Chorus grows to keep Blazers in Portland

Image: The Moda Center, Fcb981, CC BY-SA 3.0

A coalition that cuts across Oregon’s captains of industry and the former National Basketball Association (NBA) team Portland Trail Blazers are pushing the Governor of Oregon Tina Kotek and the Mayor of Portland Keith Wilson to heed the NBA Commissioner Adam Silver when he says the ‘Rip City’ (Portland, Oregon, US) “likely needs a new arena” to keep the team here.

‘oregonlive.com’ stated that the newly-formed group, calling itself the ‘Rip City Forever’ (a group aimed at keeping the Blazers firmly in Portland), said it will bankroll a group of subject-matter experts to examine the cost, size and location of a new venue. It struck a partnership with the Oregon Community Foundation (a nonprofit organization that works to improve the lives of all Oregonians by facilitating philanthropy) to accept donations for the feasibility studies on renovating or replacing the Moda Center in Portland and its other advocacy.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada). The NBA is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and is considered the premier professional basketball league in the world. The league is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan.

The Portland Trail Blazers are an American professional basketball team based in Portland, Oregon (US). The Trail Blazers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Northwest Division of the Western Conference.

The Moda Center, formerly known as the Rose Garden, is the primary indoor sports arena in Portland, Oregon, United States. It is used for basketball, rodeos, circuses, conventions, ice shows, concerts, and dramatic productions. The arena has a capacity to accommodate 20,500 spectators when configured for basketball.

The former Blazers’ President Marshall Glickman, a ‘Rip City Forever’ organizer, said in an interview, “We will hire Arena Architects who will look specifically at the site options and think about, on a conceptual level for now, what would an arena footprint be like here?”

It remains unclear who, precisely, would bankroll the arena work, either renovating on the City-owned Moda Center or new construction on a different site.

‘oregonlive.com’ further stated that Glickman and others already offered the Mayor and the Governor some ideas. Their group recently issued a letter to Governor Kotek and Mayor Wilson urging them to “significantly” renovate the Moda Center or follow the other Cities’ example and replace the decades-old arena – either at the Lloyd Center (community-centered mall) itself undergoing a multiyear redevelopment or elsewhere in the Central City.

They told the Governor and the Mayor in the letter, “Now is the time to dream big and act big.”

Glickman joins the former Dutch Bros (coffee company in Grant Pass, Oregon) Chief Executive Joth Ricci, the former Blazers Operations Chief Erin Hubert, the former Blazers player and the Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Dudley, and the Marketing Agency Founder Ryan Buchanan of Thesis (a digital marketing agency based in Portland) in forming the ‘Rip City Forever’.

Added Glickman, “At the end of the day we’re going to have a work product which we want to make available. Because remember, this is called the ‘Rip City Forever’ for a reason. That’s our goal.”

The backers of luring the Major League Baseball (MLB – the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada) to Portland found buy-in for a “jock tax” (income tax levied against visitors to a City or State who earn money in that jurisdiction) in the 2025 legislative session. Governor Kotek signed the Senate Bill 110 to authorize up to $800 million to help finance a Major League stadium by diverting income taxes from a team’s players and some employees to pay off the bonds over three decades. It’s appealing to the policymakers in part because those taxes wouldn’t exist without the new stadium.

But the State’s already collecting and spending taxes on the NBA salaries earned here so a “jock tax” might not be so easy a sell.

Meanwhile, the Trail Blazers have an established and enthusiastic fan base that supports the restaurants, the bars and the other businesses in the orbit of the Moda Center during gametime and when the live acts come to town.

The alliance lining up behind a new basketball arena is not ruling out a more substantial ask for public dollars. Glickman pointed out a range of public and private financing options that could pay for a new basketball venue – “A lot of people want to focus on the so-called jock tax. But, that may or may not be the right idea for this.”

Ricci said he and the others were rooting for the Major League Baseball (MLB) to materialize but that leaders should focus on retaining basketball – “The baseball situation and the basketball situation are very different in that one is real and the other one is in theory.”

As it stands, the Blazers have agreed to continue playing at the Moda Center through at least the 2029-2030 seasons under a “bridge agreement” (a temporary contract) struck with the Portland City Council last year. The team’s current lease at the Moda Center expires in October and the bridge agreement included a new, short-term lease.

But after the estate of Paul G. Allen announced in May it would sell the Blazers worries emerged that a new Owner could take the team out of Portland.

The ‘Rip City Forever’ was formed to act proactively rather than reactively, Glickman said, to avoid a repeat of Seattle (Washington) with the Seattle SuperSonics (the former NBA team) when they left to become the Oklahoma City Thunder – “Because in Seattle everybody was reactive and it was too late.”

Their letter to Kotek and Wilson accumulated more than 90 letter signatories – from the Blazers legend Clyde Drexler (American former basketball shooting guard) to the Major League Soccer (MLS) team Portland Timbers Owner Merritt Paulson to the Columbia Sportswear (an American company that manufactures and distributes outerwear, sportswear and footwear) head honcho Tim Boyle.

For their part, Wilson and Kotek appear to lean toward renovating the Moda Center telling the NBA Commissioner in a July 29^th letter, “We heard you loud and clear earlier this Summer when you said you wanted to keep the Blazers in Portland under a new ownership and made it clear that our arena isn’t up to snuff.”

The Governor and the Mayor support renovating the Moda Center “to become a point of pride for the Blazers and for our City,” they told Silver. “We are prepared to explore the public-private partnerships (PPPs) needed to make it happen.”

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