The Moda Deal Everyone Actually Wants

Everyone on Oregon’s side of the negotiation table wants the same thing.

The mayor wants the Blazers in Portland for a generation. So does the governor. So do the senators who moved a $365 million funding bill through Salem in weeks. So does every councilor who has asked a hard question, and every fan from the luxury suites to the 300 level.

The loudest fight in Portland politics is a fight between people who agree.

So why does it feel like a war? Because it serves one party — exactly one — for Oregon’s leaders to spend their strength on each other instead of on the negotiation.

While the mayor spars with councilors, while Salem loses patience with Portland, while editorial boards scold and lobbyists whisper in councils ears that their careers are on the line, the only two question that ever mattered sits at the center of the table, untouched:

1. What are we buying? And why?

2. What does the public get back for the largest public commitment to a sports facility in Oregon’s history?

Six months in, the answer to the first question remains unanswered. No released plan. No list of what the money buys. No rationale for why this is being demanded.

As for the second question, Dundon answered it at the Portland Metro Chamber meeting on June 24th: Zero dollars from ownership. No rent. No revenue share.

How could it be that 6 months into the public conversation on this topic, we are being asked for $600M+ and have no idea why? And why were the people who could ask those questions maneuvered into arguing with each other instead of asking the most basic of questions? Why are our leaders not negotiating, together, with the one man who profits from their arguing?

This essay aims to end that. The divide-and-wait strategy that Dundon has been deploying has one critical weakness: it only works in the dark. When we name every move before it’s made, the whole charade collapses.

Three sentences were spoken this week. Together they tell the entire story.

The team’s spokesperson said the Blazers cannot share the final renovation plans with the city until the city commits to a financing plan. Read that again. The public is being asked to commit nearly $600M first — and see what it bought second. This is not a critic’s spin: these are the team’s own words, on the record, to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The same statement complained that “the prospect of litigation” is poisoning the talks. What litigation? No one has sued anyone. A city councilor asked about a clause in the lease the team already signed, the written promise that holds Rip city Management (the Arena operating entity owned by Dundon that operates all the concerts, Fire games, and other events) to keep the arena in first-class condition. The city’s negotiators are simply doing their jobs by putting a dollar value on that promise. The city reading its own contract is now, according to the counterparty, an act of aggression.

Even Mayor Wilson, the deal’s most devoted champion, wrote: “We don’t yet have all the information we’ll need to negotiate successfully. We’ve asked for what we need, and when we receive it, we’ll review it together.”

Let’s all sit with that. The team is not just stonewalling its critics. It is stonewalling its own champion. The mayor says he has asked for the plans, and the answer from Dundon is “wait”. The councilors asked for a list of what the money buys; six months, and still nothing. The governor and legislature moved mountains in February and March on a promise of partnership; but the plans they were promised remain in a drawer. The blackout is total — ally and skeptic alike — because the same documents that would answer the critics would also reveal what ownership already owes via their first-class obligation, and therefore what the public should actually charge.

An owner in this position has exactly six moves left. Here is each one, what it looks like, how it’s designed to work on you, and why it dies the moment it’s understood.

Keep one pattern in view as you read: every move on this map is a bet that Oregonians don’t know something.

What it looks like: Silence. Dundon lets December pass. Lets the coalition exhaust itself. Come back in a year or two to a more anxious city and name a better price.

How it’s designed to work: On your fear. Waiting feels like his weapon — the billionaire outlasts the city, so take whatever’s offered now.

Why it dies in daylight: Run the actual clock. He paid $4.25 billion for this franchise on one thesis: a renovated Moda Center prints money. This is the same play his group ran in Raleigh, where a rebuilt Lenovo Center sent suite revenue and sponsorships (and ticket prices) through the roof. Every year of silence delays that payday. Meanwhile the maintenance obligation in his existing lease — a nine-figure question the city is pricing right now — keeps growing. The state’s $365 million, which the law itself calls only a “current intention,” must survive another legislative session every year he stalls. And the construction calendar he needs for 2030 burns a summer at a time.

Now run the public’s clock: the city keeps its building, its money, its claim, and its options. The clock everyone assumes is pointed at Portland is pointed the other way. The Waiting Game works only if you don’t know whose meter is running.

Now you know.

What it looks like: This is never an explicit threat. Just a shadow. A ghost city with a “more business-friendly environment.” “Other markets are interested.” The word “relocation” hovering over every headline.

How it’s designed to work: On your love. Portland has adored this team for fifty-five years, and the relocation threat converts that love into a blank check — pay anything, or lose them. This is what the majority of Blazers fans on NBA Twitter are feeling right now.

Why it dies: The team cannot even file to relocate until October 2030 stipulated by the team’s own signed agreement, and confirmed by Wright Gazaway via a KATU investigation this week. And relocate where? The only two markets that would raise the franchise’s value — Seattle and Las Vegas — are reserved by the NBA as expansion prizes worth billions in fees to the other twenty-nine owners. A move into either asks twenty-nine billionaires to vote to burn their own multi-hundred-million-dollar checks. Everything else on the map is smaller than Portland — a sole-team city whose loyalty is already priced into the $4.25 billion he just paid. The Ghost of Relocation works only if you never check whether there is a real market that’s ready, larger than Portland, and would be better short and long term. It doesn’t exist.

What it looks like: Under mounting pressure to finally release the plans — pressure now coming even from the deal’s friendliest editorial pages — expect a release of more gorgeous renderings. Sunlit concourses. Families in bright new seats. Players kissing babies.

How it’s designed to work: On your eyes. A beautiful picture feels like disclosure.

Why it dies: A rendering is marketing. A line-item budget is an admission, because whatever a detailed budget marks as “necessary to keep this an NBA building” is, line by line, a statement of what the operator already owed under the first-class clause in the lease he signed. That is the real reason the plans have stayed locked away while the city prices that clause: the scope document and the maintenance debt are the same document, read from opposite sides. So when the release comes, apply one test: is there an itemized budget that can be checked against the city’s own 2024 assessment of the building? A picture answers “will it be pretty?” Only line items answer the public’s real question — what does the money buy, and which parts did he already owe?

What it looks like: Sometime in late fall — timed for public exhaustion — a gesture arrives. A modest sum. Or, watch closely, an offer to “resolve old lease disputes as part of the new agreement.” It will be presented as “the breakthrough”. He moved. Take the win.

How it’s designed to work: On your fatigue, and on a rigged ruler. Measured against zero, anything looks generous. That’s what six months of zero was for.

Why it dies: Just measure it against the market instead. In every comparable renovation of a publicly owned NBA arena, the owner paid real money: 18 percent in Indianapolis. 26 percent in Atlanta. Roughly a third in Washington, D.C. 62 percent in Cleveland. Plus rent, including the rent this very ownership group pays in Raleigh, a smaller market than Portland.

And watch for the second trick: if the “contribution” turns out to be waiving claims, I.e quietly erasing the maintenance obligation the city is valuing right now, inside a clause reading “superseded and replaced in its entirety”, then nothing was contributed at all. A public asset worth nine figures was deleted and gift-wrapped.

To be fair: settling that obligation at its real value, credited toward the renovation, would be a perfectly honorable way for ownership’s money to arrive. That’s a deal. Erasing it for a handshake is a heist. The difference is a number, on paper, in public. The Token Concession only works on you if you truly believe zero is the baseline. The baseline is 18 to 62 percent.

What it looks like: A proposal — already floated by the Oregonian Editorial Board — to move the negotiation into a small private group: the mayor, a council leader or two, one carefully chosen skeptic. Months later the group emerges from ok high holding “the deal” — finished, blessed by the few inside. The other nine councilors now face an impossible choice: rubber-stamp an agreement they never shaped, or vote no and be blamed for killing it. Nobody took the council’s power away. The council spent it, and twelve independent votes converted into one take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum aimed at their own colleagues.

How it’s designed to work: On your patience with mess. Public process is loud and slow; a quiet room feels like competence.

What it looks like: This is the deepest move on the board, and the one that most needs light right now, in July. But first, let’s say what this move cannot do, because the limits are written into the law itself: the city owns the building; so no lease exists without the city’s signature; and the statute conditions every state dollar on binding commitments from the city and county. There is no bill Salem can write that completes this deal without seven votes on the Portland City Council. The council can’t be bypassed, only pressured.

The Salem Play is the pressure. If the council holds out for real terms into the winter, ownership’s strongest remaining option isn’t in Portland at all — it’s the January legislative session, where the funding bill passed by landslides, where an amendment requiring a private contribution was set aside without discussion, and where the deal’s most powerful friends hold the gavels. The play arrives dressed as responsibility: a new bill “keeping the state’s promise” — but actually written to squeeze. A hard expiration date, converting the law’s open-ended commitment into a countdown aimed at the council. Money conditioned on a lease matching a framework Salem writes, so a council bargaining for rent and a real contribution can be painted as defying “what the Legislature funded.” The groundwork is already visible: all that talk of Portland’s “adversarial environment” isn’t addressed to Portlanders. It’s a case file, assembled for an audience in the Capitol.

Why it dies: Two reasons. First, a January bill isn’t a threat. Done cleanly, it’s the plan working: the statute’s “current intention” language exists precisely so the legislature can renew its commitment with the market analysis finished and real terms in view. The only question is whether January’s bill funds the renovation or leashes the city, and the difference will be visible in the text.

Second, and deeper: notice what this move confesses by existing. The pressure must be routed through Salem because the deal cannot happen without the council. The city owns the building, signs the lease, and supplies the local match the state’s own law requires. A play designed to squeeze the council is a play that admits the council is indispensable. The Salem Play works only as a surprise on a public that thinks Portland can be gone around. Portland cannot be gone around.

Step back and look at all six moves at once.

The Waiting Game needs you not to know whose clock is expensive. The Ghost of Relocation needs you not to check the league’s own math and incentives. The Picture Book needs you to mistake a rendering for a budget. The Token Concession needs zero as your ruler. The Shrinking Room needs nobody asking for the charter. The Salem Play needs a bill nobody reads.

Every move is an information asymmetry play.

All six dissolve in one solvent: an informed public. None of them can be prevented, but every single one can be exposed in advance, named, explained, stripped of surprise, months before it’s played. A move that everyone sees coming no longer works.

And notice what all six have in common, because it’s the most important sentence in this essay: every single one is a way of avoiding a real negotiation with the Portland City Council. The Waiting Game avoids it by outlasting it. The Ghost of Relocation avoids it by frightening it. The Picture Book and the Token avoid it by faking it. The Shrinking Room avoids it by shrinking it. The Salem Play avoids it by going over its head.

Why go to such lengths to avoid twelve city councilors? You don’t spend six months maneuvering around something weak.

Take the six moves off the board and watch what’s left standing. Not chaos or a dead deal. Just the one thing that was always going to have to happen anyway: sitting down with the people Portland elected, and negotiating the terms. Real numbers. Real rent. A real contribution. The ordinary, unavoidable conversation every one of these moves was invented to escape.

That conversation is coming. The only question is whether it happens after six more months of theater, or now.

Where do we go from here? What should we tell our leaders? Let me take a stab at it:

Mayor Wilson: You’ve been this deal’s engine, and this week you told the truth, that the information isn’t there yet. That sentence took more courage than anything else said this month, and it isn’t weakness; it’s leverage. You’re a businessman: you know what it means when a counterparty won’t show the plans to its own partner. Stand with your council as one government, one voice: we want this done, and it gets done when the terms are on the table. The mayor who lands a market-rate deal isn’t the mayor who almost lost the Blazers. He’s the mayor who kept them and got Portland paid.

Governor Kotek, Senator Wagner, Senator Lieber: You moved $365 million in weeks because you believe in this state, and nothing here asks you to regret it. Your own statute contains its own wisdom, a renewable commitment, and a requirement, still unfulfilled, that the state retain an arena-negotiations expert to study what comparable cities got. Fulfill it now. Put the market data on the table and let Oregon bargain informed. And if January comes: write the clean bill. Reaffirm the money; let Portland’s elected council set Portland’s terms. You’ll have kept the team, rebuilt the arena, and never paid for it with the public’s dignity.

The City Council - all twelve of you: The record shows what several of you have said across every ideological line. We have to get information early enough that we’re not forced into a yes-or-no. It’s astonishing that six months in, no one has produced the list of what the money buys. You are not obstructing a deal. You are the only people insisting that a real one exist. Hold that, together, and you make everyone above you stronger.

And to Tom Dundon, because the way home is yours too, and it’s genuinely good: Nobody writing or reading this wants you to fail in Portland. You bought this team because a renovated arena in a loyal, single-team market is a great business, and you’re right. The deal is on the table today. Settle the maintenance obligation your own lease carries and let it count as your contribution — an honorable resolution of inherited business, not a surrender. Pay the kind of rent you already pay in Raleigh. Share a slice of the upside the public’s money builds. Sign the protections every comparable owner signed. In return: $573 million in public capital, a construction calendar that still makes your 2030 deadline, a legislature at your back, and a city that has loved this team for fifty-five years cheering the announcement instead of fighting it. That press conference is available in weeks. Every other path on this map ends somewhere worse — and now everyone can see the map.

Portland was never divided about the Blazers. Portland was divided by a strategy, and the strategy has now been read aloud, every move of it, in daylight, months before it plays out.

It’s over.

What remains is what was underneath all along: a state full of people, from the governor’s office to the 300 level, who want exactly the same thing and finally have no reason left to fight each other instead of negotiating for it.

So negotiate. With the market data the law already requires, the real plans this moment demands, and the simple standard every comparable city met:

The public funds what the public gets. Ownership funds what ownership keeps.

The Blazers stay. The building rises. And the deal becomes one our children and grandchildren read about with pride.

That was always the play.

Every figure, statute, and quotation in this essay is documented at ripcitynotripoff.com.