Two Ohio budget analysts say Browns stadium plan numbers don’t add up

The Ohio state legislative budget office and Gov. Mike DeWine’s budget office have both released reports on a proposed Cleveland Browns stadium saying that team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam’s projections of how $1.2 billion in public spending would be repaid are (translated from legislativese) a load of hooey.

First up, the LBO report, which looked into three questions: Whether the funding proposal is constitutional and whether the Haslams’ numbers were legit. Their answers:

• Special obligation bonds like those proposed for the Browns stadium may or may not be constitutional, based on past court rulings, and “ultimately, only a court can determine whether or not it is permissible.”
• LBO can’t say whether the Haslams’ economic projections are accurate, because they didn’t provide enough information about their sources or methodology. Still, the budget office observed, the team owners’ numbers “implied an outcome that would outperform other similar developments previously studied in peer-reviewed academic literature.”
• The Haslams’ consultants simultaneously argue that a domed stadium wouldn’t compete with the Cavaliers arena for spending, and that “data shows that events are a substitute for travel and entertainment.” The LBO concludes: “These two statements are contradictory. … An individual cannot attend a Taylor Swift concert at the proposed domed stadium and a Cleveland Cavaliers game at [the] Arena simultaneously. Even if the events are held on different days, the consumer has a limited budget and may not be able to afford both.”

On to the letter from the governor’s management and budget chief, Kimberly Murnieks, which was sent last month but only revealed yesterday following a public records request by Signal Cleveland:

• New jobs from the stadium project, not counting those that would just be relocated from the existing Browns stadium site, “would not generate income tax revenue sufficient to meet the debt service obligations on the project bonds.” Furthermore, the Haslams’ predictions of construction jobs “also appear to be wildly overblown.”
• The number of projected stadium events “greatly exceeds the number of events held in other existing domes in Detroit, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis”; Detroit’s Ford Field only has six concerts scheduled for all of 2025, and some of those are acts that are already playing elsewhere in Ohio.
• “If the state owns or partially owns the facility, the state should be entitled to revenue sharing from its use.”
• Since the project likely wouldn’t meet the standards for tax-exempt bonds, it would have to be financed with taxable bonds, which would “cost the state $200 million more over the life of the bonds.”
• “Abundant research” shows that “the promised tangible economic benefits — economic growth, income growth, wage growth, employment growth, and higher tax revenues — do not occur the way sports teams claim. State and city governments are subsidizing development within a single neighborhood, with no tangible benefits for the rest of the city or state.”

That’s some pretty damning language, as dry bureaucratic reports go. And while Murnieks’ letter could conceivably be dismissed because she works for Gov. Mike DeWine, who is pro-paying for a stadium but anti-using the Haslams’ preferred method of paying for it, the legislative budget office works for the same state legislature as is advancing the $1.2 billion omni-TIF deal, so that should carry more weight. Maybe. If anyone is listening to actual numbers and not just vibes, and doesn’t get snippy that the LBO report was requested by a Democrat in a Republican-controlled state legislature.