Category Archives: Cleveland Browns

Friday roundup: Raleigh MLS project funding, Islanders’ train station costs, Flames arena talks are all ???

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Happy Friday! If you’ve been wondering if Scott McCaughey’s excellent new album of songs written while in a hospital room recovering from a stroke can drown out the sound of poorly timed jackhammering by the gas company right outside your window, I’m here to report: Not nearly well enough!

Typing really loud so you can hear me over the din:

  • Raleigh residents are concerned that a development project centered on a new soccer stadium could price them out of living in the city. Also, there isn’t actually enough Wake County tax money available to pay for the project’s proposed $390 million public cost. And Raleigh doesn’t have an MLS team, or the promise of one. Other than that, this is going swimmingly.
  • Newsday has contradicted Long Island Business News’s report that New York state will pay “most” of the cost of a new $300 million train station for an Islanders arena at Belmont Park, saying that the actual cost is only $100 million and developers will pay most of it. Unnamed source fight!
  • Calgary city councillor Jeff Davison, who is spearheading behind-closed-doors talks with the Flames owners over a new arena, says, “We do not have a deal today, and when we will have one and if we will have one is totally up in the air. But what we can tell the public today is that discussions are productive but they’re not complete. We can’t give an exact date as to when we’ll be back with any information [but] I’m confident if we do bring a plan back, that the public will support it.” Pretty sure that translates as “Still talking, ask again later.”
  • Noah Pransky has been on a writing tear about the Tampa Bay Rays mess this week, including a review of an article he wrote in July 2009 predicting much of what has since come to pass and an analysis of how hotel-tax money that Tampa officials say can’t be spent for things like policing or libraries really can, because they could be used to free up general-fund money that’s currently spent on tourism-related expenses. “Where’s the study on best uses for that new money?” writes Pransky at Florida Politics. “How about just a best-use conversation, held out in the sunshine?” Crazy talk!
  • Speaking of tax money that could be spent on other things, Cuyahoga County is considering a 1% hotel tax hike to free up $4.6 million a year to spend on its convention center and sports venues, which in present value comes to about $70 million. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer article on this is entirely about how the bed tax hike would affect the hotel industry, because of course it is.)
  • “Could an NFL Stadium [for the Buffalo Bills] be Built on an Abandoned Coke Plant Property?” asks Erie News Now, boldly toying with Betteridge’s Law.
  • Worcester will break ground next Thursday on its new heavily subsidized Triple-A Red Sox stadium set to open at the beginning of the 2021 season, which, uh, isn’t a lot of time. They’d better hope that the climate crisis means a less stormy winter construction season in New England, which, uh, isn’t likely.

Browns owners say they don’t need new stadium so long as city spends maybe $95m to deck over nearby highway

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How long, exactly, have we been doing this stadium-watch stuff? Long enough that the very first conversation my Joanna Cagan and I had about possibly writing something together was when her hometown of Cleveland was talking about building a new stadium for the Browns at the same time that their school system had been placed into receivership. That stadium eventually opened in September1999 (one year after the first edition of Field of Schemes came out), and that was almost 20 years ago, people, so of course the Browns owners (who of course aren’t the same Browns owners as they were then) want something new, and that something new is … a bridge?

The team, as the Haslams reiterated Tuesday, is hoping a pedestrian bridge can be built over State Route 2 that would better connect FES to the city…

A pedestrian bridge was originally supposed to be completed prior to the 2016 Republican National Convention.

But a 2014 proposal was scrapped. Another plan, as Crain’s reported in February, is being discussed, but the potential price — which would go well beyond the $25 million raised for the 2014 proposal — is a sticking point.

The proposal, if you click through, is actually for a “land bridge” that would build a 5.3-acre park spanning railroad tracks and the highway, which you can see why it would cost more than $25 million. And while it wouldn’t be entirely for the Haslams’ benefit — there are also plans for housing development near the stadium, and also of course Cleveland residents would get a small park out of the deal — it sounds like the Browns owners are going to make themselves front and center in pushing for such a plan.

How much more than $25 million could a deck park cost? Here is a helpful paper titled “Cost-Effectiveness of Capping Freeways for Use as Parks” that notes that Freeway Park in Seattle, which is similarly a 5.2-acre deck park above a ground-level highway, “came at a relatively low cost of $18 million per acre.” That would price a Cleveland bridge-park at $95.4 million, which is a chunk of change, though obviously a lot less than building a new stadium. Though co-owner Dee Haslam also said that they would “make improvements to the stadium,” and didn’t say who’d pay for that, so we could still be looking at a nine-figure ask, but at least it’s a lot less than a billion dollars for a new stadium, and oh here comes our old friend anchoring again!

 

Temple economist Michael Leeds just pwned the Browns on their stadium demands, yo

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The Cleveland Scene has a long article up today about the Cleveland Browns‘ saber-rattling for a new stadium, most of which is about what the Browns are probably after in seeking to replace a 19-year-old stadium — a site with lots of land around it to develop, probably — and how likely that is to happen — not too likely, according to the Scene, unless the Browns owners can get Cleveland to decommission an airport, which is hard because the FAA would be involved. It’s an interesting read, but I mostly want to take a moment to appreciate this quote from Temple University economist Michael Leeds, explaining why teams keep upping the ante for what they “need” despite having stadiums that are barely out of the packaging:

“Every parent goes through this type of thing and knows the deal,” he said. “You ask your kid what they want for their birthday, and she might say, ‘I want a pony.’ You ask her why and she says the kid down the street has one. Most of us figure out a way to ignore what she wants and get her something else.”

[mic drop]

Browns owner says team may seek new stadium to promote Cleveland redevelopment, this is where we came in, bye

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If Field of Schemes has an origin story, it almost certainly begins on the day in 1995 when Joanna Cagan came to a meeting of our Brooklyn Metro Times zine and complained about how the Cleveland Browns were moving to Baltimore to become the Ravens, and the NFL was shaking down Cleveland for hundreds of millions of dollars in stadium money in order to provide a replacement team. So it’s more than a little weird to be reading this:

The Cleveland Browns have begun long-term discussions about a development project that could include a substantially renovated stadium or a new facility at a different site in downtown Cleveland.

Well, sure, the old place is 19 years old! Gotta be thinking about a new one!

Browns co-owner Dee Haslam told ESPN that a new stadium could be a decade out, but that really she just wants the Browns to be about helping contribute to the growth and revival of Cleveland, because that’s what football is all about, or something:

“The main thing is to start the conversation, at some point,” said Haslam, who agreed to the interview after ESPN learned of the talks. “I don’t know that we’re ready to start the conversation, but we are ready to get all the information we can about what’s possible.

“So I think it’s really important to find out what’s possible. There could be a lot of great ideas that we might not be able to do because it’s not feasible for one reason or another. I don’t want to get the horse in front of the cart until we’re knowledgeable enough to know, because we’re not informed enough to know right now.

“But we do know that we have a desire to make a bigger impact on the future of Cleveland.”

Okay, so clearly this is very preliminary, which makes sense, as the Browns’ lease at the stadium taxpayers built for them in 1999 runs until 2029 (by which time “it could be one of the league’s oldest facilities,” helpfully notes ESPN, which, hey, surprise for you guys, it’s already in the older half of NFL stadiums because those things are like goddamn mayflies). Also clearly, it’s Haslam noting that Cleveland is starting to explore ideas for downtown redevelopment, and thinking, we should try to get us some of that action, and then when questioned by ESPN spouting a lot of nothing about “making an impact” because what else is she going to say, really?

What would have been nice would have been for ESPN to ask: So, why does downtown Cleveland still need redevelopment focused around a football stadium when it just built a football stadium 19 years ago on the premise that it would help redevelop downtown? But that’s probably a bit much to expect from a network that has a $1.9 billion a year business partnership with the NFL.

Friday roundup: Beckham sued over MLS land purchase, Browns’ flammable stadium, and more!

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It’s Friday roundup time! Let’s get started:

  • A local Miami landowner is suing Miami-Dade County over its plan to sell land to David Beckham’s would-be MLS ownership group for a new stadium, arguing that the no-bid deal violates state law requiring public land to be sold to the “highest and best bidder.” Bruce Matheson, who owns land nearby the planned stadium site in the Overtown neighborhood but “spends most of his time aboard his 72-foot Argosy yacht,” according to Miami New Times, has previously blocked the use of a public park for expansion of the Miami Open tennis tournament, so he might just know what he’s doing here. Also, David Beckham is clearly cursed, so that can only help Matheson’s case.
  • In case it wasn’t clear that Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center subsidy deal was a complete disaster from last October’s report that the city was losing almost $10 million a year and the arena was in danger of going bankrupt, Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center is a complete disaster. One big reason why: sales-tax projections were based on past sales-tax growth, which included a sales-tax rate hike in 1990, which wasn’t going to happen again. Whoops! The latest plan is to have the city bail out the arena by taking on an extra $100 million in debt, which tenants the University of Louisville could pay off with less than four years’ worth of the profits they’re making on running the place, but won’t because finders keepers, losers weepers.
  • Wichita is about to spend $60 million on a new stadium for the indy-minor-league Wichita Wingnuts — slogan: If You’re Gonna Go, Then Go Nuts! — and the manager of nearby Picasso’s Pizza is excited about it: “People from all over the Wichita area love some Picasso’s,” says Efrain Ramirez. “Because we’re Picasso’s, you gotta make it look cool, it’s gotta be artistic. You gotta put your flair on it.” Well, excited about something, anyway. Spare a thought for the poor small-city reporter who has to wring a quote about economic development out of a pizzeria manager, okay?
  • Speaking of sports venues and local businesses, some bar owners near the Detroit Red Wings‘ new downtown arena are excited about it, while others are worried they’ll get “trampled” by the “big guys.” No interviews were conducted by the Detroit News with bar owners near the Red Wings’ old downtown arena, which will now close. This has been your moment in 21st-century journalism.
  • The Cleveland Browns‘ stadium is covered in the same flammable cladding that caused the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, but Cleveland’s top building official promises this poses “zero risk to the fans.” Presumably because if you’re watching a Browns game, death will come as sweet release.
  • The turf at the San Francisco 49ers stadium in Santa Clara continues to suck.
  • The Roma soccer club is owned by Americans, so they are naturally inclined to levy stadium threats. It also plays in Italy’s Serie A, which like all soccer leagues outside the U.S. works by promotion and relegation, so if the team threatened to move, Rome could just start a new team to replace it. So instead team president James Pallotta is threatening that if the ownership group doesn’t get approval to build a new stadium, they’ll sell the team to … someone who won’t demand a new stadium? You may not have thought this entirely through, James.
  • A Russian farmer has built a stadium out of straw to poke fun at the $700 million St. Petersburg is spending on a new World Cup soccer stadium. Cost of the straw stadium: $675. Be sure to click the link above for a truly bizarre Russian video for 2016 with a giant straw bear and a straw sphinx and … watermelons? Guys, I am slightly worried about whoever’s in charge of media links for ESPN.

Cleveland to Browns, Cavs, Indians: Everybody gets $57m in tax money, now play nice

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And it’s official: The Cleveland Browns, Indians, and Cavaliers will get equal cuts of the “sin tax” extension voters approved back in 2014:

Each team will get $4.6 million per year for the next 20 years. The money can be used to upgrade the stadiums and arena where they play.

Via the magic of net present value calculators (even those that don’t know how to spell “principal”), we can determine that this revenue stream will be worth about $57 million in today’s dollars to each team. It shouldn’t be hard for each of them to find ways to spend that down — especially with the Cavs already asking for another $70 million to pay for a new super-spendy glass exterior wall — but if all else fails maybe they can just buy some IBM “Internet of things” gewgaws and call it “infrastructure.”

County official proposes diverting one-third of tourist dollars to build Cavs a glass wall

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It’s been almost eight months since the Cleveland Cavaliers asked for a $140 million expansion of their arena to add more public space and give it a glass exterior wall, and Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish said, “Let me get half of that for you.” Now, Budish thinks he may have found some of the money, asking the local tourism agency to use hotel tax money to pay for the Cavs’ renovations.

Destination Cleveland collects about $15 million a year in hotel taxes, and paying off $70 million in Cavs expenses would cost about $4-5 million a year, so this would clearly be a hefty chunk of change, unless Budish has other revenue sources in mind as well. The Cavs are already getting a cut of the alcohol-and-cigarette-tax extension that county voters approved back in 2014 — Budish recently proposed splitting the proceeds evenly among the Cavs, Indians, and Browns, as nobody bothered to work that out beforehand — and since that amounts to about $170 million in total present value, Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is effectively asking for $70 million on top of the $60 million he just got two years ago for renovations. But really, who can put a price on the enjoyment that local sports fans get from a glass wall?

No crazy stadium renderings released today, Internet is sad

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Slow news day today, to the point where the only remotely stadium-related news is a minor-league soccer team signing a lease to play in San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium — which once hosted the 49ers, but now is a public park, so that was somewhat controversial — and the news that if you ask Siri where to find sadness in Cleveland, it will give you directions to the Browns‘ stadium.

Enjoy your Friday and your weekend, and may we be rewarded with more wack-ass stadium renderings on Monday.

Business leaders want Ohio to spend $5m to move Browns training camp from different part of state

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We may have a new definition of chutzpah, courtesy of Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam:

The Cleveland Browns and the Columbus business community want Greater Cleveland taxpayers to help pay $5 million for the Browns to move their training camp to a site on or near the Ohio State University campus…

The request from Columbus business leaders says the $5 million is to help pay for an “athletic practice training facility.”

It then describes the project this way: “The Athletic Practice and Training Facility will serve as a backdrop for collegiate athletic teams and community youth programs to utilize throughout the year. It will also attract professional athletic teams and franchises to our region.”

Translated: We’re going to disguise this as a tax request to help kids, but it’s really about the Browns.

The request was actually from the Columbus Partnership, a local business group, which submitted it as part of a list of funding requests for the state’s capital budget. (I know what you’re thinking: My state never asks me what I want its capital budget spent on! Yes, but you do not have the awesome clout and political mandate of the Columbus, Ohio business community.) Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Brent Larkin says that “the funds are being sought with Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s knowledge and approval,” though he doesn’t cite a source for that other than that Haslam has been talking to Columbus about moving his team’s training camp there.

The gross part here, really, is that the state of Ohio would be paying to move a business operation from one part of the state — the Cleveland suburb of Berea, which has already spent $25 million on the Browns’ current training camp — to another. The economic war among the states is bad enough without the states themselves encouraging in-state skirmishes.

Cuyahoga exec says subsidy-for-wins plan just one option: “Hey, I’m open to ideas”

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As promised, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald held a press conference yesterday to propose taking 20% of the public “sin tax” subsidies approved for the Cleveland Cavs, Indians, and Browns last month and making them contingent on the teams winning games. Under FitzGerald’s plan, which he called a (wait for it) “win tax,” a “fan advisory council” would come up with the actual criteria for how the $52 million in tax money would be divvied up among the teams based on wins and losses.

A couple of hours after that, no doubt spurred by my description of his idea as “walking the fine line between stupid and clever” (politicians just can’t resist a good Spinal Tap reference), FitzGerald called me to explain further just what the heck he was thinking. Among the questions he answered:

What on earth made you come up with this idea? “The tax issue that passed didn’t set up a distribution method,” he explained. When his staff got together after the vote to talk about how to divide the $260 million pie among the three teams, one idea he came up with was to “do something to address performance of these franchises over the past 50 years.”

Do the teams really need an added incentive to win, given that they’re already rewarded with 1) wins and 2) added revenue from people buying tickets to see winning teams? “I don’t think this is something that is going to be of such force that it’s all of a sudden going to take a team not inclined to care about winning and turn it around,” said FitzGerald. Not that he wanted to imply that Cleveland’s sports team owners didn’t care, mind you — the man’s a politician after all — but, as he put it, “Have there ever been instances in America of team owners not caring about winning? Yes.” Adding an additional economic incentive might tip some kind of balance, or at least let teams know that Clevelanders want their teams to win, in case the Indians’ attendance numbers didn’t tip them off.

Is winning games really the most important thing to be paying teams for? What about economic impact or something more tangible? FitzGerald said he’s open to ideas for tying subsidy levels to other factors as well, such as economic development or local hiring. (I threw out Jay Weiner‘s old suggestion for requiring a certain number of affordable tickets in exchange for public subsidies, and he said that could be part of the mix, too: “Hey, I’m open to ideas.”) There’s still that other 80% of the money that needs to be handed out, after all, so somebody needs to come up with some criteria for how to do that.

Is all this legal? FitzGerald’s lawyers think so. Scoring systems for payment are something that “happens with construction contracts all the time,” he said, so why should this be any different?

Did he really say that Cuyahoga County had to adjust its budget when LeBron James left?That’s what he said. More specifically, overall ticket tax revenues went down the year that James bolted for Miami, something he attributes to suburban fans spending their money closer to home rather than going to Cavs games: “It doesn’t mean they all stayed home on their couch.”

In short, FitzGerald made clear that he’s mostly just trying to start a conversation here, though you’re welcome to wonder how much his big ideas are motivated by wanting to reform the process and how much by wanting to juice his gubernatorial campaign. (Not that you can really ever separate the two when someone is running for public office.) Nothing’s going to get decided until the county council signs off on it, which doesn’t need to happen until the sin tax extension kicks in next spring, so this is likely to be a long conversation.

On the stupid side of the ledger, none of this really matters, because the teams are going to get the $260 million regardless — any funding criteria will just determine who gets what. (In other words, if all three teams continue to lose, they’ll still get paid.) And as Deadspin points out, paying based on straight wins could encourage bad long-term decisions, since “there are often times when it’s good to lose, like when tanking for a draft pick.”

On the clever side, though, it’s never bad to be talking about what you can demand from team owners in exchange for public funds, even if it’s just a matter of trying to get them to compete with each other for a pool of preexisting money. Yes, it might have been better for FitzGerald — who signed off on the sin tax referendum back in January — to bring all this up before the vote, so that taxpayers would actually get their money back if the teams didn’t live up to their promises of creating economic development and winning championships. But, you know, baby steps.

UPDATE: Just noticed that WCPN’s Nick Castele (whose show I appeared on yesterday — listen to it here) points out that Ohio state senator Shirley Smith did propose a subsidies-for-wins formula before the sin tax vote. It went nowhere, but credit for trying.