What parent hasn’t heard the petulant threat of a needy or greedy child: “If you don’t give me that (candy/toy/sugary cereal), I’ll (hold my breath/run away/grow up and vote Republican)”? The disciplined parent calls the kid’s bluff and sticks to their position. The less disciplined gives in for fear their offspring will gamble away their Social Security checks on the stock market.

By this measure, city officials in Portland are pretty good parents, judging by their reaction to two recent threats by popular civic entities. But as with parenting, only time will tell whether they made the right decisions.

First came the Greater Portland YWCA. Facing big financial problems, the social service provider went belly-up last year and closed its women’s shelter and recreation center on Spring Street. The Y’s board hoped to sell the property and use the money to settle its accounts with creditors and former employees.

Trouble was, the city has a so-called “housing replacement” ordinance that requires those who remove housing units to either build new ones elsewhere or pay into a fund for affordable housing construction. In addition, the Maine State Housing Authority held a covenant on the property’s deed that required it to continue to offer housing for the needy until 2030. Those two requirements threatened to significantly decrease the building’s resale value, making it harder for the Y to pay its debts.

The Y mounted what director Dale McCormick, housing authority director, termed “a very strenuous campaign” to get the housing authority to “relieve them of their promise” to continue offering emergency shelter, she told The Bollard. The Y even followed through on a threat to “tell Dad” (my term, not McCormick’s) – in this case, Gov. John Baldacci, whose office “tried to stay neutral,” McCormick said.

The Y’s board and its lawyer tried to get the city to exempt the property from the ordinance on grounds it constituted a “project of special merit.” Here the threat was, “If you don’t give us an exemption, we’ll file for bankruptcy, and then it’s quite possible nobody will get paid.”

City officials didn’t buy it and didn’t blink, and sure enough, the Y didn’t file for bankruptcy. Instead, its board and lawyer worked to put together a new deal by which the Portland Museum of Art will buy the Spring Street property and work with an affordable housing developer to construct new units elsewhere in the city.

There are some risks and drawbacks to this deal. For one thing, the developer doesn’t know where or when the units will be built, though $900,000 has been put in an escrow account controlled by the housing authority. And advocates for the homeless point out that the new units won’t necessarily ease the increased need for emergency shelter caused by the Y’s closure.

Next came Portland Maine Baseball Inc., the company that owns the Sea Dogs minor league franchise. It wants a new $1.7 million clubhouse at publicly owned Hadlock Field, and they initially wanted the city to pay for it. Here the argument was the familiar schoolyard threat: “If I don’t get what I want, I’ll take my bat and ball and go home.” Furthermore, the Dogs said that without a clubhouse built on the public’s dime, the Boston Red Sox could decide not to renew their affiliation with the team next year.

The trouble for the Dogs was that they needed at least seven of the nine city councilors to approve borrowing to build the clubhouse – and at least three councilors essentially said, “So long, Slugger!”

In response, the company recrafted the clubhouse and lease proposal so it would be paying for the new locker rooms themselves. It would only need a simple majority of five votes to pass that deal, but PMB blundered by structuring it in a way that would require nearly $1 million more from the city over the lease’s 20-year term than the original proposal entailed.

Faced with the prospect of this deal’s defeat, PMB restructured the proposal again, just hours before the June 18 vote, this time decreasing the public’s subsidy of the private ball club over the next two decades. The council endorsed the new lease unanimously.

Rhetoric to the contrary, however, the clubhouse project is no guarantee the Sox will continue their ties to the Dogs. Affiliation agreements can only be made for four-year periods, and the Sox haven’t even agreed to renew next year.

Besides, in pro baseball, loyalty to a team or a town is nothing compared to the quest for yet more cash. Nomar and Damon loved Boston, too, didn’t they?

For more on these stories and other Portland news, visit The Bollard, a free, online publication found at www.thebollard.com