The City’s image is tarnished because the City is failing. It’s failing because of its silly progressive government. We have city and county spending in Portland that is well above the national average for cities — several thousand per person above average. There is plenty of money if it were spent wisely. But our government and voters don’t want that. They want a failed city. I want to keep the Blazers and arts at the Keller or a replacement. But the Blazers are a bad team partly because of the owner and partly because of the heavy tax burden here, highest in the nation. Good free agents don’t want to come here. It’s a tough question with no commitment by the voters or the government to search wisely for a solution. Read the Oregonian today and you will see why. Another housing project is stalled. There is little actual good news.
Pointing out the heavy tax burden is a good place to start an evaluation process for either of the two venues. Looking downtown, we have seen anchor stores, including mom & pops, leave what used to be prime locations. Why? A trifecta of reasons come to mind. First, crime, trash and lawlessness. Second, high taxes. Third, crumbling infrastructure. The current mix of Portland's governance and dysfunction have not had much success at reversing any of them. However, even the city government could come together on a solution for the two community centers, but I'm wondering at what cost to the remaining survivors?
re "they want a failed city," see Sam Francis' theory on anarcho-tyranny for an explanation of what is going on today (not just in Portland) and for several decades now
"Anarcho-tyranny is entirely deliberate, a calculated transformation of the function of the state from one committed to protecting the law-abiding citizenry to a state that treats the law-abiding citizen as, at best, a social pathology and, at worst, an enemy. Having captured the state apparatus, the anarcho-tyrants are the real hegemonic class in contemporary society, and their function is to formulate and construct the new “culture” of the new order they envision, a culture that rejects as repressive and pathological the traditional culture and civilization."
I find it difficult to believe that a physical facility barely 30 years old must be replaced. What is wrong with it and why is it obsolete after only 31 years? As far as Keller goes, is the structure itself in danger of collapsing? This obsession with "NEW" and "MODERN" needs to be exhaustively questioned. We have already become a throwaway society, rife with waste and shoddy construction. This needs to change.
The issue is the orangizations that control sports teams. Major League Soccer required that Portland's stadium be rebuilt and that no other sports be played there, which caused us to lose our minor league baseball team. Hillsboro then stepped up and built a stadium for a new minor league baseball team. Within just a few short years, minor leauge baseball required so many changes to Hillsboro's stadium they had to build a new one.
Until cities say no to this expensive BS, the sports organization will continue to demand expensive, and most likely unnecesary, upgrades.
Magical thinking. If we have fun events that people show up for, then the doom loop Portland is in will end. The same thinking is behind all the public money being spent on the James Beard Public Market. High crime and high taxes are causing Portland’s doom loop, but those are hard problems to solve, so the leadership in Porltand goes to magical solutions. The same people who defund the police want to fund sports teams.
It's my understanding that the economics of major league stadiums have changed since the Moda Center opened in the mid-90s. Team owners and other interests who make money from games want to offer a broader array of premium experiences that bring in higher revenues. Sky boxes alone won't cut it. In other words, it comes down to money. For them.
That seems to be where Gov. Tina Kotek, the lame duck birdbrain County Chair Jessica Vega Pedersen and Mayor Keith Wilson are pushing the taxpayers at the speed of sound, like it or not. They seem to think fans will come after them with pitchforks and torches unless they give Mr. Dundon the keys to the treasury.
Until the City of Portland government is guided by moderates without a "progressive" ideology, one that prizes *public safety* above ideology -- I am against any further funding of either. Just as I will no longer vote for any library upgrades, education, or any additional tax increases.
The city should sell Moda and Keller to private owners.
I would be fine *without* a major basketball team. Does basketball induces strong citizenry? In a recent city council meeting, 15 minutes was spent (and who knows how much time leading up to it) on awarding Moda Center-associated DJ O.G. One the honor of making Nov. 30 commemorate him!!! It's as if they are oblivious to all the decay and anarchy going on around them.
On the same day, or in the same week (that they honored DJ O.G. One), they passed a bill about "polyamorous families" and "strengthening" the code thereto
City of Portland councilors need to focus on 2 or 3 things: the homelessness and mental illness problem in our streets; fiscal responsibility; public safety. They spend too much time on worthless ideological measures such as the abovementioned and dedicating money to the defense of illegal aliens (while depleting the money allocated to their own defense, which at this point they will probably need).
4 of the councilors belong to the DSA. 4 are LGBTQ. They spend more time on their pet projects and minority constituents (which includes for them their presumably non-voting illegal aliens) than they do on the their majority (sadly silent, but slowing grumbling louder) constituents.
For all the posturing, they are not fiscally conservative. Look at the mess they are doing with the $15 million earmarked for the so-called pilot project of converting downtown office space to residential space -- deludedly believing it will help those who have need of low-income housing. $2500 for a studio is not cheap. No person of low-income can afford it (unless the city subsidizes their rent) -- it's a project (with another $30 million waiting in the offing like kindling to be thrown onto a fire) that will blow up and already is.
Traditionally for me sports>arts but in this case arts>sports. Regardless of what is done to the Rose Garden, the owner will demand more in the future, threaten to move, and rinse/repeat until a new stadium is eventually built.
The budgets of either/both renovation(s) will be over budget, killed by committee/consensus, and screwed up by PC in some typical Portland fashion.
The taxpayer in Portland/Multco/Metro are tapped out at this point. There really is no good solution to this mess except for firing the management that ran things into the ground but the average idiot voter will probably double down on stupid.
The last time I crossed the Steel Bridge, the new Blazers mural on the grain elevators actually invoked "Rip City." Talk about ships that have sailed . . .
What an awful choice: either pay bloated construction costs (as we know they will be) or watch major events go elsewhere and see Portland slip further into irrelevance.
Concerned Oregonian nailed. Debating the wisdom of funding these places requires that we actually believe they exist in a functioning city. And Portland most certainly is not.
This is like arguing over the best way to treat a hangnail while the patient is bleeding out from an artery. I would prefer that governments stay away from entertainment. Not because there is no value in community created venues, whether I use them or not, but because it's just one more thing for them to screw up.
I don't care one way or the other about basketball. And I get it that people have different tastes, but it does kind of bug me that taxpayers are underwriting stuff like this:
Moda tends to be the facility that brings in productions that are culturally more broadly accessible to the working class - sports, concerts, pro wrestling, ufc, etc. Keller is more for the progressive college educated laptop class cultural elite. Good or bad, it’s just true. OBT is very elitist. Second, this market simply has too many multipurpose public spaces - expo center, convention center, memorial coliseum, Schnitzer, Keller, Newmark, pearl district armory. Now PSU wants to build another one.! The convention center bonds aren’t even paid off. This market overbuilds, over-subsidizes, too thinly spreads tax payer and philanthropic dollars (both of which are shrinking because of progressive governance driving away people who cut checks). Then it’s a constant “crisis” to keep these things afloat and keep the underemployed “artists” and non profits with cash on hand. It’s a mini-doom loop within the larger doom loop.
I used to travel to Portland several times a year for entertainment and sporting events. I stayed in local hotels and enjoyed walking or TriMetting to the venue, bars, restaurants, and shopping. I no longer go because I don't enjoy strolling through an open air asylum. I will get no personal benefit from the cost but my tax dollars will be used, like so many other things Oregon spends money on, it's a loss for me.
However, if Portland and Oregon can somehow 'right the ship', it'll be a lot harder to rebuild than maintain/upgrade Keller and Moda. If you're an optimist the right thing to do is spend the money. Even if it feels like begging a billionaire not to move the team.
The massive spending on the homeless (insane and/or addicts) shows the problem. The city wants to provide apartments when it should be treating the addictions and insanity, and making arrests. There should be no giveaways of tarps, tents, or needles. So far, we’re fatally on the wrong path.
For me, the greatest argument against the Moda remodel is that it is owned by the City of Portland largely for the benefit of Portlanders. Why should ALL Oregon taxpayers be on the hook for a billionaire team owner and a property owned by the city of Portland? If they want to upgrade Moda, pass a Portland or county tax measure or make the billionaire demanding the upgrades pay for it. If the blazers leave, so be it. We can still watch every other event there and probably land an NHL team.
The Oregon Roundup piece by Mark Hester is a reasonable overview of the challenges facing Portland's two major indoor venues, and it asks a fair central question: how much should the public pay to keep professional sports and performing arts in the city? But for readers following the Moda Center negotiations specifically, it may leave some important questions unasked.
A disclaimer is in order. The observations here are not those of an expert in arena finance, professional sports economics, or municipal negotiation. They are based on news coverage from sources that seem reliable but are not infallible, and they are offered as questions rather than conclusions.
With that said, here is what is hard to ignore in the coverage of this deal.
The City of Portland owns Moda Center. It acquired the arena from the Trail Blazers estate for one dollar in 2024. That is not a minor detail. In most public arena debates, governments are asked to subsidize a privately owned building for a privately owned team. Here, the public already owns the building. That ownership position would ordinarily be a meaningful source of negotiating leverage — at minimum, a basis for asking what the public gets in return for investing hundreds of millions in a building it already owns.
What the coverage shows, however, is elected officials from the governor on down competing to express enthusiasm for the deal. Whether that public posture reflects a deliberate negotiating strategy or simply an eagerness to get the deal done is not clear from the outside. But it is worth asking. According to available reporting, there is no professional negotiator representing the collective interests of the city, county, and state, while the Blazers have retained Dan Barrett, president of Los Angeles-based CAA Icon, a firm that has assisted in dozens of arena deals. That may or may not be the full picture. But if accurate, it is a meaningful asymmetry at a table where hundreds of millions of public dollars are at stake.
The relocation threat, which has been the primary driver of urgency in this process, also deserves a closer look than it typically receives. Under the NBA's constitution and bylaws, no team may relocate without the consent of the Board of Governors, with approval decided by a majority vote of all members. Portland is a long-established, loyal NBA market. That does not mean relocation is impossible, but it does mean it is not a simple or quick matter. The Seattle comparison is frequently invoked, but Seattle's situation differed in an important way — the city there refused to fund renovations to an arena it did not own. Portland owns the arena and is offering substantial public money. The leverage picture is different, even if it is not being presented that way.
It is also worth understanding what the renovation is actually for. Moda Center is functional. Games are being played there now. The reason 1990s arenas are considered economically obsolete is not that basketball can no longer be played in them. Modern arenas are increasingly designed around premium seating, with luxury offerings now accounting for up to 50 percent of total ticketing revenue despite occupying only 20 percent of available seats. The revenue from those premium spaces flows to the team and related private interests. If public financing is what makes those upgrades possible, it is reasonable to ask whether the public should share in some portion of the resulting revenue stream. That question appears to have been raised and set aside during the legislative process without much public deliberation.
None of this is an argument against the deal. A renovated Moda Center may well be in Portland's interest, and people far more knowledgeable about these negotiations may have good answers to every question raised here. But the public statements coming from Oregon's elected leaders have sounded less like the opening of a hard negotiation and more like a closing argument for giving the new owner what he has asked for. That posture, if it reflects the actual negotiating stance rather than just the public messaging, could leave value on the table that belongs to Oregon taxpayers. That seems worth discussing, regardless of where one ultimately comes out on the deal itself.
Give in to some subprime auto loan mogul from Dallas or lose a losing b-ball team. Which would lead to the city's downfall, we're told. Syracuse lost a team--last I looked, it was still on the map.
Buried deep in the story is this wonderful insight: "...a city like Portland that has long marketed itself based more on livability than economic viability." It's the "economic viability" piece that's in deep doo-doo; the liveability argument went south in 2022.
Any discussion is actually pointless. The Dallas tycoon burped and every leader in the state jumped. You know the fix is in when the socialists don't demand the nationalization of the team and caps on ticket prices. And the DEI gang isn't whining about the team's obvious racial imbalance.
You'll have a remodeled Moda. You'll pay for it. And the Blazers will still be an embarrassment.
IF Portland and the State were thriving this wouldn't be a discussion. At this point its all for naught unless the voters in Portland and Salem bring in leadership that can actually lead Portland and the State to a better future. It will not matter if we have a new arena or new auditorium if there is no one left to pay for the tickets to watch. Portland and the State are staring into the abyss, if we as voters do not change this in November none of this matters....
I took the time to work with an AI to evaluate the finances of fixing either one of those. While it will cost money to fix Keller, directly paid by the taxpayers, the moda center argument is pretty strong for supporting those renovations. There is no doubt that having professional grade entertainment of a high caliber is an important factor in the perception of a metropolitan region.
The City’s image is tarnished because the City is failing. It’s failing because of its silly progressive government. We have city and county spending in Portland that is well above the national average for cities — several thousand per person above average. There is plenty of money if it were spent wisely. But our government and voters don’t want that. They want a failed city. I want to keep the Blazers and arts at the Keller or a replacement. But the Blazers are a bad team partly because of the owner and partly because of the heavy tax burden here, highest in the nation. Good free agents don’t want to come here. It’s a tough question with no commitment by the voters or the government to search wisely for a solution. Read the Oregonian today and you will see why. Another housing project is stalled. There is little actual good news.
Pointing out the heavy tax burden is a good place to start an evaluation process for either of the two venues. Looking downtown, we have seen anchor stores, including mom & pops, leave what used to be prime locations. Why? A trifecta of reasons come to mind. First, crime, trash and lawlessness. Second, high taxes. Third, crumbling infrastructure. The current mix of Portland's governance and dysfunction have not had much success at reversing any of them. However, even the city government could come together on a solution for the two community centers, but I'm wondering at what cost to the remaining survivors?
re "they want a failed city," see Sam Francis' theory on anarcho-tyranny for an explanation of what is going on today (not just in Portland) and for several decades now
https://web.archive.org/web/20051204100306/http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/2005/April2005/0405Francis.html
From the quoted article:
"Anarcho-tyranny is entirely deliberate, a calculated transformation of the function of the state from one committed to protecting the law-abiding citizenry to a state that treats the law-abiding citizen as, at best, a social pathology and, at worst, an enemy. Having captured the state apparatus, the anarcho-tyrants are the real hegemonic class in contemporary society, and their function is to formulate and construct the new “culture” of the new order they envision, a culture that rejects as repressive and pathological the traditional culture and civilization."
wow, from 2005. scary accuracy.
He had actually formulated and expressed the idea much earlier, 1992 I believe.
interesting article...
Good points Democritus. I'll forego reading the Orgonian however...
I find it difficult to believe that a physical facility barely 30 years old must be replaced. What is wrong with it and why is it obsolete after only 31 years? As far as Keller goes, is the structure itself in danger of collapsing? This obsession with "NEW" and "MODERN" needs to be exhaustively questioned. We have already become a throwaway society, rife with waste and shoddy construction. This needs to change.
The issue is the orangizations that control sports teams. Major League Soccer required that Portland's stadium be rebuilt and that no other sports be played there, which caused us to lose our minor league baseball team. Hillsboro then stepped up and built a stadium for a new minor league baseball team. Within just a few short years, minor leauge baseball required so many changes to Hillsboro's stadium they had to build a new one.
Until cities say no to this expensive BS, the sports organization will continue to demand expensive, and most likely unnecesary, upgrades.
truth! why are we letting them get away with this "BS"?
Magical thinking. If we have fun events that people show up for, then the doom loop Portland is in will end. The same thinking is behind all the public money being spent on the James Beard Public Market. High crime and high taxes are causing Portland’s doom loop, but those are hard problems to solve, so the leadership in Porltand goes to magical solutions. The same people who defund the police want to fund sports teams.
It's my understanding that the economics of major league stadiums have changed since the Moda Center opened in the mid-90s. Team owners and other interests who make money from games want to offer a broader array of premium experiences that bring in higher revenues. Sky boxes alone won't cut it. In other words, it comes down to money. For them.
and who pays for these extra amenities? the taxpayer?
That seems to be where Gov. Tina Kotek, the lame duck birdbrain County Chair Jessica Vega Pedersen and Mayor Keith Wilson are pushing the taxpayers at the speed of sound, like it or not. They seem to think fans will come after them with pitchforks and torches unless they give Mr. Dundon the keys to the treasury.
Until the City of Portland government is guided by moderates without a "progressive" ideology, one that prizes *public safety* above ideology -- I am against any further funding of either. Just as I will no longer vote for any library upgrades, education, or any additional tax increases.
The city should sell Moda and Keller to private owners.
I would be fine *without* a major basketball team. Does basketball induces strong citizenry? In a recent city council meeting, 15 minutes was spent (and who knows how much time leading up to it) on awarding Moda Center-associated DJ O.G. One the honor of making Nov. 30 commemorate him!!! It's as if they are oblivious to all the decay and anarchy going on around them.
On the same day, or in the same week (that they honored DJ O.G. One), they passed a bill about "polyamorous families" and "strengthening" the code thereto
City of Portland councilors need to focus on 2 or 3 things: the homelessness and mental illness problem in our streets; fiscal responsibility; public safety. They spend too much time on worthless ideological measures such as the abovementioned and dedicating money to the defense of illegal aliens (while depleting the money allocated to their own defense, which at this point they will probably need).
4 of the councilors belong to the DSA. 4 are LGBTQ. They spend more time on their pet projects and minority constituents (which includes for them their presumably non-voting illegal aliens) than they do on the their majority (sadly silent, but slowing grumbling louder) constituents.
For all the posturing, they are not fiscally conservative. Look at the mess they are doing with the $15 million earmarked for the so-called pilot project of converting downtown office space to residential space -- deludedly believing it will help those who have need of low-income housing. $2500 for a studio is not cheap. No person of low-income can afford it (unless the city subsidizes their rent) -- it's a project (with another $30 million waiting in the offing like kindling to be thrown onto a fire) that will blow up and already is.
Traditionally for me sports>arts but in this case arts>sports. Regardless of what is done to the Rose Garden, the owner will demand more in the future, threaten to move, and rinse/repeat until a new stadium is eventually built.
The budgets of either/both renovation(s) will be over budget, killed by committee/consensus, and screwed up by PC in some typical Portland fashion.
The taxpayer in Portland/Multco/Metro are tapped out at this point. There really is no good solution to this mess except for firing the management that ran things into the ground but the average idiot voter will probably double down on stupid.
"Portland ... has long marketed itself based more on livability than economic viability."
Hasn't that ship sailed? Listed way too far to portside. (Ironically)
The last time I crossed the Steel Bridge, the new Blazers mural on the grain elevators actually invoked "Rip City." Talk about ships that have sailed . . .
RIP OFF CITY?
'Weird' is the new livability.
That ship sailed a couple of decades ago also.
Yes, it was called the S. S. Kiss of Death. Look where that got us.
What an awful choice: either pay bloated construction costs (as we know they will be) or watch major events go elsewhere and see Portland slip further into irrelevance.
Concerned Oregonian nailed. Debating the wisdom of funding these places requires that we actually believe they exist in a functioning city. And Portland most certainly is not.
This is like arguing over the best way to treat a hangnail while the patient is bleeding out from an artery. I would prefer that governments stay away from entertainment. Not because there is no value in community created venues, whether I use them or not, but because it's just one more thing for them to screw up.
I don't care one way or the other about basketball. And I get it that people have different tastes, but it does kind of bug me that taxpayers are underwriting stuff like this:
https://www.portland5.com/event/marvelous-miss-gender-starring-bosco
Two additional points I would offer:
Moda tends to be the facility that brings in productions that are culturally more broadly accessible to the working class - sports, concerts, pro wrestling, ufc, etc. Keller is more for the progressive college educated laptop class cultural elite. Good or bad, it’s just true. OBT is very elitist. Second, this market simply has too many multipurpose public spaces - expo center, convention center, memorial coliseum, Schnitzer, Keller, Newmark, pearl district armory. Now PSU wants to build another one.! The convention center bonds aren’t even paid off. This market overbuilds, over-subsidizes, too thinly spreads tax payer and philanthropic dollars (both of which are shrinking because of progressive governance driving away people who cut checks). Then it’s a constant “crisis” to keep these things afloat and keep the underemployed “artists” and non profits with cash on hand. It’s a mini-doom loop within the larger doom loop.
I used to travel to Portland several times a year for entertainment and sporting events. I stayed in local hotels and enjoyed walking or TriMetting to the venue, bars, restaurants, and shopping. I no longer go because I don't enjoy strolling through an open air asylum. I will get no personal benefit from the cost but my tax dollars will be used, like so many other things Oregon spends money on, it's a loss for me.
However, if Portland and Oregon can somehow 'right the ship', it'll be a lot harder to rebuild than maintain/upgrade Keller and Moda. If you're an optimist the right thing to do is spend the money. Even if it feels like begging a billionaire not to move the team.
The massive spending on the homeless (insane and/or addicts) shows the problem. The city wants to provide apartments when it should be treating the addictions and insanity, and making arrests. There should be no giveaways of tarps, tents, or needles. So far, we’re fatally on the wrong path.
For me, the greatest argument against the Moda remodel is that it is owned by the City of Portland largely for the benefit of Portlanders. Why should ALL Oregon taxpayers be on the hook for a billionaire team owner and a property owned by the city of Portland? If they want to upgrade Moda, pass a Portland or county tax measure or make the billionaire demanding the upgrades pay for it. If the blazers leave, so be it. We can still watch every other event there and probably land an NHL team.
The Oregon Roundup piece by Mark Hester is a reasonable overview of the challenges facing Portland's two major indoor venues, and it asks a fair central question: how much should the public pay to keep professional sports and performing arts in the city? But for readers following the Moda Center negotiations specifically, it may leave some important questions unasked.
A disclaimer is in order. The observations here are not those of an expert in arena finance, professional sports economics, or municipal negotiation. They are based on news coverage from sources that seem reliable but are not infallible, and they are offered as questions rather than conclusions.
With that said, here is what is hard to ignore in the coverage of this deal.
The City of Portland owns Moda Center. It acquired the arena from the Trail Blazers estate for one dollar in 2024. That is not a minor detail. In most public arena debates, governments are asked to subsidize a privately owned building for a privately owned team. Here, the public already owns the building. That ownership position would ordinarily be a meaningful source of negotiating leverage — at minimum, a basis for asking what the public gets in return for investing hundreds of millions in a building it already owns.
What the coverage shows, however, is elected officials from the governor on down competing to express enthusiasm for the deal. Whether that public posture reflects a deliberate negotiating strategy or simply an eagerness to get the deal done is not clear from the outside. But it is worth asking. According to available reporting, there is no professional negotiator representing the collective interests of the city, county, and state, while the Blazers have retained Dan Barrett, president of Los Angeles-based CAA Icon, a firm that has assisted in dozens of arena deals. That may or may not be the full picture. But if accurate, it is a meaningful asymmetry at a table where hundreds of millions of public dollars are at stake.
The relocation threat, which has been the primary driver of urgency in this process, also deserves a closer look than it typically receives. Under the NBA's constitution and bylaws, no team may relocate without the consent of the Board of Governors, with approval decided by a majority vote of all members. Portland is a long-established, loyal NBA market. That does not mean relocation is impossible, but it does mean it is not a simple or quick matter. The Seattle comparison is frequently invoked, but Seattle's situation differed in an important way — the city there refused to fund renovations to an arena it did not own. Portland owns the arena and is offering substantial public money. The leverage picture is different, even if it is not being presented that way.
It is also worth understanding what the renovation is actually for. Moda Center is functional. Games are being played there now. The reason 1990s arenas are considered economically obsolete is not that basketball can no longer be played in them. Modern arenas are increasingly designed around premium seating, with luxury offerings now accounting for up to 50 percent of total ticketing revenue despite occupying only 20 percent of available seats. The revenue from those premium spaces flows to the team and related private interests. If public financing is what makes those upgrades possible, it is reasonable to ask whether the public should share in some portion of the resulting revenue stream. That question appears to have been raised and set aside during the legislative process without much public deliberation.
None of this is an argument against the deal. A renovated Moda Center may well be in Portland's interest, and people far more knowledgeable about these negotiations may have good answers to every question raised here. But the public statements coming from Oregon's elected leaders have sounded less like the opening of a hard negotiation and more like a closing argument for giving the new owner what he has asked for. That posture, if it reflects the actual negotiating stance rather than just the public messaging, could leave value on the table that belongs to Oregon taxpayers. That seems worth discussing, regardless of where one ultimately comes out on the deal itself.
Hi Ollie,
This is a great comment. Any chance you will run for public office? Fix the messes Portland/Multnomah county is in.
(Blush) I know my limits, and I am not suited for public office. Thank you anyway.
Blackmail works.
Give in to some subprime auto loan mogul from Dallas or lose a losing b-ball team. Which would lead to the city's downfall, we're told. Syracuse lost a team--last I looked, it was still on the map.
Buried deep in the story is this wonderful insight: "...a city like Portland that has long marketed itself based more on livability than economic viability." It's the "economic viability" piece that's in deep doo-doo; the liveability argument went south in 2022.
Any discussion is actually pointless. The Dallas tycoon burped and every leader in the state jumped. You know the fix is in when the socialists don't demand the nationalization of the team and caps on ticket prices. And the DEI gang isn't whining about the team's obvious racial imbalance.
You'll have a remodeled Moda. You'll pay for it. And the Blazers will still be an embarrassment.
IF Portland and the State were thriving this wouldn't be a discussion. At this point its all for naught unless the voters in Portland and Salem bring in leadership that can actually lead Portland and the State to a better future. It will not matter if we have a new arena or new auditorium if there is no one left to pay for the tickets to watch. Portland and the State are staring into the abyss, if we as voters do not change this in November none of this matters....
Very interesting. I’m with, Sam Francis, until he gets to vigilantism, although that will eventually occur if government doesn’t protect us.
I took the time to work with an AI to evaluate the finances of fixing either one of those. While it will cost money to fix Keller, directly paid by the taxpayers, the moda center argument is pretty strong for supporting those renovations. There is no doubt that having professional grade entertainment of a high caliber is an important factor in the perception of a metropolitan region.
the gladiators and the colosseum, coinciding with the decline and fall of some forgotten empire? time to review a bit of the history of civilization?
Maybe rename some streets instead.