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Jayne: A grasp of basketball could have been handy for C-Tran

By Greg Jayne, Columbian Opinion Page Editor

Published: November 16, 2014, 12:00am

If only the C-Tran board members knew a little more about basketball.

OK, that might sound like a stretch, but bear with me for a moment. You see, in 1976, when the National Basketball Association merged with a rival league, team owners negotiated maybe the worst deal in the history of negotiations. Or maybe the best, depending upon which side you were on.

Instead of joining the NBA, the owners for the Spirits of St. Louis, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, accepted a share of NBA TV revenue in perpetuity. That means forever. And that means the Silnas are still getting paid for the mere act of folding their team nearly 40 years ago.

How this relates to C-Tran might not be clear. Until you ponder the fact that it’s never a good idea to sign a deal in perpetuity. And until you ponder the contract the C-Tran board signed last year with TriMet, Oregon’s financially strapped transit authority, over how light rail would be operated as part of the Columbia River Crossing project.

Now, many people in Clark County would rather suffer from mange than sign a contract with TriMet. This is understandable, considering that TriMet has, according to The Oregonian, “a mountain of unfunded financial obligations.” And that last year the agency sued Clackamas County as part of a spitting match over light rail. And that, according to the Oregon Supreme Court, the Interstate 5 Bridge proposal was a $2.5 billion bribe (my word, not theirs) to get Clark County to welcome light rail. Yet none of that prevented the C-Tran board from entering an agreement that ceded eminent domain authority to TriMet, which would allow it to acquire property in Clark County for the light-rail extension.

The agreement, of course, came about when the CRC was still a gleam in the eyes of supporters, and the shotgun wedding between C-Tran and TriMet was contingent upon the project being funded and built. Now the CRC is dead, which means that the light-rail contract is dead. And still the stench lingers.

C-Tran officials have asked TriMet officials to join them in tearing up the contract, which has no sunset date. But TriMet General Manager Neil McFarlane responded last week by writing: “Leaving the agreement in place at this point costs nothing to either party, while terminating it would undo a great amount of cooperative effort and resources that were put into designing it. Given this view, TriMet will take no action to formally terminate the agreement at this time.”

In other words, “Nuts to you!”

Loss of credibility

On one count, McFarlane is correct. The contract costs nothing, unless you think that C-Tran’s credibility and reliability and dignity have any value. But as far as cooperative effort, he might as well have lauded the way Republicans cooperated with Obamacare. Taunting the other party when changes are necessary does not count as cooperation.

McFarlane pointed out that some version of the CRC could rise from the dead, in which case it would be helpful to have the light-rail contract in place. Except that any Son of CRC is certain to be vastly different from the original, which is likely to lead to arguments over the language of the deal and whether it remains in force.

Unilaterally ending the agreement could trigger a $5 million penalty for C-Tran. But because the deal currently does not have any financial cost, Vancouver Mayor and C-Tran Chair Tim Leavitt said, “My opinion is this is much to-do about nothing.” He might be correct. And yet the flap over the contract calls to mind the nefarious nature in which it was approved by the C-Tran board. As The Columbian reported last year, the contract “was still being changed hours before the C-Tran Board of Directors approved it, and board members never saw the actual agreement before the vote was taken.”

So, we have the C-Tran board being stuck with a deal that needed a lot more thought, and being stuck with it forever. It all could have been avoided — if only they knew a little more about basketball.

Loss of credibility

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