February 07, 2012

Cleveland gives Browns another $5.8m for stadium

Somebody on Twitter already beat me to the good headline, so I'll have to settle for a straight lede: The Cleveland city council has just approved spending $5.8 million on repairs to the Browns' 12-year-old stadium, over and above the $850,000 a year it's required to spend on major improvements.

Why? The article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer doesn't exactly say, except that the stadium needed waterproofing after some rough winter. "When you own a building and a few years go by, it starts to develop needs," Mayor Frank Jackson's chief of staff, Ken Silliman, told the council. It's not clear, though, who's required in the team's lease to actually pay for this stuff.

The stadium maintenance issue is likely to come to a head in the near future, as the "sin tax" on alcohol and cigaretttes that is used to pay for upkeep (and was used to pay for construction costs on both the Browns stadium and the Indians' and Cavaliers' facilities) is set to expire in 2015, and the Indians, at least, are already jonesing for upgrades. One Cleveland councilmember has already predicted that voters will be asked to extend the sin tax beyond that year. Truly, stadiums are the gift that keeps on giving.