The Statehouse News Bureau asked three budget watchdogs what they thought of the idea of spending perhaps $600 million or more in state money on a new Cleveland Browns stadium, and the headline that resulted was “Possibility of state money for new Browns stadium leaves Ohio funding experts skeptical.” Read the actual quotes, though, and you’ll see that that significantly underplays the actual story: Two conservative budget groups and one progressive one all said that this would risk throwing perhaps $600 million or more down a hole:
“We’ve taken a look at a lot of stadium proposals over the years, and we’ve never been supportive of any of them,” said Greg Lawson, a research fellow at conservative Buckeye Institute. “When you look at a lot of the literature that’s out there, the academic literature from a lot of economists, what they and almost invariably say is these don’t really end up with true benefits.”…
“Moving this outside of downtown for a project just to line the pockets of the Haslams is not really a great idea for the taxpayers to fund,” said Bailey Williams, a researcher focusing on tax policy with Policy Matters Ohio.
“You’re trying to hope for a lot of economic gains on the back or down the road. That’s really just an IOU to the taxpayers,” Williams said. “I don’t really trust that, and especially when we have other needs and issues that the state could be addressing.”…
“Stadium projects are great ideas,” said Donovan O’Neil, state director for Americans for Prosperity-Ohio. “Where the concern comes in, I think, we need to have a robust conversation around the taxpayer obligations here.”
“These are multi-million dollar businesses. The NFL is a large enterprise. The Browns franchise is a large enterprise,” O’Neil added. “We have a lot of concerns and a lot of hesitation about early conversations around taking money from the taxpayers in the state of Ohio and investing it in the new Browns Stadium.”
Lawson added that he’s also concerned about the “cascading effect” of sending a signal to other Ohio sports team owners that the state treasury is open for their business. “You do something in Cleveland, what’s the next thing to happen?” Lawson said. “Because I’m assuming that at some point Cincinnati is going to want to add something, and you got the baseball teams that are going to ask for things.”
This is one of the rare articles that doesn’t try to “balance” economists who know what they’re talking about with consultants who are paid not to, and props to Statehouse News for not doing that. Still, “skeptical” is not quite the right way to describe these three groups’ positions, and the headline also leaves out the fact that this is multiple budget analysis from across the ideological spectrum. Still, if the headline writers only had 87 characters to work with … nope, I did, you could have done it too, only partial credit for you!
I can’t wait for the Guardians to go “well over the last 5 seasons we’ve had more rainouts then any other AL team…we need a retractable roof stadium or we might have to look elsewhere”
A move to Brook Park may reduce the lake-effect rain showers!
To eliminate rainouts the Indians or whatever could move too Phoenix where it hasn’t rained a drop in 6 months. Oops, there’s already a MLB team in Phoenix that can’t stop crying about their “defective” retractable roof. The real structural defect at Chase Field is 50,000 seats, or about twice as many seats as the Diamondbacks can ever sell.
If Cleveland was to get a new stadium deal, it should be a natural surface field, not artificial turf, why does the league continue with this.
There is simply no argument against a taxpayer funded stadium better than “so, you can spend $200m on player salaries – including $50m for a QB who was a known sexual predator when you signed him – each year but cannot possibly pay for $30-40m in debt service on stadium bonds/construction mortgage????”
Maybe a few years of playing NFL (or NBA or MLB or…) games in a concrete parking lot would motivate owners to pay for their own billion dollar stadia (which are only billion dollar stadia BECAUSE someone else is paying…)?
We already know that if a team’s fans want a shiny new palace badly enough, the owner can raise $200-400m in PSL funds from that fanbase. So, really a $300-700m mortgage on the rest would not be that hard to float… leaving the billionaire in question with no need to dip into his or her own pocket to fund the facility either way.
Public funding of these kinds of “assets” (single purpose non revenue producing sports stadia) is idiotic and shouldn’t be considered even in passing.
Amen! The silence is deafening …