No dispute here: Tom Dundon is a first-class bully.
The new Trail Blazers owner might also be called a first-class conniver, grifter and villain attempting to execute a first-class heist that would reduce Portland to a second-class city.
All of which makes him a first-class… er, um… asset manager.
Dundon is not merely using the threat of relocation to exert his will on the city of Portland, he now effectively wants the city to pay him to flee town.
The fixation by Dundon and the Trail Blazers on the “first-class standard” provision that has been part of the team’s lease dating back to 1995 — and that the Blazers again agreed to as part of the five-year bridge agreement less than two years ago — is not a good-faith negotiating tactic by the franchise’s leadership. It is a naked attempt to pre-emptively get off the hook for whatever compensation the city might attempt to collect should the team leave.
If Dundon were serious about making a deal to keep the Trail Blazers in Portland, he would be focused on the language of a new lease rather than the old one. He would not be concerned with what the five-year bridge agreement says because he would expect it to soon be in the shredder.
However, it is that simple clause, the one that says the Blazers are responsible for maintaining the building in a “first-class manner” that is gumming up negotiations and threatens to upend the entire deal.
Because I don’t see the city budging here.
It’s a small detail that feels like it could end up being the whole enchilada.
“We need the city to take the prospect of litigation off the table by affirming the work the team has done to maintain Moda Center in a first-class condition,” Blazers spokesman Charles Boyle told my colleague Alissa Gary and me on Wednesday. He called it a “critical first step to unlock a freer flow of information.”
That is appealing, since the current flow of information could best be described as glacial.
In a welcome development, Trail Blazers’ president Dewayne Hankins said in a phone call on Wednesday that he will participate in the city council’s work session on Thursday morning, breaking a weeks-long public impasse between the sides.
But it’s difficult to see much progress being made, even with an appearance in that setting, if the Blazers remain dug in on their position.
“Then we have no negotiation,” one city source said.
No negotiation, no deal. No deal, no Blazers.
If the city somehow were to strike the “first class” provision from the existing lease or formally concede that the building is currently a “first-class” facility, it surrenders the only insurance the public has against relocation.
The term is very much open to interpretation, and would likely be picked apart by the courts. It is that very ambiguity that makes the provision so valuable to the city and so threatening to the Blazers. It gives the city a path to try to recoup whatever it might cost to get the building to first class if the Blazers were not there.
That was the point Councilor Steve Novick attempted to make last month, when he inartfully broached the possibility of suing the Blazers during a work session. That public threat was all the Blazers needed to retreat to their corner.
The Blazers would argue that the building is already first-class because it hosts 41 NBA games a year. The city would counter that if it was first-class it wouldn’t need the $600 million in upgrades that the city, county and state are working together to fund.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. But after spending months crying that the Moda Center is the “oldest non-renovated building in the NBA” the Trail Blazers can’t have it both ways. It can’t be a first-class dump when it suits them and a first-class palace when it doesn’t.
Take it from someone who has covered games in all 30 current NBA arenas, plus at least four former venues (including three that were turned into rubble): Moda Center was good for yesterday, fine for today, bad for tomorrow.
It is simultaneously true that the renovations the Blazers are asking for are desperately needed and that the franchise, to its credit, has adequately maintained the building.
It should be stressed that the “first-class” provision would only become relevant if the team were to leave Portland. It is a moot point in the ongoing negotiations and would end up in the waste bin once a new lease is signed.
To make it a point now means only that Dundon anticipates a standoff over the team’s exit, and he wants to make it as painless for himself as possible.
As distasteful as I find it all to be, in some ways I don’t even blame the single-minded Dundon. He is simply pursuing a deal within the parameters that Jody Allen created when she maximized profit by selling him a team with an expiring lease in a dated building.
“He’s just doing the thing with the thing that he was told he could do when he bought it,” one source close to the deal said.
But if that is the path Dundon wants to take, it should be hard and it should be expensive. Moving a team should be the final resort of an owner entirely out of options. If left entirely up to me, it would be prosecuted as a crime.
Whether he likes it or not, Dundon is the steward of a public trust that predates the first Nike sneaker, Big League Chew, the Fremont Bridge and both Portlandia (the statue) and “Portlandia” (the show).
One that arrived in Portland before Powell’s sold its first volume.
The Trail Blazers are as important to the soul of Portland and its citizens as Gore-Tex and vegan tattoo ink. The city, rightfully, is refusing to yield on the one piece of leverage it has to keep the organization in town.
Despite months of squawking and rabble-rousing, the City Council appears poised to approve a term sheet that, at least financially, meets the commitments the Blazers have been asking for.
I’m firmly in the camp that the city must do everything in its power to close a new lease with the Trail Blazers, even if it means conceding on deal points some councilors are clinging to, such as rent and labor harmony.
There has been no sign Dundon would have any compunction about using those sticky issues as cause to bolt, and in this negotiation, that lack of humanity counts as something of a twisted superpower.
It is the responsibility of a first-class city to force him to stay.
