THE BILL

Oregon Baseball Stadium Finance Proposal

The funding proposal presented to the Oregon Legislature in 2001 would have authorized $150 million in lease bonds for the Oregon Baseball Stadium. These bonds were to be paid through the dedication of income tax from player and team management salaries and would not require lottery funds or any existing general fund money.

Lease Bonding and Personal Income Tax Dedication

Instead of seeking to bond against limited lottery dollars, lease bonding is done out of the General Fund and is a more flexible method of bonding than lottery bonding, as the bonded amount can be paid back over a longer duration and can be adjusted to meet the expected income generated from baseball team and management salaries. This results in four major benefits:

1. Due to the longer duration of the bond, the annual payments against the bond are lower.
2. The lease bonding option will have lower interest payments than lottery bonding
3. The bond payments can be tailored to capture the particular estimates of when stadium employee and team income tax revenues will be generated, so that these can take care of the entire bond payment for each biennium.
4. The State's bonding cap is not affected.

Bonding Threshold

As with the previous proposal, no dollars will be bonded by the state for funding until the following threshold requirements have been met:

1. All of the remaining funding for the stadium has been committed.
2. A Major League Baseball Team is committed to transfer to Oregon.
3. The above two requirements must be met within a period of 4 years.
4. Should team payroll fall below $80 million per year, The team owner will pay the state the amount lost in income tax revenue resulting from the reduction.