Commentary Culture Investigations

They’re big. Like really big. 
So big, in fact, that as you drive by them on the highway, your brain plays tricks on you. You know this because the nearby trees look like wooden toy trees from a child’s train set. 
Colossal buildings assigned colossal tasks necessarily take up colossal resources and put a colossal strain on local communities — or so the logic goes among residents who are worried about practical things like the cost of electricity and water wherever data centers are being built. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about whether data centers are really all that bad, but the fact is, they’re wildly unpopular. (RELATED: Why Aren’t Our Modern-Day Robber Barons Giving Us Robber-Baron Benefits?)
Gallup polling from a few months ago found that seven in 10 Americans are either strongly opposed or somewhat opposed to data centers being built in their local area. For comparison, just 53 percent of Americans said the same about nuclear power plants when asked in the same poll. (RELATED: The Backyard Problem of Data Centers)
It’s not split down party lines either. The 56 percent of Democrats who are strongly opposed to data centers in their communities are joined by 39 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of independents. As a general rule, the Midwest and South are slightly more anti-data-center than everyone else. 
What, you ask, is the problem with data centers? Well, the responses vary. Some opponents are concerned about noise and pollution. Others are worried that the potential demand on the electric grid could drive up electricity costs while the massive amount of water needed to cool down computers could deplete an area’s water resources. To be sure, there are responses to most of these concerns, but what matters here isn’t the content of the debate, but its context. (RELATED: Electricity Affordability — Trump’s Achilles’ Heel?)
Data centers, it turns out, seem to be turning into a crucial issue for November
Take the Senate race in Ohio, which is going to be an important piece of the puzzle if Republicans are going to maintain their control of the Senate. The race is between former Sen. Sherrod Brown and incumbent Sen. Jon Husted (who replaced J.D. Vance after he became vice president). A rather substantial portion of Brown’s campaign focuses on pinning 226 of Ohio’s data centers on Husted. 
“If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one”
One political ad called Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio,” while another featured Brown claiming that Husted was responsible for “$2.5 billion in out of control tax breaks to big out-of-state corporations.” That’s a line of attack he’s also used in stump speeches. 
To be sure, the attack is a bit unfair. In recent years, Husted has walked back some of his support. Recently, he proposed legislation in the Senate to try to alleviate the strain data centers allegedly place on the communities they’re being built in by requiring them to ensure that increased electricity costs don’t get passed down to average consumers. (RELATED: From ‘All In’ to Tap the Brakes: Josh Shapiro Redefines Pennsylvania’s Tech Boom)
But a political attack need not be completely true to be successful. 
The whole thing has become so concerning that a leaked memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee noted that the data center issue has become the “centerpiece” of Brown’s campaign against Husted. “More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck. If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,” the memo reads.
President Donald Trump, it seems, did not read that memo.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week. “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.”
Predictably, he got plenty of backlash for that comment. Most of it was from Democrats who are reading the polls and think the situation calls for wisecracks about putting a data center in Mar-a-Lago. (Apparently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t check to make sure there wasn’t one across the lagoon from Trump’s golf course.) 
Look, Trump knows what he’s doing. He’s had his finger on the pulse of the American people for decades. He knows that sometimes political opinion runs in fads and that those fads pass away. Likely, he thinks the data center issue is a fad. Given America’s history of constantly improving technology, he’s probably right. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the fad won’t matter in November. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Citizens Against Virtually Everything)
Then there was JD Vance, whose defense of the president’s remarks could serve as a blueprint in promoting economic growth while remaining sensitive to voter concerns. In comments to reporters, Vance suggested that the focus should be on making sure that data centers benefit the communities they’re in by lowering the utility bills we all pay every month.
“If you build the data center you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out,” he said. “And if that is happening, I don’t think the data centers are that controversial.” 
Or perhaps we could all just get on board with Elon Musk’s plan to send the data centers into outer space.
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Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

SACRAMENTO — As this year’s legislative session approached a conclusion on Monday, California’s GOP Senate leader handed out “easy buttons” similar to those used in one office-supply chain’s commercials with the word “NO” stamped on them. It represented some levity as Republicans, who find themselves in a super-minority in the Assembly and Senate, telegraphed their commitment to opposing the Democrats’ usual array of tax-and-spend bills. These Republicans posed for the cameras to apparently reinforce their party’s commitment to fiscal responsibility.
I might have applauded their effort to put up a futile yet noble fight, except that even this act of lighthearted defiance was a farce. Republicans had the chance to vote “no” on two of the most outrageous, fiscally irresponsible bills that came before the Legislature in years — and most of them (only two “no” votes on each bill) voted “yes” or didn’t vote (profiles in courage!). In fact, multiple Republicans signed on as co-authors of the most noxious measure. No Democrat opposed either bill, but at least they avoided the fiscal-responsibility photo-op theatrics.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The two measures are Assembly Bill 1383 and Assembly Bill 1054, both of which dramatically boost public-employee pensions. Ironically, AB 1054’s existence (more on this later) undermines the argument that supporters make for AB 1383, but we can’t expect any legislator to draw even the most obvious conclusions when their union allies are egging them on. It reminds me of the quotation from author and 1934 California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Unions don’t fund lawmakers’ salaries, but they do back their campaigns.
AB 1383 guts a 2012 pension reform measure called the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act (PEPRA). Spearheaded by Gov. Jerry Brown in the midst of a budget crisis, this modest law tried to get control of escalating pension costs. Unlike most private-sector workers, California government employees receive defined-benefit pensions that guarantee a payout based on a formula. At the time, most public-safety employees received a “3 percent at 50” plan that allowed them to retire at age 50 with 3 percent of their final salary multiplied by the number of years worked. (RELATED: Maybe the Pension Mess Can Go on Forever)
That meant these employees — police, firefighters, prison guards — retired with 90 percent of their pay payable to them and their spouses through their end of days. Other public employees received less-generous formulas (such as 2.7 percent at 55), but still retired with enviable amounts at relatively young ages. During that debate, critics pointed to California government workers who were members of the so-called $100,000 Pension Club. Now the average California Highway Patrol officer receives a $114,000 pension after 30 years, per recent reports. The Transparent California database shows scores of state workers receiving pensions far in excess of that number.
The pension problem affected the state budget, of course, as the general fund paid for state-worker pensions. But it was a rounding error in California’s enormous state budget. The real impact came at the local level, where pensions consumed larger shares of municipal budgets and led to service “crowd out” as pension costs forced cities to cut back on public services. At the time, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) was funded below 70 percent — meaning it had only 70 cents on the dollar to make good on its pension promises. (RELATED: California’s Debt Crisis Is Brewing Again)
The latest numbers show CalPERS funding levels at 85 percent. Pension funds invest their money and do well in alignment with market gains — and the stock market has been doing pretty well. But PEPRA deserves credit for slightly boosting retirement ages and trimming benefits for new hires. It also eliminated outrageous pension-spiking gimmicks for every employee, thus dissipating some of the costs.
A series of court decisions known collectively as the California Rule forbade the state from reducing pension benefits for current employees even going forward. So Brown’s idea — and he used his political capital to achieve it — was to trim pensions for new hires only and stabilize the system in 15 years or so. The idea is working as planned given that everyone hired since then has operated under a slightly less — but still very generous — pension system. Now that it’s working, lawmakers are pushing us back toward the old, more-costly system.
AB 1383 would “authorize” agencies to increase benefits by lowering pension ages and boosting pension percentages. Of course, authorizing is the same as mandating, given that once the state’s powerful safety unions secure a deal, everyone else (safety and otherwise) will follow. Unions always start by proposing boosts to police and firefighter compensation, given those groups’ popularity and political muscle — thus explaining Republicans’ instinctive willingness to support those unions’ priorities.
The Legislature’s bill analysis, to its credit, notes that a 1999 law (Senate Bill 400) triggered PEPRA, as SB 400 was
followed by those economic crises affecting pension fund investment returns, this resulted in increased unfunded or underfunded actuarial liabilities…. The public outcry against that public policy coupled with those economic crises … was then followed by regular and increased attention by the media and the public, as well as pension abuse schemes and manipulation by public employers and employees such as pension spiking and double-dipping.
And now here we are again. Note the latest news, which suggests widespread fears of a stock-market correction. By the way, AB 1054 sets up a Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP) that allows “retired” public employees to keep working for a few years and then actually retire with their huge formula and massive lump-sum payouts. Supporters of these bills say they are needed to deal with a so-called retention crisis, but there’s no crisis. People still line up for $ 250,000-a-year firefighting jobs.
Police turnover levels stable and lower than national levels, per Reason. But AB 1054 highlights that any recruiting problem is the result of a current retirement system that is so generous that it entices employees to retire earlier than they might otherwise choose. The only reason to have a DROP program is to enable current employees who want to keep working to do so. Why would someone keep working if they get paid virtually the same amount if they retire?
If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs these bills — and what are the chances he would stand up to any public-employee unions, let alone police and fire? — California will be setting itself up to repeat some troubling fiscal history. Most Republicans supported SB 400, but in 2012 they were at least vocal about the need for pension reform. Now they’re just going along with Democrats and government unions and don’t appear worried about the fiscal impact. That explains why some of us find their little “no” button stunt a bit much to take.
READ MORE from Steven Greenhut:
California Needs AI. So Why Is It Making Data Centers Harder to Build?
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Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
Image licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

Ted Cruz was on Laura Ingraham’s show a couple of nights ago and he said something worth repeating…

WOW. Ted Cruz didn’t mince words with ‘moderate’ Republicans still upset over Ken Paxton winning the primary:
“My message to them is enough!
Stop your bitching!
We had a $200 million primary, and Ken won. And one of the reasons the numbers are close is because $200 million of… pic.twitter.com/muiWVzOgNH
— James Laverty (@jjlavs2) September 2, 2026

Cruz is talking about a dynamic within the Republican Party which has gone on for decades, and has especially been front and center since the days of the Tea Party. Namely, that the GOP establishment has demanded lockstep loyalty from its conservative base, particularly when some anti-establishment conservative upstart offers a primary challenge to an establishment incumbent and gets beaten back, and the establishment has generally received the support it has demanded in such cases because the alternative has been to put communists, or communist-adjacents, in positions of political power.
But sometimes, the upstarts win. More to the point, sometimes the establishment performs so poorly that the voters just can’t stomach it anymore and they send in a cleanup crew.
And that’s what Ken Paxton is.
Paxton beat John Cornyn 63.8 percent to 36.2 percent in the runoff back in May after President Trump’s late endorsement. This after Cornyn managed only 42 percent of the vote in the primary; Paxton wasn’t the only challenger; Wesley Hunt and a couple of minor candidates were also in that race. (RELATED: Advice for Ken Paxton)
That’s a double test of John Cornyn’s utility as a senator from Texas. Occupying the absolute heights of Senate seniority, by the way. Cornyn was the chair of the NRSC from 2009-2013 and the Senate’s Republican whip from 2013-19. He got 24 votes for Majority Leader last year when John Thune won the job after Mitch McConnell, whom Cornyn was a yes-man for, finally relinquished it. This guy was in a position to deliver on conservative policy for Texas voters, and he had two shots at closing the sale with the folks in his own party, while his camp spent tens of millions of dollars — they outspent Ken Paxton’s camp by EIGHTY MILLION BUCKS in a PRIMARY, for Pete’s sake — and the voters screamed “Go away!” at the top of their lungs. (RELATED: Beware the Renegade Caucus)
Let’s remember that Paxton offered Cornyn a lifeline. The Senate GOP establishment crowd was pressuring Trump to endorse Cornyn, and Trump was close to acceding to their demands, while making his own demand to pass the SAVE Act. And Paxton said he would pack up his campaign and go home, conceding the race to Cornyn, if the Senate would pass the bill. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Grand Senate Bargain?)
They didn’t pass it. Cornyn, with all his stroke on Capitol Hill, either couldn’t or wouldn’t move the needle.
On a piece of legislation which is essentially a no-brainer in front of the American people, and has since become the distilled, Everclear manifestation of why Republican voters absolutely despise the Washington establishment inside the party.
Was this full-frontal repudiation enough for Cornyn and his camp to get the message? Hell, no.
They went out and fleeced all the party’s corporate donors by warning that Ken Paxton, who can reasonably claim to be the most maligned and attacked politician in America not named Donald Trump and yet wins election after election, can’t win that Senate seat.
Except it turns out that between Paxton and Cornyn, it’s Cornyn who isn’t electable. When you outspend your opponent by $80 million, and you get boat-raced to the tune of 64-36, you look like an abject buffoon in making an electability argument against him.
Was this full-frontal repudiation enough for Cornyn and his camp to get the message? Hell, no.
First, he sends one of his staffers to work for James Talarico, the fake-Christian heretic trans-kids-loving communist state representative who’s proven to be a fleecer of donors on par with the Cornyn crowd, and then shrugs and says, essentially, “it’s a free country” when people notice. As though that fooled anybody. (RELATED: The Incredibly, Unacceptably Weird James Talarico)
Then he says he’ll “support the Republican ticket” by going to Maine, Alaska, and Michigan to campaign for Susan Collins, Dan Sullivan (the real one, not the fraudulent Democrat plant with the same name — at least, we think that’s who Cornyn is going to try to help), and Mike Rogers.
But not Paxton. Paxton, Cornyn says, is unfit and a lawbreaker. And he’s still saying Paxton is a general-election risk.
While Cornyn’s friends at the NRSC and the Senate Leadership Fund say they don’t have any money for Texas. As a result, Talarico and his California and New York puppetmasters have deluged the Texas airwaves with tens of millions of dollars for the last three months, which haven’t been answered by outside money from the GOP.
Cornyn put this on Trump. He said Trump can “write a check.” Right. In an attempt to assuage the damage that the $100 million in attack ads Cornyn’s camp threw at Paxton, which couldn’t stop the challenger from getting more than 60 percent of the vote against him.
The NRSC did set up a joint fundraising committee with Paxton. That happened in June. Has it done any good? Well, the NRSC and SLF hadn’t booked a single ad for this fall in Texas as of late August. Cruz’s Truth and Courage PAC has thrown $2 million in for Paxton; Lone Star Liberty, another conservative PAC, is in for $15 million in ads this month so far; Trump did an RNC fundraiser in Houston, and the GOP has a convention coming up in a couple of weeks in Dallas that will likely give Paxton some momentum. Greg Abbott, Texas’s longtime Republican governor, laid into Talarico a few days ago, calling him a “pathological liar” on national TV and pledging to help Paxton.
And there are finally some Senate Republicans going to bat for Paxton. But they aren’t the Cornyn people. Cruz has been joined by Mike Lee and Ron Johnson, who are among the few good guys in that caucus. John Kennedy has said he’s going to hit Texas, and Kennedy is out begging people to give Paxton money.
It isn’t an indictment against these guys that they’re jumping in now rather than sooner. Individually, there’s only so much they can do, and it’s better that they do it later than during the summer anyway. This is about the third party spends and the official outlets which are supposed to be backing the party’s candidates for the Senate. And instead of helping the nominee in the biggest red state, they left him on an island for three months while a Democrat of highly dubious heterosexuality (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who thinks meat is murder, capitalism is “oppressive,” God is “non-binary,” loves trans kids, and that there ought to be a welcome mat at the border got to outspend him 200 to 1 on the airwaves.
Despite all of this, Talarico is basically tied with Paxton. And all of the growth potential left in the race is Paxton’s. One poll only had him at +57 net with GOP voters, while Talarico is +93 with Democrats. And Republicans almost always rise after Labor Day, particularly if they’re Republicans who have won election after election like Paxton has.
Let’s not play the moral fitness game when the survival of the Republic is on the line.
Yes, but Paxton is a poopy-head, say the Cornynites. After all, he got impeached, and he’s proven to be a bad husband.
Except the impeachment piece was already litigated by the voters of Texas who overwhelmingly re-elected Paxton four years ago. As for the “bad husband” piece, enough already with that. The “good husbands” in American politics have poisoned this as a job requirement a very long time ago. Ken Paxton might be a bad husband; Talarico carries himself like he’s looking for a husband. Let’s not play the moral fitness game when the survival of the Republic is on the line.
What’s probably worst here is the blithering idiocy of it all. You’ve let your nominee, a proven vote-getter who smashed your candidate almost two to one with your voters, wither on the vine for the entire summer, and he’s still right there in the fight. Paxton might not beat Talarico by the same margin he beat Cornyn, but not since 1994 has a Democrat won a statewide race in Texas. Talarico isn’t the kind of cultural figure you’d expect to change that. He’s not Beto O’Rourke. O’Rourke wasn’t even O’Rourke, truly; in both cases these are manufactured products of out-of-state money from places Texans give a stink-eye to.
Forget about the polls, which prior to Labor Day are always terrible. The fundamentals say Paxton is the likely winner, even if it’s 51-49 like Cruz beat O’Rourke back in 2018. And should he win, Ken Paxton will go to Washington absolutely beholden to nobody but the voters in Texas who put him in office.
And whatever you think of Ken Paxton, when he shows up someplace he’s all out of bubble gum.
This is somebody who filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration in four years. He’s the guy who had the stones to sue Pennsylvania over its… ahem… irregularities during the 2020 presidential election. The skins on his wall are legitimate: overtime threshold, Title IX/trans school rules, energy-efficiency mandates, highway-emissions rules, parole-in-place, HHS obstruction of state abortion/transition investigations. He’s kicked Meta’s rear end several times and wrangled multi-billion-dollar settlements out of them. No AG in the country has done more good in fighting the federal administrative state and the abuses of Big Corporate America at the same time like Paxton has.
And you want to piss this guy off after he’s already annihilated your candidate in front of the voters? Just how stupid are you people?
It’s better that John Cornyn sits out this cycle. The good he and his friends can do for “the Republican ticket” is of pretty scant value. As for the rest of the snot-nosed establishment who have micturated on the party’s nominee for the last three months, the message is simpler, and it’s one conservatives are very familiar with…
Shut up and get in line. Now, dammit.
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A new bill backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and three other Democrats came in response to an ICIJ and The New York Times investigation.

The project, which aimed to expand protected environmental areas and boost tourism, was terminated in 2024 after allegations of human rights abuses.

New data shows how a key office hammered by layoffs and cost-cutting referred at most two cases in fiscal year 2025.

by Tony Schick and Conrad Wilson, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

When the Portland Trail Blazers went up for sale this year for the first time in three decades, local leaders were so determined to keep the team in Portland that they penned a widely publicized letter promising the National Basketball Association they’d work with whoever the new owner was to secure an overhaul of the team’s arena.

Fans cheered as a group of investors led by Texan Tom Dundon went all-in with a $4 billion bid for the team, which has now been accepted. Many speculated about what Dundon’s ownership of a newly successful National Hockey League team in Raleigh, North Carolina, would portend for Oregon’s oldest and biggest sports franchise.

There was no public discussion locally about the fact that Dundon created a company Oregon accused in 2020 of preying on residents through high-interest car loans they couldn’t afford. The state’s then-attorney general said that the business practices of Santander Consumer USA were “predatory and harmful and will not be tolerated in Oregon” as she announced Oregon’s piece of a $550 million multistate lawsuit settlement with the company.

In addition, Oregon is part of an ongoing multistate investigation into another national subprime lender for which Dundon has served in a leadership role, Exeter Finance. The Oregon Department of Justice confirmed to Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica the state’s role in the investigation, the existence of which Exeter has disclosed in securities filings.

It’s unclear how these issues might affect the commitment of Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson to a partnership, which could include tens or hundreds of millions in public money based on past arena projects in other cities. Spokespeople for both Wilson and Kotek declined to answer when asked if the elected leaders knew about Dundon’s history with regulators.

Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve regulator who teaches finance at Boston University, said Dundon’s record is an important consideration.

“The money used to buy the Portland Trail Blazers is money that was built on predatory lending,” Williams said of Dundon. “He had an opportunity. He seized it. He made lots of profit. And how did he make that profit? He made it on the backs of low- and poor-credit individuals.”

Dundon’s purchase of the Blazers awaits approval from the NBA’s board of governors, which often takes months, before it can close.

OPB and ProPublica received no response after sending a summary of their reporting and a list of questions to Dundon, his investment firm, the public relations staff of his hockey team and the attorneys representing him in a bankruptcy dispute.

Dundon later answered to a text message seeking comment: “Unfortunately at this point in the process I am not available. Happy to speak with you after closing. Thx.”

Dundon left Santander Consumer in 2015. In biographical posts online and previous news media interviews, Dundon has described his approach to subprime lending as providing opportunities for people with bad credit to own cars and making sure borrowers receive a fair deal.

“Just because someone has bad credit doesn’t mean they are a bad person,” he told The Dallas Morning News shortly after leaving the company.

Santander Consumer declined to comment on Dundon. In a statement, the company said: “Operating in a highly regulated industry, we have robust processes in place that are designed to protect customers and adhere to all regulatory requirements and industry best practices.”

A spokesperson for Exeter Finance declined to comment. The company has said in filings that it is cooperating with the current investigation by states’ attorneys general.

The case that Santander Consumer settled with attorneys general in 2020 concerned more than 265,000 borrowers across the country, including 2,000 in Oregon. The settlement agreement said it did not constitute evidence of, or admission to, any of the state’s allegations against the company.

As for Exeter Finance, Oregon consumers have filed 23 complaints against it with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all of which the agency listed as “closed with explanation” from the company.

One of those complaints was from AshLe’ Penn.

Penn, a single mother of three working as a staffing company account manager in 2021, needed a car. Her credit was bad. But a dealership was able to get her a loan on a 2014 Chrysler 300 through Exeter Finance.

Penn would have to make $511 monthly payments over 72 months, reflecting an interest rate of 28%.

“The interest rate was pretty insane,” she said in an interview. “But I needed a car so bad.”

Two years later, Penn found herself three payments behind and had been evicted from her apartment, she said. According to her consumer complaint, she was living in the sedan when Exeter sent a company to repossess it in January 2023. It was late at night, and she was parked outside her ex’s house. Her daughters watched from inside. She wrote that she spent the next 10-plus hours locked in her car, in a standoff with the repo agent, before enlisting a bankruptcy attorney who halted the repossession.

She recorded much of it on video, which she shared with Exeter.

“It was horrific. I mean, I cried. I cried for God,” Penn told OPB and ProPublica. “I was afraid to leave my car. I couldn’t get out of my car after that. I was just so afraid somebody was going to take it.”

Penn complained, arguing the law prohibits repossessing a car with someone inside, and demanded $150,000 in compensation. Exeter told her that it had done a thorough review, which concluded that she had failed to pay and that she was warned ahead of time her car would be taken away.

Penn’s version of events, Exeter wrote, could not be corroborated.

AshLe’ Penn at her home. Her consumer complaint said she was living in her car in 2023 when Exeter Finance tried to repossess the vehicle.

(Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)

Building an Auto Loan Giant
Allegations of predatory lending would hardly stand out among NBA owners.

It is a billionaires’ club whose past and current members or their companies have been accused of housing discrimination, knowingly underwriting improper mortgages, exploiting prison inmates, making racist comments and engaging in sexual misconduct. The Blazers’ current owner, Jody Allen, settled lawsuits in which her company’s security guards accused her of sexual harassment and attempting to smuggle penguin skulls and giraffe bones out of Antarctica and Africa. All the owners, including Allen, have denied the allegations against them in court filings or in statements to the news media.

Dundon’s path to NBA ownership began at used car dealerships, where he worked in finance. In the mid-1990s, he and other former dealership workers co-founded the company Drive Financial Services. Dundon became its president and chief operating officer.

The company billed itself as “setting a new standard in the sub-prime lending industry.” Dealers appreciated that Drive Financial would loan money to people other companies wouldn’t, according to its website at the time, because it was able to “overlook negative credit histories such as charge offs, bankruptcies and repossessions.”

Finance experts who’ve studied the subprime lending industry say it offers a last resort for some people to own a car. Lenders set high interest rates in part to absorb the losses from those who can’t make payments. Even when lenders follow consumer laws, defaults are common.

“The alternative is, ‘Let’s just not issue loans to people that are very risky, and then they’ll never default,’” said University of Utah professor Mark Jansen, who has authored several papers on subprime loans. “But in a lot of places without public transport, no car means no job.”

In 2006, the Spanish company Banco Santander acquired Drive Financial and transformed it into Santander Consumer USA. Dundon kept a 10% ownership stake and a seat on its board of directors. He stayed on as CEO of the newly formed company.

Dundon emerged as a key figure in the growth of the subprime auto loan industry, said Williams, the Boston University finance professor.

Williams, who made car loans as a bank officer before working in financial regulation and risk analysis, now teaches classes about subprime car loans and other lending risks. He started studying car financing companies like Santander when he was researching a 2010 book about systemic risk in the finance industry. In 2015, he was one of the experts the New York Senate tapped for help with a report on the risks of the subprime auto loans industry.

Williams said Dundon “was one of the individuals that really grew the industry. Many would argue that he took it to a new level.”

Under Dundon, the value of Santander Consumer jumped from just over $600 million at the time of the acquisition to nearly $9 billion in 2014, according to Bloomberg.

That growth was built almost entirely with subprime borrowers. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Santander Consumer’s early years show the average credit score on its loans was below 540. Roughly two-thirds of its loans had interest rates over 20%.

A speaker bio for Dundon, posted by the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, said he was “able to impact lives by increasing access to reliable transportation for individuals with limited credit history” during his time at Santander Consumer.

But the company was also drawing consumer complaints.

Kenneth Dost was living in Scappoose, Oregon, when the housing market crashed and the architecture firm he worked with went under in 2007.

He was still struggling financially in 2010 when Santander Consumer took over the 15.85% Citi Financial loan that he’d used to buy his yellow Ford F-150 pickup. He said in his complaint with the Oregon Department of Justice that Santander Consumer agreed over the phone to lower his payments from $399 a month to $281. Dost said he then spent weeks going back and forth with the company trying to provide requested documents.

In November that year, Dost said, his daughter saw the yellow truck being hauled away shortly after she stepped off her school bus. After repossessing the Ford, Santander Consumer said in a letter to Oregon officials that the loan modifications Dost thought he received were actually subject to management’s approval and that Dost’s loan “did not meet the guidelines.”

In another letter, Santander Consumer told Oregon officials the documentation necessary to modify Dost’s loan was “not received in its entirety.” The letter also said Dost was 59 days delinquent by the time he sought the modification.

After selling the truck at auction, Dost said, Santander Consumer informed him he still owed more than $2,000. That included a fee for repossessing his truck.

“This ends up being a further windfall for Santander and more money they can bleed from us,” Dost told state investigators. “This is wrong.”

Dost became one of 24 borrowers Oregon’s Department of Justice named in an April 2012 “investigative demand” letter addressed to Dundon. The state ordered the Santander Consumer CEO to give testimony in person or else turn over the borrowers’ documents.

Santander chose the latter, and Oregon’s attorney general reached an “assurance of voluntary compliance” with the company in 2013 that required it to take steps to protect consumers and pay the state $25,000. The agreement said it was not an admission by the company that it violated the law.

There was more to come.

Leaving Santander
Dundon knew pressure on his company from regulators was mounting.

In financial reports between late 2014 and early 2015, Dundon disclosed that in addition to a state attorneys general investigation, Santander Consumer also had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice and a notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission that the agency planned to investigate its lending practices.

In early 2015, the company reached a $9 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over allegations the company illegally repossessed military service members’ cars. The company neither admitted nor denied the allegations under the settlement. It was quoted as saying it fully cooperated with the government and had taken steps to improve its compliance with the law.

Around that time, a front-page story in The New York Times detailed how Dundon and others had amassed wealth by packaging risky auto loans made to low-income people and selling those loans as securities for hundreds of millions of dollars. Regulators said it resembled the way banks sold bundles of shoddy home loans before the housing bubble burst in the mid-2000s.

Dundon reassured stock analysts in April 2015 that “we’re too good to have a bust.”

But on the same earnings call, Dundon acknowledged problems, saying the company had “a lot of work to do” to meet regulatory expectations.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston was one regulatory agency looking into Santander Consumer. It found numerous deficiencies with the company. In late June 2015, Santander Consumer’s board of directors voted to accept a Fed enforcement action that required the company to submit written plans to improve its risk management and company structure.

Dundon was out as CEO the same day the enforcement agreement took effect, July 2, 2015. In his interview with The Dallas Morning News at the time, Dundon said that the Federal Reserve issues didn’t involve him and that he and Santander Consumer’s parent company “had different ideas about how to run a business.”

He netted more than $700 million in his separation agreement, which included cashing out his stock, SEC filings show.

A slew of multimillion-dollar legal settlements followed for Santander Consumer in the wake of Dundon’s departure: $26 million for allegations of “unfair, high-rate loans” in Massachusetts and Delaware; $12 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found it engaged in “deceptive acts” and violated consumer protection laws; and $550 million — the largest payout — with 34 attorneys general, including Oregon’s. The company did not admit wrongdoing in any of these cases.

After settling with state attorneys general, the company stated at the time it had “strengthened our risk management across the board” and called the lending that regulators had scrutinized a “legacy” issue.

After Santander Consumer
Dundon used the money he made through Santander Consumer to make a wide range of investments, and he soon became known less for his tenure as an auto lender and instead as a prominent figure in recreational and professional sports.

Through a new firm, Dundon Capital Partners, he invested in Topgolf, an entertainment and restaurant chain built around golf driving ranges that was rapidly growing at the time. Along with forays into real estate and health care companies, he became the sole owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes in 2021.

Yet Dundon remained a player among subprime auto lenders.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Dundon Capital Partners invested $100 million in Carvana in 2017, and sold much of the stock a year later. Almost half of the loans that Carvana issues are subprime, according to a report from the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research.

In 2023, Dundon Capital invested in subprime car lender Exeter Finance, according to the research firm Pitchbook.

Exeter Finance was founded in 2006 in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, the city where Dundon and others founded the company that became Santander Consumer. Exeter’s website shows that several former Santander executives took leadership roles at Exeter starting in 2015, while Santander Consumer was under state and federal scrutiny. Exeter is currently listed on Dundon Capital’s website as part of its portfolio, and a 2022 news release from Exeter identified Dundon as chairman of the board.

A 2024 investigation by ProPublica found that because of the way Exeter Finance handled loans, it sometimes made more money when borrowers defaulted than when they paid on time.

Exeter has settled allegations of unfair lending practices, paying more than $6 million combined to Massachusetts and Delaware. (The company did not admit wrongdoing in either case.) Meanwhile, it is under investigation by the attorneys general in 42 states, it said in a corporate filing this year. These include Oregon, a spokesperson for Attorney General Dan Rayfield confirmed.

Exeter has described the current multistate inquiry as an extension of demands for information that started in 2015. The company wrote that the initial investigation concerned its “origination, servicing and collection practices” and that it cooperated with state requests for documents.

For JT Cotter of Bend, Oregon, Exeter Finance was the only lender available when he bought a used Honda Pilot at Carmax in 2022 for $28,000.

Cotter, who works privately with families of children with special needs, said he had previously defaulted on a 2018 high-interest car loan from Santander Consumer.

“It demolished me,” he said.

When Cotter needed a new car and Exeter offered him a rate of 19%, he thought, “‘Oh, it’s just another Santander.’ But I didn’t know there was actually a connection.”

Exeter let him skip payments and extend his loan, a practice that ProPublica’s 2024 investigation found was fundamental to the company’s business model. (The company said at the time that it communicates with customers to ensure they know the costs involved with extensions.)

Cotter said what he didn’t know was that the payments Exeter let him skip were moved to the end of the loan, increasing the interest and fees he had to pay. By 2024, his $731 monthly payment went entirely toward interest, according to an Exeter billing statement reviewed by OPB and ProPublica. Exeter repossessed the Pilot eight months ago.

He never filed a complaint with the state Department of Justice because, he said, he didn’t know it was something he could do.

Cotter now drives a Subaru. He said he saved up and paid cash for it.

A New Arena

Portland’s Moda Center arena in 2025. Memorial Coliseum, behind it, was the Blazers’ home until the 1990s.

(Brooke Herbert/OPB)

Portland’s city-owned Moda Center arena has been the home of the Trail Blazers since it opened in 1995 under the name the Rose Garden, replacing the city’s aging Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

The team’s future in the Rose City wasn’t a prominent debate in Portland until Allen, the owner, put it on the market in May. Asked to comment on the team’s future in light of a potential sale, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver declared to reporters that Portland “likely needs a new arena.”

“That will be part of the challenge for any new ownership group coming in,” Silver said at the time.

Others echoed Silver’s sentiment. Marshall Glickman, whose father founded the Trail Blazers in 1970, said during an August interview on OPB’s “Think Out Loud” that any new owner would have “extraordinary leverage” over the city and the state to pay for a new or renovated arena. “And that leverage comes from the threat, which may be spoken or it may not be spoken, but the portability of the team that it could leave.”

Glickman started an organization, Rip City Forever, to build public support for keeping the Blazers in Portland. He declined to comment further but said his statements during the “Think Out Loud” interview were not directed specifically at Dundon, whose name had not yet surfaced.

Cities rarely come out ahead when they put tax dollars into these stadium projects, a group of researchers concluded in 2022 after examining more than 130 economic studies of publicly financed stadiums. Any public benefits from increased foot traffic, new visits to nearby businesses or heightened civic stature were too small to justify the amount the public spent, the review found.

Wilson and Kotek, the Portland mayor and Oregon governor, stepped up in a big way nonetheless. In their letter to Silver, they said they’d heard his concerns about the Blazers arena “loud and clear” and “fully support renovating the Moda Center to become a point of pride for the Blazers and for our city.”

“We are prepared to explore the public-private partnerships needed to make it happen,” they concluded.

Then, on Sept. 12, the current Blazers owner announced that the franchise had accepted Dundon’s purchase offer.

Dundon has not commented on the Blazers acquisition since, but U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said he’d spoken with him just before the bid became public. “He sounded very excited about the team’s future being here in beautiful Portland,” Wyden told reporters.

As in Portland, there were concerns the NHL’s Hurricanes would leave Raleigh for a bigger market when Dundon bought the team. In 2023, the Hurricanes signed a long-term lease in the city, announcing the development of a billion-dollar arena and surrounding entertainment district. The deal included $300 million in public money.

Oregonians who borrowed money from companies linked to Dundon voiced emotions ranging from dismay to disgust when they learned their tax dollars might go toward supporting Dundon’s latest investment.

“Great,” Dost said. “Making a partnership with the devil, essentially is what that is.”

Penn, who was homeless when Exeter sent a repo company to take her car away, said she considers herself a Blazers fan. She’s never made it to a game in person, but her kids went on a school-sponsored trip to the Moda Center this year.

She fended off repossession back in 2023, but the car broke down a few months later. She couldn’t afford to fix it and stopped trying to make payments. She eventually found Section 8 housing, but without a vehicle, she said her kids had to stop playing soccer and basketball because she had no way to get them to practices and games.

Penn said she wonders if the people who run Exeter know what’s happened to borrowers like her.

“I’ve seen their executive team, and they’re definitely eating and feeding their families,” she said, having looked the company up online, “and I think it’s definitely at the expense of others not being able to.”

Without a car, Penn says her kids had to stop playing soccer and basketball because she had no way to get them to practices and games.

(Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB)

Doris Burke and Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research.

Matthew MacConnell , Ars Technica Automotive lights are better than they’ve ever been, but there’s a trade-off.