OT MLB to PDX: We're talking baseball to PDX

I like how this guy, who I've never heard of, seems to know more about the prospects of expansion (which the commissioner of MLB has pretty much said is on the table after they settle Tampa Bay and Oakland) than the people who are actually in the know.

 

The 1.5M is money the PDP will pay to PoP during the initial 2-year negotiating window. At this point, there are no plans for any public money to be used.

The article does mention the potential use of $150M in bonds to partially offset eventual construction costs, but even this would be repaid with player income taxes, so it's not really an expense for the state so much as a recoverable investment.

They really have tried very hard to do everything without any public money at all. Because of all the "small town thinking people," I presume.

 

Usually the fans who comment on stuff like this are some of the most uniformed people involved. Hell, look at the comments on articles about the Blazers, they tend to be full of people who don't even have a elementary grasp on facts.

That said, even knowing what I know about the situation (and how it's being said that it's privately funded), I still have a hard time believing it's going to happen.

 

Me too (about the fans lacking basic knowledge of stuff). But think about who mostly posts on line stuff? Look at political stuff on twitter/facebook. It's a lot of people who just act like talking louder and more often makes them correct. Not a lot of fact checking goes on, just "it feels correct so I'm going to say it".

 

As has been mentioned previously, it's not the property, the structure itself, or the surrounding development that will require significant cooperation from the city and/or public funding. It's the infrastructure improvements necessary to accommodate a stadium and a team that will be the issue. Increased traffic access, likely another bridge, expanded lightrail, etc...no way an MLB team can succeed in that location without those improvements, and those are the things that the non-baseball-loving public is going to bristle about money being spent on.

 

I'm talking more about people who are indifferent to sports rather than those who openly oppose them. People who couldn't care less about baseball one way or the other begin to care (negatively) once the city has to outlay tens of millions of dollars for infrastructure improvements "solely" to support stadium development.