February 09, 2012
Browns: We built selves restaurant, we deserve public money
Mark Naymik has a column in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer detailing the claims the Cleveland Browns owners used about how much money they've put into renovating their stadium in order to talk the city council into giving them $5.8 million in public cash. And the list is pretty impressive, though probably not in the way the Browns owners hoped:
The team said it spent $50 million on stadium repairs and improvements it wasn't required to spend.
That's a good chunk of money, for sure. The figure, however, is a bit misleading. It includes escalators that were installed when the stadium was built. This amenity was an upgrade the team's late owner believed was necessary to attract fans. The figure also includes a restaurant at the stadium, which generates profits for the Browns.
The Browns also counted sales and tickets taxes paid by fans ($35 million since 1999), team income taxes ($6.2 million) and its elecric bill ($24 million), leading city councilmember Mike Polensek to snort, "I'm glad you pay utilities and taxes like most other businesses." (It's also worth noting that these are agressively feeble numbers for a team paying only $250,000 a year in rent on a stadium it got for free, and casts even more doubt on some of the wilder claims of the tax benefits of having a team in your city.)
The real news here, as Naymik notes, is that the Browns are looking to get the city's sin tax extended beyond 2015, and "there's growing chatter that the Browns will join forces with the Indians and Cavaliers -- whose facilities are 20 years old and in need of upgrades -- to mount a campaign" to extend it. Which should answer anyone wondering what the shelf life is of modern stadiums: until the teams can gather the chutzpah to ask for new (or improved) ones.
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.
July 28, 2009
Stadium tax breaks cost Cleveland $18.6m a year
Judith Grant Long has long pointed out that property tax exemptions represent a hidden public cost of sports stadium construction, and now indefatigable Cleveland journalist Roldo Bartimole has estimated the exact costs in his hometown: About $8 million a year for the Browns, $3.8 million a year for the Cavs, and $4.8 million a year for the Indians. All three teams received new homes mostly built with public funds — and made sure that the public would own the buildings as well (though not the profit-making revenue streams they generate), since that absolves them of owing property tax.
Bartimole notes that 55% of property taxes in Cleveland go to the local school district, so that's roughly $9 million a year in education money that isn't flowing in because of the tax abatement. Let's see how the Cleveland schools are doing in the absence of those funds ... oh, dear.