How Oregon's Most Progressive Governor Learned to Love Billionaires

Tina Kotek spent a decade as Oregon House Speaker building a progressive reputation. Now she’s committing $600 million in public money to a Texas billionaire’s basketball arena while the same legislative session refused to restore even $4 million for eviction prevention.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s a policy record.

The Arena Deal

Here’s what happened in the 2026 legislative session, told plainly.

Oregon was in a short special session. Agencies across the state faced reduced budgets. Tenant advocacy organizations had already been gutted the year before, with 75% of their state funding eliminated in 2025, forcing groups like the Community Alliance of Tenants to lay off nearly their entire staff. Evictions hit record highs in January 2026, with nearly 3,000 Oregon families in court that single month.

Then Tom Dundon, a Texas subprime auto loan billionaire, announced his group was purchasing the Portland Trail Blazers for over $4.2 billion. Dundon’s previous business specialized in subprime auto lending that Oregon regulators called predatory.

The asks came quickly. Renovate the Moda Center. Make it world-class. Or we might have to explore our options.

Governor Kotek was not a bystander here. Weeks before Dundon’s group even officially announced the purchase, she and Mayor Keith Wilson co-signed a letter to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver pledging to find the money to renovate the arena. She was the earliest and loudest champion of what became Senate Bill 1501. When the bill cleared the House 42-14 in March 2026, the Blazers’ own President of Business Operations specifically thanked “Governor Kotek, who has championed Oregon’s Arena from the very start.”

What passed was a $365 million commitment from state bonds, backed by the state’s general fund and funded by diverting income taxes paid by Blazers employees, Rose Quarter workers, and performers. Multnomah County is expected to add $88 million. Portland, $120 million. Total public commitment: roughly $600 million, to renovate an arena owned by the city and leased to a franchise that just sold for over four billion dollars.

The Blazers’ direct financial contribution to renovations: zero. Unless there are cost overruns, and only overruns the team is directly responsible for.

The Blazers did spend money on something. Records show the team employed eight lobbyists from four separate firms during the legislative session, including former high-ranking staffers from Governor Kotek’s own office. They spent $100,000 in the first three months of 2026, more than the team had spent on lobbying in most entire calendar years over the past decade.

Meanwhile, advocates had asked the Legislature to restore just $4 million of the $129 million in homelessness prevention services cut the previous year. They got nothing. Same session. Same legislators who said there was no money for eviction prevention found $365 million for a billionaire’s arena.

To secure some Republican votes for the Blazers bill, Democrats sweetened the pot with county fair funding, removing a lottery proceeds cap that will send an extra $6.5 million a year to rural fairgrounds. That’s what it took to build bipartisan support: basketball and county fairs. Eviction prevention: not this session.

There’s a detail from the negotiating table that’s worth sitting with. When Paul Allen and the city of Portland built the Moda Center in 1995, the city hired Steve Janik, Oregon’s top real estate lawyer, to represent the public’s interests in those talks. Former Mayor Vera Katz’s chief of staff, Sam Adams, who later became mayor himself, recalled: “Having Steve Janik involved in the deal was crucial.” In the 2026 negotiations, there was no professional negotiator representing the collective interests of the city, county, and state. The Blazers, meanwhile, hired Dan Barrett, a consultant who had previously negotiated against Dundon on behalf of the public in the Raleigh arena deal for the Carolina Hurricanes, and brought him over to negotiate for Dundon in Portland.

Kotek’s framing throughout: the Moda Center is publicly owned, so renovating it is different from handing money to a private team. She said protections would be in any final lease. She called it “a solid business arrangement.”

Here’s what’s actually solid: lawmakers committed $365 million before anyone sat down to negotiate a lease with Dundon. The binding guarantees came after the public money was promised. And the state’s 20-year minimum lease commitment would be, per analysts who reviewed comparable deals, the shortest term of any major arena deal in the country.

The NDAs are their own story. Some Portland city councilors were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements in order to participate in negotiations over hundreds of millions of public dollars, before any public vote. Councilors Tiffany Koyama Lane and Mitch Green refused. Green wrote publicly: “If you want the public to support using public money to remodel a stadium, then you need to make the case to them in public.” Several other councilors found out about the city’s arena commitments the same way you did: through press releases.

Kotek said she had never been asked to sign an NDA and described the process as “eminently transparent.”

The Preschool Pivot

In June 2025, Governor Kotek sent a letter to Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson that surprised a lot of people who thought they knew what Tina Kotek stood for.

Preschool for All is a program county voters approved in 2020 by 64%. It’s funded by a marginal income tax on the county’s highest earners: 1.5% on individual income above $125,000, higher rates above $250,000. It funds free preschool for three and four-year-olds. Around 1,900 families were actively enrolled when the fight broke out.

Kotek’s letter called the program “unsustainable.” She cited a drop of over 1,700 high-earning taxpayers since the tax began, argued the tax was driving top earners out of Multnomah County, and suggested the county either pause tax collection for three years, reduce the tax rate, or both. She wrote that the program was “breaking beneath its own weight.”

Vega Pederson pushed back immediately. Her office pointed out that Kotek’s taxpayer data was outdated. The actual number of people filing the Preschool for All tax had grown by nearly 5,500 between 2021 and 2023. The county argued the implementation problems Kotek cited were real but fixable, and that eliminating the revenue source wasn’t the solution to a rollout problem. Over 70,000 letters poured into the governor’s office from the public urging her to keep her hands off the program.

The attempt to use a Senate amendment to kill the tax entirely, which would have stopped collection immediately and phased out the program by 2027, stalled when the public response became overwhelming. But Kotek continued to press for restructuring.

What’s important context: Jordan Schnitzer, Portland real estate developer, heir to the Schnitzer Steel fortune, and a $25,000 donor to Kotek’s reelection campaign, was simultaneously sitting on her Prosperity Council and arguing loudly in writing to his fellow council members that Oregon’s tax rates, including the Preschool for All tax, were “the biggest issue arresting Oregon’s economy.” He had hosted a fundraiser for Kotek in December 2025.

The language in Kotek’s June letter and the language Schnitzer and Portland-area business leaders had been publicly using were the same language. That’s not a coincidence you’re required to ignore.

The Executive Order That Wasn’t Hers to Issue

Supporting unions isn’t the problem here. The problem is what Kotek actually did, and how she did it.

In December 2024, she issued EO 24-31, an executive order requiring all major state construction contracts to include project labor agreements. PLAs require contractors to negotiate union wages and working conditions before a project begins. That’s a legitimate policy goal. The issue is that the Oregon Legislature had already considered this exact policy in 2023 and declined to pass it. Rather than go back to the Legislature, Kotek issued the order herself and called it done.

The courts disagreed. A coalition of construction firms sued, and in March 2026 Marion County Judge Thomas Hart ruled that Kotek had exceeded her constitutional authority. Policy changes of this scope require legislative action. The governor can’t just decide she knows better than the Legislature and write a law herself.

That’s the first problem: she tried to do by executive fiat what she couldn’t get done through the democratic process.

The second problem is what the policy would have actually cost. Her own transportation agency, ODOT, had analyzed PLAs before the order was issued and found they were “strongly correlated with increased construction cost within the range of 10% to 20%,” because non-union contractors, which make up the majority of road-building firms in Oregon, especially in rural eastern Oregon, simply don’t bid on PLA projects. Fewer bidders, less competition, higher costs. The evidence was already in: one ODOT pilot project near Terrebonne received only one bid, coming in 22% above projections and requiring an additional $5.9 million from the Transportation Commission. This was happening at the same time ODOT was trying to close a $300 million structural budget deficit and asking voters to approve gas tax increases just to stay solvent.

Kotek knew all of this and signed the order anyway.

The third problem is who paid for her campaign. Construction and building trades unions contributed around $6 million to elect her in 2022, the most SEIU had ever spent on an Oregon candidate. There is nothing wrong with unions supporting politicians who support workers. But when the politician those unions funded then issues an executive order that directly benefits those unions, ignores her own agency’s cost analysis, bypasses the Legislature that already said no, and gets struck down by a court for overstepping her authority, the question of whose interests she was actually serving becomes worth asking out loud.

Kotek’s response to the court ruling: “I continue to believe that this was the right policy for the state at the right time.”

The building trades still have her back for reelection. The Oregon Education Association and the Oregon Working Families Party, who together put hundreds of thousands of dollars into her 2022 campaign, have both withdrawn their endorsements and gone neutral.

The Prosperity Council

The governor’s Prosperity Council is worth understanding on its own terms.

Announced in early 2026, it’s a sixteen-member advisory body meant to help Kotek develop an economic roadmap for Oregon. It includes real estate developers, tech executives, construction leaders, major employers, and union officials. The framing is big-tent. The reality is a room where the loudest voice belongs to a man who donated $25,000 to the governor’s reelection campaign and hosted her fundraiser two months before the council was named.

That man is Jordan Schnitzer, CEO of Schnitzer Properties. In May 2026, internal emails obtained by the Oregon Journalism Project showed Schnitzer telling his fellow council members that the group’s draft economic recommendations lacked “urgency and weight.” His prescription: more aggressive action on cutting taxes. “The biggest issue arresting Oregon’s economy is high taxes,” he wrote.

Two union representatives on the council, a retired SEIU official and the executive secretary of the Oregon Building Trades, pushed back in a closed session, urging the council to focus on improving incomes for low- and moderate-income Oregonians instead.

The Prosperity Council’s final recommendations go to Kotek in June. Watch what they say, and watch what she does with them.

The Pattern

Tina Kotek is running for reelection on an economic prosperity platform. She has the building trades’ endorsement despite a union-friendly executive order that a court ruled unconstitutional. She has the Trail Blazers naming her as their champion the moment the arena bill passed. She has a major real estate developer hosting her fundraisers and sitting on her economic advisory council.

And she has the Oregon Education Association and the Oregon Working Families Party, organizations that were part of the coalition that made her governor, sitting out this election after pulling their endorsements.

The organizations that did her coalition work in 2022 are watching her govern and deciding they can’t go all the way this time.

The people most likely to be hurt by the decisions she’s made, tenants facing eviction, families who depended on preschool slots, taxpayers footing higher construction bills because the governor’s own agency said they would, don’t have fundraisers. They don’t sit on Prosperity Councils. They write letters, and sometimes 70,000 of them show up at once, and the legislature still finds $365 million for a basketball arena and nothing for their eviction defense.

What To Do With This

If this makes you angry, make noise where it can’t be ignored.

We know public pressure works. When Kotek tried to gut the Preschool for All tax, 70,000 letters poured in and the Senate amendment that would have killed the program stalled. That happened because enough people found out, got loud, and made it impossible to ignore. The same thing needs to happen here.

Whispering concerns to a staffer in a hallway does nothing on its own. But visible, public, shareable pressure — the kind that other people can see and add to — is what actually reaches a campaign operation running for reelection.

Make a TikTok. Make a short. Put it on Reddit, on r/Portland, on r/oregon. Screenshot the specific contradictions in this piece and post them. Tag Kotek’s campaign accounts. Ask the question out loud: how does a governor who took $6 million from unions then hand $600 million to a Texas billionaire and call herself a champion of working people? Ask it simply, ask it repeatedly, ask it in public. That is what actually reaches a campaign operation — not a phone call to a staffer who will log it and move on, but a visible, growing, public record of people who are not satisfied with the answers.

The Moda Center lease still has to be voted on by the Portland City Council and the Multnomah County Commission. Those votes haven’t happened yet. Show up when they do. Bring a sign. Bring people. Record it. City council meetings that get filmed and clipped and posted pull more accountability than years of public comment forms.

She is going to run this fall on the idea that she stands between Oregon and Donald Trump. That framing is real and the threat is real, but it is also a way of asking you to stop asking questions. Don’t let it work. Demanding accountability from a Democratic governor is not the same as handing the state to the Republicans. Kotek knows that conflation is useful to her. Don’t give it to her for free.

Talk to your neighbors. Talk to people who like the Blazers and explain what was traded away to keep them. Talk to parents who needed a preschool slot and couldn’t get one. The people most affected by these decisions often don’t know the full picture because the full picture requires reading six different articles from outlets most people don’t follow. That’s what this piece is for. Share it.

The governor needs to answer, publicly and specifically, how she can still claim to govern for the people. Make sure enough people are asking that the question is impossible to avoid.

Sources: OPB — Trail Blazers lobbying records · Willamette Week — Moda Center subsidy deal breakdown · Willamette Week — Oregon officials playing not to lose · KGW — City Council divided over NDAs · KGW — Blazers fans call deal a ripoff · KATU — Kotek signs arena bill · OPB — Kotek Preschool for All deadline · Portland Mercury — Preschool for All advocates · Willamette Week — Kotek’s PLA order vs. ODOT analysis · OPB — Kotek’s PLA order ruled unconstitutional · Oregon Journalism Project — Prosperity Council · Willamette Week — Prosperity Council internal emails · OPB — SEIU and unions in Kotek 2022 campaign

If we got something wrong, missed something, or would like to add supporting context, reach us at signalfirespdx@protonmail.com