is captured into the Arena Fund under SB 1501’s own mechanism (LRO: −$72.3M / −$82.6M per biennium), and what remains for the General Fund after debt service on the $365M?
9. Show the discounting. Are the cumulative figures discounted? At what rate? What is the present value of the 2030–45 stream at 2–3% real?
10. Defend the asymmetry. What disruption to existing arena operations is modeled during the 2027–29 construction, and why do the counterfactual’s losses persist through 2045 rather than reverting fully?
11. Define the jobs. Are the 3,170 and 1,430 figures FTE jobs or job-years? New positions or existing employment “supported”?
12. Fix the horizon. Testimony described “2030 through 2045, which is a 20 year time horizon.” That span is sixteen years. Which horizon do the cumulative figures use — and why does the construction slide use $600M rather than the $573M actually committed?
13. Produce the city numbers. What are the City of Portland fiscal impacts of this deal — the line the deck does not contain — and does ECONorthwest advise a city council to rely on a state-scoped analysis for a city appropriation?

The technical memo — received August 10, published in full

On August 10, ECONorthwest sent this page the complete technical memo — with the team’s permission — covering scope, the REMI framework, revenue classifications, growth rates, the counterfactual design, and full results tables. The instrument worked: asked publicly July 30, answered in writing August 6, methodology released August 10, two days before the vote. As promised, it is published unedited: the memo (PDF, 9 pages).

What it settles

• The $15.2B, decomposed at last Verified — $941.8M cumulative construction output (2027–29) + $14.277B cumulative operations output (2030–45) = $15.2B, all in 2025 dollars, undiscounted. Alongside: $10.1B cumulative personal income, $940M cumulative state fiscal, ~3,170 average jobs.
• The counterfactual keeps the concerts, the Fire, and the Winterhawks — in the methodology itself now, not only the letter.
• “Gross” is the memo’s own word for the $940M — state taxes only, “No local (city, county, or regional) fiscal impacts were estimated,” no SB 1501 netting, no cost side.
• The category error is conceded on page one, dated July — before the July 30 presentation: the analysis “does not constitute a comprehensive benefit-cost or return-on-investment analysis,” which “would compare these benefits with the value and alternative uses of any public contributions.” The study documented its own limits; the deployment to Council ignored them.
• Real conservatisms, confirmed: all locally derived revenue reallocated (zero net impact); players assumed to spend only 10% of salaries in the metro; visitor spending net-new only ($28M base, 3% growth); job-years never summed. Better mechanics than the genre — credit where the document earns it.

What it exposes

• The largest input is still a black box. Out-of-region sources are stated at ~65% of revenue through 2045 — but the memo discloses no revenue levels and no growth rate for that stream. Compensation grows at 7%; visitors at 3%; the biggest line has no number. The $22B revenue base remains underivable.
• 7% payroll growth through 2045 — justified by the media deal’s escalators, then compounded a decade past the deal’s 2035-36 expiry.
• The fifteen-year wound. The memo’s own Figure 4 shows Oregon still below baseline in 2045 — fifteen years after departure, “does not make a full recovery.” The empirical literature finds metro economies absorb team departures with effects near zero; the persistence is a model assumption, and every cumulative figure rides on it.
• $600M, not $573M — the construction shock modeled is the earlier floated ask, and it is source-agnostic: any $600M of Oregon construction produces that $942M.
• Provenance, on every figure: “input data provided by Rip City Management.”

What remains open — now just two asks: the year-by-year revenue build-up behind the 65% (levels and growth), and a sensitivity run — on the post-2036 escalator and the recovery lag. Both are answerable from the model files. This page will publish them when they arrive, as it published everything else.