Cleveland mayor offers Browns around $240m worth of stadium subsidies, now we’re just haggling over the price

Welp, wrote one post this morning, time to spend a little time digging through potential news items for tomorrow’s news roundup and what the—

Negotiations between Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam over a possible lease extension on the lakefront stadium reached a significant turning point Thursday, when Bibb went public with a $461 million offer for publicly financed stadium renovations.

Previously on “Cleveland Browns: Stadium Wars”: Team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam have been dithering between demanding renovations to their current stadium (built at public expense 25 years ago to bring back the team after the old Browns moved to Baltimore) and demanding a whole new stadium in suburban Brook Park, and have seemingly landed on demanding either one or the other, so long as there’s a taxpayer check involved. Mayor Bibb has now offered an opening bid that consists of:

• $227 million from kicking back ticket taxes over 30 years. The mayor’s term sheet isn’t clear on whether this would be a new ticket surcharge, or ticket tax money that is currently going into city coffers. The term sheet also specifies that this money would be heavily backloaded; without doing a whole of Excel work I’m going to guesstimate it’s worth around $80 million in present value, maybe even less.

• $120 million raised from Cuyahoga County cigarette and alcohol taxes — at $4 million a year over 30 years, that’s roughly $60 million in present value.

• $20 million from existing stadium capital reserves.

• $94 million in parking revenues from a garage and parking lot that would be turned over by the city to the Browns owners. No word on whether that’s spread out over 30 years, but assuming it is, that’s going to be roughly $46 million in present value.

• Waiving the Browns’ $250,000 a year in rent, but charging the team $1.3 million a year in property taxes and insurance that is currently covered by the city, as is done for the Guardians and Cavaliers. That’s a net $16 million going back to the city.

That all adds up to enough to pay for about $240 million worth of stadium upgrades, which while not chicken feed is also nowhere near the $500 million that the Haslams have demanded toward a $1 billion renovation. Of course, there’s still the state and county to be heard from, so they could end up covering the rest, but that’s still a ways off.

Bibb’s statement insists that all this would happen “without any impact to city services,” which LOLmayor, since if nothing else that sin tax money would be available for other city needs if not used on the Browns. (As would parking revenues and ticket tax money if the team ended up having to stay at the current stadium without renovations, etc.) It’s also worth noting that Cleveland.com’s reporting on the renovation subsidies was directly cut-and-pasted from Bibb’s press release, nice journalism there, guys.

More on this once the Haslams respond, which Bibb requested they do by no later than August 12. As opening bids go, it’s not the most taxpayer-grifty — a ticket-tax surcharge, in particular, could end up mostly coming out of the Haslams’ pocket — but it’s also only the opening gambit, with much haggling sure to come. We know the number of zeroes now, it’s just a matter of figuring out how crooked the initial digit will be.