Paul Allen has asked the City of Portland and other local governments to chip in to help keep his Trail Blazer basketball team in town. His minions say that the team will lost $100 million in the next three years if something doesn't change, and one cause of this (I think they're saying) is that Mr. Allen no longer controls the Rose Garden arena, which he took into bankruptcy two years ago and has had to give back to its creditors. (The Rose Garden creditors now control the courtside and club seating and the skyboxes, and the concessions in the arena, and that revenue doesn't go to the Blazer organization any more.)
It's unsporting for Mr. Allen to blame the financial fall of the Trail Blazers on losing control of the arena without admitting that he lost the arena because he didn't want to pay for it, but he does have a point about the Blazers being in some way a community asset. Portland is a major league city only by reason of the Blazers being here. The area has a large pressure group who want the City to seek out (and build an expensive stadium for) a major league baseball team, but it makes more sense to spend our energy to keep the team that's already here. (There's an analogy to our economic development efforts that I could have drawn at this point.)
But what kind of effort should we put forth? The City doesn't have any spare money to chip in -- even cancelling the Tram wouldn't cover Mr. Allen's losses -- but we do have some other resources that we can contribute. I'm thinking in particular of Commissioner Sten's "voter-owned elections" campaign.
One gripe of the diehard Blazer fans is that the Blazer organization makes what to them are incomprehensible personnel decisions, stacking the team with problem cases ranging from the unmotivated to the unsafe. "I could do much better than the Blazers' personnel department," many of them say.
So let them.
As a first step, in exchange for some sort of subsidy (reduced license fees? free transit with game tickets?), require the Blazers to install those little instant-feedback gadgets in the club seats and six or eight of the regular arena sections. As the game progresses, the names of the players will be flashed on the scoreboard, below the words "VOTE NOW!" The fans in the seats with the gadgets (think of them as the Blazers' version of the Electoral College) set the dials on the 1-to-10 scale for how they think the player's doing. The team would promise to bench, trade or cut any player who scores below (say) 3 for five games straight. Or, in the fourth quarter, the fans could select the starting five for the next home game. (Leave the away games to the coaches.)
What of the fans who don't get to sit in the lucky seats, or who don't go at all? That's where the voter-owned elections campaign comes in. Provide that if (say) 1000 Metro-area voters sign a petition and raise $100,000 to defray the cost of the election, a player of their choice will be put on the ballot for an up-or-down vote. "Yes" wins? He stays on the roster. "No" prevails? Then he's to be traded or cut. It's delightfully reminiscent of the ancient Romans pointing their thumbs up or down as the condemned gladiators are brought before them. And it's sure to pack the arena with hopeful voters.
The Blazers used to be fond of saying that their cadre of loyal fans were their sixth man on the team. The fans don't want to be the sixth man on the team, but they should have a chance to be the second man in the personnel office.