The Cleveland city council may be preparing an Art Modell Law suit over Jimmy and Dee Haslam’s plan to move the Browns to suburban Brook Park:
The law, Ohio Revised Code Section 9.67, says that no professional team owner can leave a taxpayer-supported stadium without first signing an agreement with the host city. Or team owners must provide at least six months’ notice of their intent to leave. Within those six months, they must give the city or local investors a chance to buy the team.
“Our city ordinances require the city to enforce the Modell Law,” Law Director Mark Griffin said in a statement to Signal Cleveland. “That is what we are going to do. In order to protect our taxpayers’ investment and keep the Browns downtown, we are following the law and putting together our litigation response.”
This is an interesting twist: The Art Modell Law was passed by the state in 1996 after then-Browns owner Art Modell moved that iteration of the team to Baltimore to become the Ravens, prompting the construction of the current Cleveland stadium to get a new NFL team that would go by the same name. The Cleveland city council previously passed a measure back in May calling on the mayor to enforce the law; former mayor Dennis Kucinich, who wrote the Modell Law when he was an Ohio state legislator (and who is currently running for Congress, where he previously served four terms, on a weird-for-him anti-immigration and deficit-cutting platform), has urged the city to act, and even suggested he might file suit himself on behalf of taxpayers if it doesn’t.
There are some drawbacks to the Modell Law: It doesn’t spell out penalties for if the Haslams ignore its provisions, doesn’t say whether they can say “Fine, we’ll sell the team to the first local buyer who can give us $100 trillion,” and hasn’t been tested in court yet, though it was waved around in 2018 to get Columbus Crew owner Anthony Precourt to sell the team (to the Haslams, ironically) rather than moving it to Austin. Still, it is undeniably a stick, and one that the city of Cleveland can use to try to force the Haslams to return to the negotiating table to stay in town rather than moving to a new suburban stadium that no one has figured out how to pay for yet. Though the risk is always that they could end up “winning” the right to throw a few hundred million dollars at the Browns, even though the Haslams don’t have anyone else offering them the same at the moment; someone really needs to write a FAQ for lawmakers on “How Not to Bid Against Yourself for Dummies.”
It is an interesting development… but it reminds me a little of the Glendale city council touting how their “interests were fully protected” by a $700m lease break fee written into the arena funding contract for the Coyotes.
And we know how that worked out.
Perhaps the so-called Modell law will be more use than that particular clause turned out to be, but as you’ve highlighted there are several ways in which it does not and perhaps can not do what it was intended to do.
There was an agreement a few years ago among Cuyahoga municipalities to share revenues when businesses move from one city to another. This was done when American Greetings moved to Westlake from Brooklyn. This suit is probably a leverage play
Stuff like this usually is. It’s to get the owners of the vacating business to put in a little money for the redevelopment fund kitty so they’re not stuck with the bill for tearing the old stadium down.
As Cleveland assesses all the better uses for that lakefront land, they’re going to welcome the Browns departure. Apartment towers? Condos? A beach? Anything is better than a parking lot and football stadium.
If they just put a lawn out there it would bring more people downtown
Nice to see Neil not offer context to Kucinich’s policies, merely citing them as “weird for him”. Apparently, “weird” means securing the border and stopping the wasteful spending of US taxpayer dollars on a proxy war with a nuclear armed country AND an Israeli led genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.