Portland city councilors held a town hall Saturday, offering the public a chance to ask questions about the contentious debate over whether to fund a remodel of the Moda Center.
District 2 City Councilors Sameer Kanal, Elana Pirtle-Guiney and Dan Ryan, as well as City Administrator Raymond Lee, were in attendance at Alberta Abbey to discuss the city’s ongoing negotiations with the NBA franchise Portland Trail Blazers Saturday afternoon.
The 31-year-old Moda Center falls within District 2 and has been owned by the city since Paul Allen’s estate sold the building to the city of Portland for $1 in 2024.
The town hall, scheduled to start at 11:30 a.m., began at noon and lasted an hour, drawing close to 100 people. A moderator asked the panel questions written by the audience in advance.
The event came days after a top Trail Blazers official, granted anonymity so they could speak candidly, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the Trail Blazers and the city were “very far apart” on any deal following the city’s submission of a draft term sheet.
Tom Dundon, the Texas billionaire who purchased the Trail Blazers earlier this year, has said he will not cover any of the estimated $600 million cost to renovate the Moda Center.
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, meanwhile, has pledged the city would pour $120 million into the arena, while state lawmakers have committed $365 million in taxpayer-backed bonds. Multnomah County, which originally pledged $100 million toward the project, has since requested a “reset” on negotiations.
City councilors, who need to approve the city’s funding ahead of an Aug. 12 deadline to deliver a term sheet to the Trail Blazers, remain divided on the specifics of the deal.
Lee, Portland’s highest-ranking non-elected official, said the city’s non-binding term sheet is “the first signal” to the NBA, not Dundon, that the city is committed to the upgrade. The anonymous Trail Blazers official, however, said the deal “gets worse with time.”
“The question isn’t whether it benefits one organization,” Lee said. “The question is whether it advances Portland’s long-term interests, whether it strengthens our economy, supports family wage jobs, encourages private development and investment and helps us compete with other cities for conventions, tourism and also talent.”
Discussions on Saturday centered on the potential economic impact of the Trail Blazers leaving Portland and how the city would fund its share of the renovations. The city of Portland’s Moda Center lease ends in 2030. The draft term sheet hopes to keep the Trail Blazers at the arena for at least the next 20 years.
The District 2 city councilors made it clear that the three levels of government — city, county and state — orchestrating this deal with the Trail Blazers need to be “realistic” that if they don’t remodel the Moda Center, there would likely not be “one economic scenario that’s positive.”
However, Kanal mentioned counterarguments that even if the Trail Blazers leave Portland, the city’s WNBA team, Portland Fire, would still be able to produce a beneficial economic impact for the Moda Center.
But while the Fire set a WNBA attendance record — which has since been broken — of 19,347 fans, the notion of playing at an arena deemed unsatisfactory for a men’s sport but satisfactory for a women’s sport is an “inherently sexist proposition,” Kanal said.
One sticking point in the negotiations is Mayor Wilson’s proposal to put $75 million from the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF) toward the Moda Center deal. While the PCEF is a fund designed to support climate and clean energy projects, some city officials have proposed using the money more broadly.
The mayor and city officials have claimed that a Moda Center rehab would result in fewer carbon emissions than building a new arena from scratch. On Saturday, Lee assured that the renovation would work with the fund’s original purpose.
Kanal pointed out in the town hall that Mayor Wilson is negotiating without “us in the room.” He said he worries that by the time the Portland City Council weighs the draft term sheet’s proposals on Aug. 12, the decision for a Moda Center renovation could feel “gun-to-head.”
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