In late January, Portland rolled out the red carpet for a group of visiting dignitaries. Mayor Ed Suslovic stood on the steps of City Hall to welcome them, joined by Gov. John Baldacci, an Irish dance troupe and a bagpiper.

You’d have thought the Queen of England was in town – or someone even bigger, like Bono. But no. The celebration was in honor of a group of investors hoping to start a minor league basketball team. TD Banknorth chairman Bill Ryan Sr. is part of the group, as is his son, Bill Ryan Jr., owner of Oxford Plains Speedway, and Jon Jennings, a former assistant coach with the Boston Celtics.

The investors hope their team can strike an affiliation deal with the Celtics (thus the Irish dancers). They also expressed interest in having the team play at either the city-owned Portland Exposition Building (the Expo), next to Hadlock Field on Park Avenue, or at the county-owned Civic Center (thus the mayor and the red carpet treatment; can’t let county government steal a potentially lucrative rent-paying tenant).

The team would be part of the NBA’s Development League – called the D-League, even though, if they’re at all like NBA players, D-Leaguers don’t play much D. There are currently 14 D-League teams, but they all play in western or mid-western states. At least three or four new franchises would need to be started in the eastern half of the country for a Portland team to be viable. The NBA has said two D-League franchises will be awarded this year, and recently announced one of them, a team in Reno, Nev.

Nevertheless, Suslovic was preparing for tip-off. “An NBA D-League team would be the perfect complement to the Sea Dogs and Pirates by providing Maine sports fans young and old a local basketball team to root for,” he said in prepared remarked distributed in a Jan. 31 press release. “We’re ready and hope to be a part of the NBA family.”

All well and good, I figured. We’ll wait and see what happens. The carpet was rolled up, the governor left, the piper packed his pipes, and time passed with no further official word about the team. Then, on Feb. 22, I got an e-mail alerting me that city staff were trying to arrange a closed-door meeting to “review the terms of the proposed NBA lease.”

Proposed lease? Hold on a minute, I thought. The city has already drawn up a lease for this non-existent team and now wants to review it in private? There’d been no public discussion and no vote by any elected official to offer this private investment group a lease to use public property.

And it’s not like the Expo is sitting vacant. As the city’s public facilities division notes online, the Expo is “busier than ever” these days, hosting more than 185 events per year. In addition to various fairs, festivals and trade shows, the Expo is the site of many middle school and high school sporting events, and most of those take place during the D-League’s season, which runs from November through April.

Scheduling conflicts seem inevitable, especially on Friday nights and Saturdays. Minor league franchises like the Pirates covet weekend home games, when attendance is typically the largest. The Expo’s schedule for February and March this year shows that nearly every Friday and Saturday is booked with school sporting events.

At least two of the three city councilors on the committee being asked to review lease terms in private balked – not because they don’t want the team here, but because they thought there ought to be some public discussion before dotted lines are signed. Though the meeting was announced on the city’s Web site as an “executive session” closed to the public, the committee first needs to vote to go into private session. Lacking a two-vote majority to shut the public out entirely, the committee first held an unannounced public session on Feb. 29, which was attended by reporters from The Bollard (yours truly) and two other print media, as well as a TV news cameraman.

It was here that we heard the investors’ pledge that a D-League team in Portland would not displace any current users of the Expo or cost the city any money whatsoever. The details of how that feat would be achieved were reserved for the private session that followed, but councilors also pledged that any lease agreement would see the light of day before it was signed.

Professional sports teams rarely, if ever, require nothing from their home city. Just look at the Sea Dogs and Pirates, who’ve both benefited from special deals that make it easier for them to play here. And once a team is established, the threat that they’ll leave if some concession is not made is an all-too-common tactic used to extract more favors.

Yes, a D-League team would be great. But Portland would be wise to play a little D itself.

Chris Busby is editor of The Bollard Report, an online newspaper covering Portland at www.thebollard.com.