Here's a distressing scenario that you can see coming a mile away if Portland is ever stupid enough to spend public money to build a Convention Center hotel. The outfit that's brought in to run the hotel looks out for its own interests, to the detriment of the people who own the place. In Portland's case, that latter group would likely be you and I:

The contracts are supposed to give owners the benefits of a hotel operator’s reputation and its marketing and management prowess. But provisions in those operating agreements also usually require owners to cover the costs of operating the hotels, in addition to paying the hotel manager a fee, often a percentage of gross revenue.

"It gives the operators all the benefits of ownership with none of the burdens," said James R. Butler Jr., a lawyer at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Marmaro in Los Angeles. "It pushes to the owner all of the costs — the capital costs of buying, maintaining and operating the property — and lets the managing companies take most of their money off the top."

A friend who knows hotel deals and who must remain nameless comments on our proposed Convention Center hotel project that Starwood's apparent indifference to the prudence or lack thereof in the revenue forecasts for the project are probably based on the presence of something called a "non-disturbance agreement" in their deal with Metro. Such an agreement protects the hotel operator from loss of management income in the event the hotel underperforms. My friend observes that elsewhere, Starwood is demanding not just its full management income payments, but additional capital investments in upgrading the property to keep it in top shape, where the property hotel in question is having big losses.