Merritt Paulson submitted his bid Tuesday to Major League Soccer to bring a franchise to Oregon. “I feel like I’m creating an opportunity for the city,” he told Ryan Frank and Mark Larabee. “It’s not easy, but I think it makes sense for Portland on a number of levels. For us to be ambitious as a city these are the type of things we need to be doing.”
He has yet to convince the city. Although Paulson will stump up the $40 million needed to land an MLS franchise these days, he’s asking the city for $85 million of taxpayers’ money to finance the refurbishment of PGE Park to turn it into a soccer-only venue, and to build a new baseball stadium for the minor league Beavers baseball team, in which Paulson has an 80 percent stake. Paulson “faces a city and state skeptical of digging into general tax revenues to subsidize professional sports, especially in an economic downturn,” write Frank and Larabee. “The city is still saddled with debt from its last PGE Park remodel.”
Paulson has “hired A-list Portland consultants, donated to the campaigns of key politicians, hired specialists to tout the economic benefits, and put up a Web site asking fans to pepper City Hall with e-mails,” they report. Paulson told them “there’s no question in terms of the benefits to the community,” but doubters such as Jody Wiser of watchdog group Tax Fairness Oregon counters: “My personal feeling is if Merritt Paulson wants a team he should buy some land and build the stadium. That’s his job as a business owner. It’s not the job of the grocery store clerk.”