Willamette Week60%
County Delays Moda Center Funding Vote After Skepticism From Key Labor Union 19%
By Aaron Mesh79%
7/23/2026, 10:46:27 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Slippery Slope, Availability Heuristic, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 18.9% saturation with 170 hits. Analysis detected 862 faulty-reasoning hits from 899 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 33.7% and a BS Rank of 19% (17,317 of 21,198 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.70% of the article peer group.
The Multnomah County Board of Commissioners postponed its scheduled vote Thursday on whether to contribute $88 million to the renovation of Moda Center.
The delay is the latest wrinkle in what is becoming a fraught campaign to use public dollars to anchor the Trail Blazers basketball team to Portland.
Commissioner Shannon Singleton successfully called to delay the vote until Aug. 6, a week before the Portland City Council decides on its $120 million share.
Her request was unexpected, given that Singleton has been a vocal supporter of the arena overhaul.
After the hearing, Singleton and others familiar with the matter told WW she asked to postpone in part because a key player wasn’t on board with the spending: AFSCME Local 88, the union that represents more than 4,000 county workers.
That matters because opposition from one of the most powerful voices in organized labor has the potential to upend a public subsidy deal, especially because a union that represents thousands of county and city employees holds real leverage in an election year when six City Council seats and the Multnomah County chair’s office are up for grabs.
“Particularly, what I heard from them [Local 88] was that they’d had zero conversations with the chair’s office,” Singleton says.
“They weren’t supportive of the BIT [Business Income Tax] being used.”
At issue is $35 million of the $88 million in capital spending County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson proposed the county chip in to rebuild Moda Center.
That $35 million would come from Business Income Tax paid to the county by the Paul Allen estate on its sale of the Blazers to Texas billionaire Tom Dundon.
However, Business Income Tax payments can be used to backfill the county’s general fund.
Local 88 president Jackie Tate told WW on Thursday night that any county revenue that can be used for core services should not be diverted to a sports arena.
Any future shortfall in the general fund budget might need to be filled by layoffs—and AFSCME employees have already borne the brunt of budget cuts this summer.
“We don’t want any funds that could be used to backfill the deficit and save jobs and services going to Moda [Center],” Tate said.
“That’s a hard no for us.”
Commissioners Julia Brim-Edwards and Meghan Moyer have repeatedly called to reconsider the funding proposal.
(“We called for a reset to the Moda discussion last week,” the two said in a statement Thursday.
“Today, that’s exactly what the county commission did.”)
And Local 88 made its opposition clear in a statement issued on the eve of the vote.
Vega Pederson disputed Singleton’s contention that she hadn’t met with the union, and pointed to an array of other labor supporters, including SEIU 49 and the Teamsters Joint Council 37.
“The proposal to use one-time-only county Business Income Tax dollars for the Moda Center has been public since February,” Vega Pederson said in a statement to WW.
“I have had several conversations with AFSCME during that time in our monthly check-ins and, specifically, spoke to the Local 88 executive team about the deal last month.
I understand they are strongly opposed to the idea.”
She added that proceeds from the Blazers sale were a logical place to find the money.
“I looked for revenue sources that have a nexus with the Moda Center,” Vega Pederson said, “including using a funding source that reflects economic activity because of the arena and one that is currently used for a very similar purpose.”
Tate shed some light on the conflicting accounts by saying Vega Pederson met with the union June 23, but “I don’t think we had a full conversation about it.
I think she understood that we didn’t want that level of public funding in Moda Center.”
Tate says she told Vega Pederson, “You can’t ask the kids for their lunch money when you’re buying steaks for rich guys.”
Singleton said she wasn’t sure Local 88 could be persuaded to support the funding package after a delay.
“I really don’t know,” she said.
“I do want us to make an informed decision, and it may be that our decision doesn’t line up with what AFSCME wanted to see.
We might end up in the same place we are now, but we owe it to them to have the conversation.”
It’s not clear what other funding sources the county could tap for the $35 million—especially sources that couldn’t flow into the general fund, which is what AFSCME wants.
The exact source of $35 million out of a proposed $600 million public funding package might seem a minor sticking point.
But it was far from clear Thursday if the county board had sufficient votes to pass the funding package—and the opposition of a key public employee union in an election year could create a domino effect that impacts how the City Council votes Aug.
12.
This friction between local governments and their labor force is occurring as Dundon has effectively removed the Blazers organization from the negotiating table, waiting to see what kind of offer local government officials approve before discussing the terms of a lease.
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and state Sen.
Kate Lieber (D-Southwest Portland) urged county officials to pass the funding on Thursday.
But the Blazers, as KATU-TV reporter Wright Gazaway noted, were conspicuously absent from the hearing.
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