Merritt Paulson launched his plan Wednesday for bringing MLS to Portland, Ore. It involves a $75 million project to take the Portland Beavers baseball team out of PGE Park and into a new stadium, while converting PGE Park into a soccer facility.
Where would the cash come from? Paulson, who owns both the minor league Beavers and the United Soccer Leagues’ Portland Timbers (both presently PGE Park tenants), says that he’ll pay the $40 million it reportedly costs to buy an MLS franchise these days, but the $75 million for the stadium projects would be financed by the City of Portland. Paulson called the figure “a relative bargain” for the city compared with the cost of building a new soccer stadium and putting a new baseball facility on private land, adding that it was “impossible to do this without public participation.”
The proposed 8,500-seat baseball stadium would go up in Lents, a 20-minute drive from downtown, and an area which the paper’s Anna Griffin reminds us is known as “Felony Flats.” City Commissioner Randy Leonard conceded that there was a risk in building a stadium at Lents, “but there was risk when I got in my car this morning that I might not make it. Part of being a city is you have to take risks.”
“Still,” notes Griffin, “it’s a lot of cash for a city struggling to keep its roads paved and hire enough police officers. Mayor Tom Potter, who leaves office in January, has uniformly opposed spending public money on sports, though he sent a letter to Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber last month promising city support for soccer.” Meanwhile mayor-elect Sam Adams opposes taking cash from Portland’s basic operating budget to pay for either soccer or baseball. But the officials would be “willing to use the city’s stellar credit rating to borrow the money for construction.”