Earlier this week, the PTFC front office released a combined Timbers and Thorns scarf with a heart pattern and the words “here for Portland” on each side. It’s a cute design, and plenty of fans will probably buy it, especially since a portion of proceeds will go to support local small businesses. But the scarf isn’t just PTFC merch—the team designed it in collaboration with the Portland Business Alliance, the powerful business advocacy group whose board of directors is chaired by Timbers President of Business Operations Mike Golub.
As many readers are aware, the PBA has a long history of taking positions on important issues that place it at odds with PTFC’s loudly progressive fanbase. Worse still, some of the causes the PBA has championed directly conflict with the club’s stated values.
Climate Crisis
The area of most naked hypocrisy when it comes to PTFC’s partnership with the PBA is the issue of climate change. The club lists the environment as a focus area of “Stand Together,” its philanthropic arm. It notes that its “Score a Goal, Plant a Tree” program, a laudable partnership with Friends of Trees, has resulted in the capture of 171,120 pounds of carbon dioxide since 2011. Providence Park’s 2019 expansion received a LEED gold certification. Merritt Paulson has talked about his concern about climate change multiple times, in one tweet calling it “the defining global human issue of our time”—a stance I agree with.
Yet in this context, the club’s public alignment with the PBA is troubling. The business group has historically opposed local and regional legislation aimed at curbing climate change. In 2018, the group sent a letter to a federal regulatory agency indicating their membership’s support for the proposed Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas terminal.
That project, which is still sitting in regulatory purgatory, would involve a “100-foot-wide swath of slashed-and-burned, chemically maintained, plantless dirt (2,000 acres) from Malin to Coos Bay and trespasses over the lands of hundreds of private property owners without their consent,” according to Street Roots. It would also pass under 400 streams and five rivers, using horizontal drilling, a technique that can leach drilling fluids into waterways. The terminal is also located in a liquefaction zone, which will turn into quicksand in the event of a major earthquake; a leak would be enormously destructive to oyster farms and fisheries. And this project is an export terminal, meaning that the gas—produced by hydraulic fracking, which is a nightmare all its own—wouldn’t even be put to use by Oregon businesses.
In 2018, the PBA opposed Measure 26-201, the Portland Clean Energy Initiative, which proposed “a one percent business license surcharge from businesses that make at least $1 billion annually, and use it to fund environmentally friendly projects like weatherizing homes, training people for green jobs, and upping the city’s use of clean energy,” according to the Portland Mercury (the measure passed). The group physically locked its office doors to avoid talking to three faith leaders who wanted to deliver a letter urging them to drop their opposition to the measure, rather absurdly citing staff safety concerns.
And in 2017, the PBA successfully sued the city over a local ordinance restricting the construction of facilities for the transfer or storage of fossil fuels. The city later appealed the decision and won.
Housing
If the club has been less vocal about the housing crisis, this is no doubt still an issue of concern for many fans. Portland, like other west coast cities, has a housing shortage of staggering proportions. One study from PSU found that “in a one-year period, nearly 40,000 people in greater Portland experienced an episode of homelessness and 105,000 households faced housing insecurity.” This is Portland’s most visible issue, and its most urgent. It is a human rights disaster, and it should be the shame of every city government for the last 20 years that a solution has not been found. It should also be said that since homelessness affects Black Portlanders disproportionately, this is also a race issue—and the club has made a visible effort on that front.
The PBA, like other Portlanders, professes concern about homelessness, but that concern has generally emphasized the unsightliness of homeless encampments and their supposed impact on business, favoring camp sweeps as part of the solution to homelessness.
In one incident, they pushed the city to crack down on a group serving free meals at Director Park—which they referred to as “feeds” in communications with parks employees—on the basis they did not have a permit to do so.
But most visibly, the PBA runs Clean & Safe, a taxpayer-funded organization that picks up trash downtown and, less innocuously, pays an armed private security force to patrol the area and keep houseless people away from business entrances. Those security guards, according to the Mercury, seem to be completely unaccountable to the public. Even the Portland Police Bureau has a process for reporting officer misconduct; the security staff on Clean & Safe’s payroll are supposedly accountable to the police commissioner (Mayor Ted Wheeler), but an audit “finds no evidence that this has ever happened.”
As the Willamette Week reported earlier this year, even some downtown business owners are unhappy with Clean & Safe. That unhappiness largely stems from the fact that the fees that businesses pay the group go, in part, to pay salaries and overhead for the PBA, not to pay for any actual services.
It’s worth noting that the PBA has, in the past, urged support for more shelter beds. But to people who study the issue, emergency shelters are a stopgap solution, at best, and are often rejected by the people they’re intended to serve for very good reasons.
Takeaway
This is just a cursory look at two of the issues the PBA is most egregiously wrong on. They’ve also opposed a mandate for bike parking in new construction, supported discriminatory sit-lie laws, and voiced weirdly fierce opposition to the Better Naito project, and are generally anti-tax, even opposing taxes that Portlanders have voted for in order to fund needed services.
In short, this is a group concerned with the bottom line of their members above all else. To me, that’s at odds with the way PTFC has positioned itself over the years, and with much of the truly commendable work the club has done in the community. Fans on Twitter were upset about this announcement, and I believe that anger is justified. If the club professes to be a community-centered organization, this partnership calls that into serious question.