Merritt Paulson to present MLS Proposal to Portland City Leaders soon

By: Bob Kellett | April 30th, 2008

Those rumblings we heard a couple weeks ago have turned out to be true. The Oregonian reports today that Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson recently met with City Commissioner Randy Leonard to discuss the city’s role in helping to bring an MLS expansion team to Portland. Paulson, who could present his plan to City Council as early as June, has said that he will pay the $40 million MLS expansion fee out of his own piggy bank but the city will need to be involved with:

* The $20 million upgrade to PGE Park that will include stands on the east side and more places to urinate after drinking $8 beers.

* The $35 million needed to build a 9,000-seat stadium for the baseball Beavers.

So we’re looking at a total price tag of $95 million or so, of which Paulson is committed to paying $40 million himself. That is going to be a tough sell in Portland, especially with the national economy going into the tank and the local economy probably soon to follow. He has Randy Leonard on his side and you know that the current mayor Tom Potter is opposed to it. That leaves Sam Adams and Dan Saltzman as the deciding voices until the new Council is sworn in this fall. I looked through Adams’ meeting schedule over the past couple years. He has met with Paulson twice. One time was when MLS Commissioner Dan Garber was in town in October. The other time was back in August along with a couple representatives of the Oregon Sports Authority. I haven’t heard Adams issue an opinion one way or another about MLS expansion since he began running for mayor. From what I can tell, Paulson has not officially met with Saltzman and the commissioner is not on record one way or the other. With the possibility that this won’t be done until after the November election, when there will be a new mayor and two new council members, the political calculations are in flux.

Swaying City Council in an election year is just one of the challenges facing Paulson. Finding a suitable place for a minor league stadium is also a big one. The article mentions Lents Park in Southeast Portland as a possible location. I know people who are intimately involved with the redevelopment of Lents. When I asked if they had heard about any of this a few weeks ago they told me they hadn’t heard anything since the talk of bringing a major league baseball team to Portland died a few years back. If Lents is the area that Paulson chooses to pursue, I can tell you that he will have a lot of work to do to convince the neighborhood that this is a good opportunity for them — a questionable case in my opinion, stadiums are not the greatest redevelopment tools. He will also have to go through a pretty intensive public process, something that people from outside of Portland can’t appreciate until they experience it. I am a little worried that people who should be in the know about this type of project are just learning about it from the paper today.

Paulson is working the right political channels though and he as a couple of heavy hitters working as his consultants. He clearly wants to own an MLS team in Portland. And MLS would clearly work in Portland. He faces some very real challenges to get it all done. It is going to be fascinating to see how this all turns out.